THE STORY OF THE SUBMARINE BY FARNHAM BISHOP Author of “Panama, Past and Present,” etc. ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND DRAWINGS NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1916 Copyright, 1916, by The Century Co. Published, February, 1916 To MY MOTHER...

This book has been written for the nontechnical reader—for the man or boy who is interested in submarines and torpedoes, and would like to know something about the men who invented these things and how they came to do it. Much has been omitted that I should have liked to have put in, for this is a small book and the story of the submarine is much longer than most people realize. It is perhaps astonishing to think of the launching of an underseaboat in the year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Roc

If you had been in London in the year 1624, and had gone to the theater to see “The Staple of News,” a new and very dull comedy by Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson, you would have heard, in act III , scene i, the following dialogue about submarines: The idea of submarine navigation is much older than 1624. Crude diving bells, and primitive leather diving helmets, with bladders to keep the upper end of the air tube afloat on the surface of the water, were used as early as the fourteenth century. W

In the first week of September, 1776, the American army defending New York still held Manhattan Island, but nothing more. Hastily improvised, badly equipped, and worse disciplined, it had been easily defeated by a superior invading force of British regulars and German mercenaries in the battle of Long Island. Brooklyn had fallen; from Montauk Point to the East River, all was the enemy’s country. Staten Island, too, was an armed and hostile land. After the fall of the forts on both sides of the N

Robert Fulton was probably the first American who ever went to Paris for the purpose of selling war-supplies to the French government. Unlike his compatriots of to-day, he found anything but a ready market. For three years, beginning in 1797, Fulton tried constantly but vainly to interest the Directory in his plans for a submarine. Though a commission appointed to examine his designs reported favorably, the minister of marine would have nothing to do with them. Fulton built a beautiful little mo

The most powerful battleship in the world, half a century ago, was the U.S.S. New Ironsides . She was a wooden-hulled, ship-rigged steamer of 3486 tons displacement—about one tenth the size of a modern superdreadnought—her sides plated with four inches of iron armor, and carrying twenty heavy guns. On the night of October 5, 1863, the New Ironsides was on blockade duty off Charleston Harbor, when Ensign Howard, the officer of the deck, saw something approaching that looked like a floating plank.

How best to float a charge of explosives against the hull of an enemy’s ship and there explode it is the great problem of torpedo warfare. The spar-torpedo, that did such effective work in the Civil War, was little more than a can of gunpowder on the end of a stick. This stick or spar was mounted usually on the bow of a steam-launch, either partially submerged, like the David , or boldly running on the surface over log-booms and through a hail of bullets and grapeshot, as when Lieutenant Cushing

During the half-century following the death of Fulton, scarcely a year went by without the designing or launching of a new man-power submarine. Some of these boats, notably those of the Bavarian Wilhelm Bauer, were surprisingly good, others were most amazingly bad, but none of them led to anything better. Inventor after inventor wasted his substance discovering what Van Drebel, Bushnell, and Fulton had known before him, only to die and have the same facts painfully rediscovered by some one on th

When the Merrimac rammed the Cumberland , burned the Congress , and was fought to a standstill next day by the little Monitor , all the world realized that there had been a revolution in naval warfare. The age of the wooden warship was gone forever, the day of the ironclad had come. And a twenty-year-old Irish school-teacher began to wonder what would be the next revolution; what new craft might be invented that would dethrone the ironclad. This young Irishman’s name was John P. Holland, and he

John P. Holland was not the only inventor who responded to the invitation of the United States navy department to submit designs for a proposed submarine boat in 1893. That invitation had been issued and an appropriation of $200,000 made by Congress on the recommendation of Commander Folger, chief of ordnance, after he had seen a trial trip on Lake Michigan of an underwater boat invented by Mr. George C. Baker. This was an egg-shaped craft, propelled by a steam engine on the surface and storage-

Lieutenant Perry Scope , commanding the X-class flotilla, was sitting in his comfortable little office on the mother-ship Ozark , when I entered with a letter from the secretary of the navy, giving me permission to go on board a United States submarine. Without such authorization no civilian may set foot on the narrow decks of our undersea destroyers, though he may visit a battleship with no more formality than walking into a public park. “We’re too small and full of machinery to hold a crowd,”

The following submarines, with all or part of their crews, have been accidentally lost in time of peace: The A-1 was engaged in manœuvers off Spithead, England, when she rose to the surface right under the bows of the fast-steaming Union Castle Liner Berwick Castle . Before anything could be done, the sharp prow of the steamer had cut a great gash in the thin hull of the submarine and sent her to the bottom with all her crew. This was in broad daylight; her sister-ship C-11 was rammed and sunk b

THE MINE SWEEPERS A mine is a torpedo that has no motive-power of its own but is either anchored or set adrift in the supposed path of an enemy’s ship. We have already seen how Bushnell used drifting mines at Philadelphia in 1777. Anchored mines are among the many inventions of Robert Fulton. The following description of the original type, illustrated by an engraving made by himself, is taken from Fulton’s “Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions.” “Plate II represents the anchored torpedo, so arra

The first submarine in history to sink a hostile warship without also sinking herself is the E-9 of the British navy. Together with most of her consorts, she was sent, at the outbreak of the present war, to explore and reconnoiter off the German coast and the island fortress of Heligoland to find where the enemy’s ships were lying, how they were protected and how they might be attacked. After six weeks of such work, the E-9 entered Heligoland Bight on September 13, 1914, and discharged two torpe

“It is true that submarine boats have improved, but they are as useless as ever. Nevertheless, the German navy is carefully watching their progress, though it has no reason to make experiments itself.” Admiral von Tirpitz , in 1901. “DANGER! Being the Log of Captain John Sirius by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” If you have not read the above-mentioned story by the author of Sherlock Holmes, I advise you to go to the nearest public library and ask for it. For those that cannot spare the time to do this

Both Admiral von Tirpitz and the Austrian Admiralty seem to have begun their submarine campaigns after the method of Captain John Sirius: to starve the enemy any way they could and let the lawyers argue about it afterwards. From the beginning of the blockade, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Spanish vessels, even when bound from one neutral port to another, were torpedoed and sunk without warning by the German submarines. Their governments protested vigorously but without effect. Then came the turn of t