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 the other side of the earth.

A striking example of this lack of progress is Halstead’s Intelligent Whale. Built for the United States navy at New York, in the winter of 1864–5, this craft is no more modern and much less efficient than Fulton’s Nautilus of 1801. The Intelligent Whale is a fat, cigar-shaped, iron vessel propelled by a screw cranked by manpower and submerged by dropping two heavy anchors to the bottom and then warping the boat down to any desired depth. A diver can then emerge from a door in the submarine’s bottom, to place a mine under a hostile ship. It was not until 1872 that the Intelligent Whale was sent on a trial trip in Newark Bay. Manned by an utterly inexperienced and very nervous crew, the clumsy submarine got entirely out of control and had to be hauled up by a cable that had been thoughtfully attached to her before she went down. Fortunately no lives had been lost, but the wildest stories were told and printed, till the imaginary death-roll ran up to forty-nine. The Intelligent Whale was hauled up on dry land and can still be seen on exhibition at the corner of Third Street and Perry Avenue in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Lack of motive-power was the reason why man-sized submarines lagged behind their little automatic brethren, the Whitehead torpedoes. Compressed air was just the thing for a spurt, but when two Frenchmen, Captain Bourgois and M. Brun, built the Plongeur, a steel submarine 146 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, at Rochefort in 1863, and fitted it with an eighty-horse-power, compressed-air engine, they discovered that the storage-flasks emptied themselves too quickly to permit a voyage of any length.

The Plongeur also proved that while you can sink a boat to the bottom by filling her ballast-tanks or make her rise to the surface by emptying them, you cannot make her float suspended between two bodies of water except by holding her there by some mechanical means. Without anything of the kind, the Plongeur kept bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. Once her inventors navigated her horizontally for some distance, only to find that she had been sliding on her stomach along the soft muddy bottom of a canal. Better results were obtained after the Plongeur was fitted with a crude pair of diving-planes. But the inefficiency of her compressed-air engine caused her to be condemned and turned into a water tank.

Electricity was first applied in 1861 by another Frenchman, named Olivier Riou. This is the ideal motive-power for underwater boats, and it was at this time that Jules Verne described the ideal submarine in his immortal story of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” But before we can have a Nautilus like Captain Nemo’s we must discover an electric storage battery of unheard-of lightness and capacity.

There was a great revival of French interest in electric submarines after Admiral Aube, who was a lifelong submarine “fan,” became minister of marine in 1886. In spite of much ridicule and opposition, he authorized the construction of a small experimental vessel of this type called the Gymnote. She was a wild little thing that did everything short of turning somersaults when she dived, but she was enough of a success to be followed by a larger craft named, after the great engineer who had designed her predecessor, the Gustave ZÉdÉ.

“The history of the Gustave ZÉdÉ shows how much in earnest the French were in the matter of submarines. When she was first launched she was a failure in almost every respect, and it was only after some years, during which many alterations and improvements were carried out, that she became a serviceable craft. At first nothing would induce the Gustave ZÉdÉ to quit the surface, and when at last she did plunge she did it so effectually that she went down to the bottom in 10 fathoms of water at an angle of 30 degrees. The committee of engineers were on board at the time, and it speaks well for their patriotism that they did not as a result of their unpleasant experience condemn the Gustave ZÉdÉ and advise the government to spend no more money on submarine craft.”10

Twenty-nine other electric submarines were built for the French navy between 1886 and 1901. During the same period, a French gentleman named M. Goubet built and experimented with two very small electric submarines, each of which was manned by two men, who sat back to back on a sort of settee stuffed with machinery. Little or big, all these French boats had the same fatal defect: lack of power. Their storage batteries, called on to propel them above, as well as below, the surface, became exhausted after a few hours’ cruising. They were as useless for practical naval warfare as an electric run-about would be to haul guns or carry supplies in Flanders.

But if compressed-air and electricity were too quickly exhausted, gasoline or petroleum was even less practicable for submarine navigation. To set an oil-engine, that derives its power from the explosion of a mixture of oil-vapor and air, at work in a small closed space like the interior of a submarine, would soon make it uninhabitable. While Mr. Holland was puzzling how to overcome this difficulty, in the middle eighties, a Swedish inventor named Nordenfeldt was building submarines to be run by steam-power.

Mr. Nordenfeldt, who is remembered to-day as the inventor of the famous gun that bears his name, had taken up the idea of an English clergyman named Garett, who in 1878 had built a submarine called the Resurgam, or “I Shall Rise.” Garett’s second boat, built a year later, had a steam-engine. When the vessel was submerged, the smoke-stack was closed by a sliding panel, the furnace doors were shut tight, and the engine run by the steam given off by a big tank full of bottled-up hot water. Nordenfeldt improved this system till his hot-water tanks gave off enough steam to propel his boat beneath the surface for a distance of fourteen miles.

He also rediscovered and patented Bushnell’s device for submerging a boat by pushing it straight down and holding it under with a vertical propellor. His first submarine had two of these, placed in sponsons or projections on either side of the center of the hull. The Nordenfeldt boats, with their cigar-shaped hulls and projecting smoke-stacks, looked like larger editions of the Civil War Davids, and like them, could be submerged by taking in water-ballast till only a strip of deck with the funnel and conning-tower projected above the surface. Then the vertical propellors would begin to revolve and force the boat straight down on an even keel. Mr. Nordenfeldt insisted with great earnestness that this was the only safe and proper way to submerge a submarine. If you tried to steer it downward with any kind of driving-planes, he declared, then the boat was liable to keep on descending, before you could pull its head up, till it either struck the bottom or was crushed in by the pressure of too great a depth of water. There was a great deal of truth in this, but Mr. Nordenfeldt failed to realize that if one of his vertical propellors pushed only a little harder than the other, then the keel of his own submarine was going to be anything but even.

The first Nordenfeldt boat was launched in 1886 and bought by Greece, after a fairly successful trial in the Bay of Salamis. Two larger and more powerful submarines: Nordenfeldt II and III, were promptly ordered by Greece’s naval rival Turkey. Each of these was 125 feet long, or nearly twice the length of the Greek boat, and each carried its two vertical propellors on deck, one forward and the other aft. Both boats were shipped in sections to Constantinople in 1887, but only Nordenfeldt II was put together and tried. She was one of the first submarines to be armed with a bow torpedo-tube for discharging Whiteheads, and as a surface torpedo-boat, she was a distinct success. But when they tried to navigate her under water there was a circus.

No sooner did one of the crew take two steps forward in the engine-room than down went the bow. The hot water in the boilers and the cold water in the ballast-tanks ran downhill, increasing the slant still further. English engineers, Turkish sailors, monkey-wrenches, hot ashes, Whitehead torpedoes, and other movables came tumbling after, till the submarine was nearly standing on her head, with everything inside packed into the bow like toys in the toe of a Christmas stocking. The little vertical propellors pushed and pulled and the crew clawed their way aft, till suddenly up came her head, down went her tail, and everything went gurgling and clattering down to the other end. Nordenfeldt II was a perpetual see-saw, and no mortal power could keep her on an even keel. Once they succeeded in steadying her long enough to fire a torpedo. Where it went to, no man can tell, but the sudden lightening of the bow and the recoil of the discharge made the submarine rear up and sit down so hard that she began to sink stern-foremost. The water was blown out of her ballast tanks by steam-pressure, and the main engine started full speed ahead, till she shot up to the surface like a flying-fish. The Turkish naval authorities, watching the trials from the shores of the Golden Horn, were so impressed by these antics that they bought the boat. But it was impossible to keep a crew on her, for every native engineer or seaman who was sent on board prudently deserted on the first dark night. So the Nordenfeldt II rusted away till she fell to pieces, long before the Allied fleets began the forcing of the Dardanelles.

Fantastic though their performances seem to us to-day, these submarines represent the best work of some of the most capable inventors and naval engineers of the nineteenth century. With them deserve to be mentioned the boats of the Russian Drzewiecki and the Spaniard Peral. Failures though they were, they taught the world many valuable lessons about the laws controlling the actions of submerged bodies.

But many of the underwater craft invented between 1850 and 1900 can be classified only as freaks. Most of them, fortunately, were designed but never built, and those that were launched miraculously refrained from drowning any of their crews. There were submarines armed with steam-driven gimlets: the

that Ben Jonson playfully ascribed to Van Drebel. Dr. Lacomme, in 1869, proposed a submarine railroad from Calais to Dover, with tracks laid on the bottom of the Channel and cars that could cast off their wheels and rise to the surface in case of accident. Lieutenant AndrÉ Constantin designed, during the siege of Paris, a boat to be submerged by drawing in pistons working in large cylinders open to the water. A vessel was actually built on this principle in England in 1888, and submerged in Tilbury Docks, where the soft mud at the bottom choked the cylinders so that the pistons could not be driven out again and the boat was brought up with considerable difficulty. Two particularly delirious inventors claimed that their submarines could also be used as dirigible balloons. Boucher’s underwater boat of 1886 was to have gills like a fish, so that it need never rise to the surface for air, and was further adorned with spring-buffers on the bottom, oars, a propellor under the center of the keel, and a movable tail for sculling the vessel forward. There were submarines with paddle-wheels, submarines with fins, and submarines with wings. A Venezuelan dentist, SeÑor Lacavalerier, invented a double-hulled, cigar-shaped boat, whose outer hull was threaded like a screw, and by revolving round the fixed inner hull, bored its way through the water. But he had been anticipated and outdone by Apostoloff, a Russian, who not only designed a submarine on the same principle but intended it to carry a large cabin suspended on davits above the surface of the water, and declared that his vessel would cross the Atlantic at an average speed of 111 knots an hour.

As late as 1898 the Spanish government, neglecting the promising little electric boat built ten years before by SeÑor Peral, was experimenting with two highly impossible submarines, one of which was to be propelled by a huge clock-spring, while the other was perfectly round. Needless to say, neither the sphere nor the toy boat ever encountered the American fleet.

At the same time, the United States government declined to accept the war services of the already practicable boats of the two American inventors who were about to usher in the present era of submarine warfare: Simon Lake and John P. Holland.