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Who Invented The Submarine? |
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Man’s desire to be able to travel underwater goes back a long, long time. But the first craft actually designed to travel in this way of which we have a record goes back to 1578.
A British mathematician called William Bourne published a book in that year in which there was the design of a completely enclosed boat which could be submerged and rowed under the surface. It consisted of a wooden framework covered with waterproofed leather. It was- to be submerged by reducing its volume by contracting the sides through the use of hand vises.
Bourne never built this boat, but a similar boat built by someone else was launched in 1605. The credit for building the first submarine is usually given to a Dutch inventor called Cornelius van Drebbel. |
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He actually maneuvered his submarine in the river Thames many times at depths of 3 to 4 meters under the surface.
Van Drebbel’s boat also had its outer hull made of greased leather over a wooden frame. It had oars which came out through the sides and were sealed with tight-fitting leather flaps. This boat was built in 1620. -
The interest in building submarines was so great that by 1727 no fewer than 14 different types had been patented in England alone. The first time a submarine was used as an offensive weapon in naval warfare was during the American Revolution. A man called David Bushnell had invented a one- man submarine that was hand-operated by a screw propeller. It was called “the Turtle.”
The Turtle tried to sink a British man-of-war in New York harbor by attaching a charge of gunpowder to the ship’s bottom. It failed to do this, but after it released the charge, -the British ship made certain to move farther out to sea! |
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