The first working submarines were rowed, cranked by hand, or powered by air
In 1620 a Dutch inventor serving James I of England built a submersible propelled by oars. Over the next two and a half centuries, inventors tried leather ballast bags, hand-turned screws and tanks of compressed air before the torpedo and the electric battery finally made submarines practical warships.
Submarine simply means undersea, and the noun is short for submarine boat; navies still call them boats, whatever their size. A 1562 report describes two Greeks going under and resurfacing in the Tagus near Toledo before Emperor Charles V, still dry and holding a lit flame. William Bourne sketched an underwater vessel in 1578, and Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont designed craft with snorkels, portholes and gloves for handling objects outside.
Cornelis Drebbel's oar-driven craft of 1620 is the first whose construction is reliably documented. In 1747 Nathaniel Symons patented leather bags that filled with water to sink his boat, the first known working ballast tank. David Bushnell's one-man, acorn-shaped Turtle of 1775 was the first military submersible and the first to move independently underwater using screws. France dropped Robert Fulton's hand-powered Nautilus in 1804, and Wilhelm Bauer's Brandtaucher of 1850 is the oldest submarine still surviving.
In 1863 France launched Plongeur, driven by compressed air, and in 1864 Narcís Monturiol's Ictíneo II in Barcelona became the first air-independent, combustion-powered design. That year the Confederate Hunley sank USS Housatonic with a charge on a spar, and sank too. Julius Kroehl's Sub Marine Explorer of 1866 was the first to dive, cruise and surface under full crew control, and Robert Whitehead's self-propelled torpedo, also 1866, gave submarines a usable weapon. John Philip Holland's 1897 design combined an engine on the surface with batteries below.
Submarines were first used widely in World War I. Today they range from one-person craft operating for hours to Russia's Typhoon class, the largest ever built, able to stay submerged for six months. More countries operate them now than at any earlier point in modern history, with China leading new construction.
Source: Submarine
