Читать книгу Robert Fulton and the Submarine онлайн

29 страница из 48

The above references are not a complete résumé of the early development of the underlying principles of the art of submarine navigation. They are nothing more than a brief recital of the salient and outstanding features that mark the path of progress like milestones along a road.

With these and other similar impracticable conceptions, the art of submarine construction was found by an American, David Bushnell, born at Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1742, and graduated from Yale in 1775. In the war with Great Britain, which broke out shortly after his graduation, Bushnell conceived the idea of attacking the enemy’s ships under water and there is no doubt that he constructed a boat embodying among other novel devices a screw propeller. His boat, a small affair carrying but a single operator, was scarcely a submarine as it was not intended to plunge, but to float just “awash” or almost submerged. Like Rumsey and Fitch, Bushnell went abroad and, as Fulton did later, opened negotiations with the French Government. Delpeuch says, “Then (1797) there appeared an engineer who offered to the Directory a means quite as terrible as it was invisible to force the British to lift their blockade, and not only did this man undertake to drive the enemy from our shores, but he even proposed to carry the war to the shores and ports of Great Britain, heretofore inviolable.”