[On September 7th, 1776, the Revolutionary forces employed the Turtle, the first submersible to be used in warfare. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that event and other submarine stories in our history and culture, leading up to a special weekend tribute to one of my favorite people who has a special sub connection!]
On three figures who together embody the innovations & limitations of the first military sub.
- David Bushnell: The Turtle was far from the first navigable submarine—that seems to have been invented and pioneered by Cornelius Drebbel, a 17th century Dutch scientist who built and successfully tested the underwater vehicle while working for the English Navy in the 1620s. Whie a student at Yale in the early 1770s, the Connecticut scientist and inventor David Bushnell learned of Drebbel’s work, and around the same time came up with the idea that gunpowder could explode underwater, and began to develop prototypes for mines, torpedoes, and other nautical explosives. He sought financial support for a submarine from Connecticut’s colonial government as early as 1771, but (ironically) it was not until April 1775, when the colony and the entire fledgling nation were in a state of open rebellion against England, that he began work on an individually manned submersible that would be able to carry an explosive charge and attach it to a ship’s hull. As he wrote to his fellow inventor Ben Franklin, the sub would be “Constructed with Great Simplicity and upon Principles of Natural Philosophy.”
- Isaac Doolittle: As I’ve written about many prior times for this blog, however, inventions are almost never the product of the iconic individuals to whom we like to credit them, and things were no different with the Turtle. Whie the initial ideas do seem to have come from Bushnell, the designs of many of the sub’s specific components came from another legendary Connecticut figure—the famous New Haven watch and clockmaker, silversmith and engraver, and all-around craftsman Isaac Doolittle, whose shop was located very close to the Yale campus. Dr. Benjamin Gale, another famous scientist and inventor from the area who knew and worked with both men, argued at the time for giving equal credit for the sub to Doolittle; because Gale called Doolittle “an ingenious mechanic,” for quite a while the historical accounts described him as just a worker in the employ of Bushnell, but in the 1770s the term meant much more of a designer and inventor. It seems clear that the submersible that was completed in the summer of 1776 was at the very least the product of collaboration between these multiple Connecticut figures.
- Ezra Lee: Inventing and building the Turtle was one thing (or rather a series of things involving these multiple men, but you know what I mean), but piloting it in its first military mission was quite another. In August 1776, when the sub was deemed ready to be tested, it was Brigadier General Samuel Holden Parsons who was tasked with choosing the soldiers who would learn to operate the vehicle; one of those Parsons nominated was his brother-in-law and an officer in the 10th Continental Regiment, Sergeant Ezra Lee. Lee was eventually chosen by General George Washington himself to pilot the Turtle in its first mission, an attack on the British naval flagship HMS Eagle which was anchored in New York harbor. 250 years ago this evening, Lee maneuvered the Turtle up to the Eagle’s hull, but he was unable to lodge the explosive device in the hull—there are various theories as to why, including his own relative unfamiliarity with piloting this new form of craft. In any case military missions fail as often as they succeed, and in terms of submarine histories this was still an iconic moment, and one that was made possible by the bravery of Ezra Lee—a man who was described in an 1821 obituary as “the only man who fought the enemy upon land, upon water, and under the water.”
Next SubStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Sub stories you’d share?
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