Hl hunley submarine rough draft professional#

A professional boatman by training, he volunteered for service with the He immediately shifted his focus from the infantry to the nascent field of submarine warfare. Was fascinated with the prototypical vessel. Having worked on the Mississippi as a steamboat engineer in civilian life, Dixon Dixon, who was staying in Mobile while recovering from a combat wound, and heĪpparently spent considerable time with William Alexander, a member of Dixon’s regiment, and one of the builders of the Hunley. Observing the Hunley’s construction in Mobile, Ala., was a dashing young lieutenant of the 21st Alabama Volunteers named George E. The Hunley could remain submerged for two excruciating hours before having Entry into the vessel was tight at best, and inside there was very little room for movement. Each tower was capped byĪ small hatchway, sealed with rubber gaskets. Two conning towers, some 16 feet apart, were ringed by a number of small viewing ports. Depth was indicated by a mercury gauge, lit by a single candle. It ran upright by means of a 4,000-pound keel, and was powered by an offset crankshaft that ran the length of the interior, with a bench and seven hand cranks

The amount of sea water taken in and pumped out by hand. The Hunley submerged and surfaced by means of controlling

The jet-black vessel tapered sharply at the bow and stern, with a water ballast tank at each end. The ship was about 40 feet long and was dominated by a cylindrical iron boiler, securedīy iron bands and rivets, which took up its entire midsection. It was a combination of clever innovation and surprisingly primitive mechanisms. With two colleagues, to build one that worked. But it took a Louisiana planter, lawyer and financier named Horace Lawson Hunley, along But it failed during review by a Navy board.īy 1863, there were several enterprising men around the world who were experimenting in the construction of undersea vehicles. That same year, a group of Northern speculatorsįormed the American Submarine Company, and built an ungainly craft called the Intelligent Whale. In 1862, the Union Navy had, in fact, commissioned an oar-powered submarine – the “Alligator” – from itsįrench designer, but it proved too awkward for river campaigns, and in 1863, before it could be employed in coastal warfare, it sank in a storm off South Carolina. – albeit unsuccessfully – on a British warship in New York Harbor. As far back as 1580, a British innkeeper and would-be scientist named William Bourne hatched a design to “make a boate go under the water unto the bottome,Īnd so to come up again at your pleasure.” During the American Revolution, the American inventor David Bushnell built an ovoid contraption, appropriately called the Turtle, that actually staged an attack Men had dreamed of building submarines for centuries. But shortly after the Housatonic went down, the Hunley and its eight-man crew joined her on the ocean floor. Perhaps the concussion from the blast compromised one or more of the seals that kept the But as the submarine’s crew back-powered furiously, something went terribly wrong.

The shore party obligingly built huge signalįires, to guide the Hunley home. In the wake of the explosion, the Hunley’s commander signaled to the rebel lookouts on shore with a blue magnesium light, indicating that the mission had succeeded. The Housatonic had achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first ship to be sunk by a submarine in combat – and the only vessel destined to be destroyed by the H.L. Moments later, the charge detonated, lighting up the sky and sending the Yankee warship to the bottom, along with five Vessel planted an explosive charge in the Housatonic’s wooden side, below the waterline. The men onboard heard a muffled thud as the The swiftly moving craft had passed under the Housatonic’s guns, and the small-arms fire now directed at it by the men on deck bounced harmlessly off its iron hull. Still, it took a few minutes for the officer of the deck, John Crosby, to comprehend what he was seeing. Its men had heard reports of a new Confederate weapon, a “sub-torpedo” Steam-powered warship was serving blockade duty outside Charleston Harbor, and was one of the Union’s biggest, best-armed vessels. 17, 1864, when a watchman spotted a strange, partially submerged shape gliding steadily toward the side of the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. The moonlit sea was unusually calm on the bitterly cold night of Feb. The USS Housatonic Credit The Navy Historical and Heritage Command

Hl hunley submarine rough draft