Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  The operative word in that description was “hydrocarbon.” The Brayton Ready Motor was an internal combustion engine, and it ran on a muscular new fuel—petroleum.‡ The motor that Brayton brought Philadelphia was huge—more than eight feet high and floor-mounted—but the principles seemed applicable to smaller versions, such as would be required to power a submarine. (Another interested spectator had been George Selden, who would create the first internal combustion engine to power a motorcar and later would become embroiled in a bitter and ultimately fruitless patent suit against Henry Ford.) Freeing up the operator and any sailors from supplying power to the propeller would allow the entire crew to focus on navigation, engine maintenance, and weapons delivery. And the weapon that a submarine could deliver had suddenly become more sophisticated as well.

  Previously, a torpedo attack required a vessel to come virtually alongside its target and then make its escape before the explosion killed predator as well as prey, as it had with the Hunley. But two years after the Hunley sank, in 1866, Robert Whitehead, a British engineer, developed a torpedo that could power itself through the water and thus be delivered from a safe distance.

  Born in 1823 to a cotton bleacher, Whitehead trained as an engineer and then moved to Europe to ply his trade. Eventually, he was hired by an Italian firm in Fiume, northeast of Venice, which built steam boilers and engines for sailing ships. Fiume was not far from the Austrian border and that nation’s navy was one of Whitehead’s customers. On a stay in Austria, he met Giovanni Luppis, a recently retired naval officer who had been attempting to perfect a self-propelled torpedo using compressed air as a power source. The two formed a partnership to continue the work.

  Luppis’s conception of a “torpedo boat” built to fire his projectile was unwieldy and impractical, so Whitehead substituted a design of his own, which included launching tubes mounted in the bow and the stern. He, as everyone, viewed the torpedo only as a surface weapon. An officer of the Austrian navy got wind of Whitehead’s experiments and obtained authorization to purchase both the torpedoes and launching tubes and to then mount them in gunboats. The Austrians tried to keep tests of the new weapon secret, but word leaked out and naval officers across Europe became convinced that the “Whitehead torpedo,” as it was soon known, must be part of their arsenal. A number of other nations purchased Whitehead’s invention, each with the understanding that the specifications remain proprietary.

  Whitehead “fish torpedo”

  The United States, however, whose senior naval officials were notoriously conservative, resisted all entreaties by junior officers to purchase the new weapon. In 1875, Lieutenant Francis Barber, the navy’s foremost expert on shipboard ordnance—and submarines, as it would turn out—gave a lecture to a group of admirals and senior commanders extolling Whitehead’s device. “This remarkable invention, as at present furnished to the different European powers which have purchased the secret, is a vessel of very nearly the shape of a ‘spindle of revolution,’ of a length of nearly 14 feet, and a diameter of 14 inches. It is constructed of iron and steel, and carries an exploding charge of 20 lbs. of dynamite. It is driven by a propeller, the motive power being compressed air. Behind the propeller is a rudder capable of regulating the depth at which the torpedo shall go, and also keeping it straight or sending it on any curve which may be desired. The propeller is surrounded by a ring, and the bow compartment which contains the explosive, can be separated from the body of the torpedo for storage aboard ship in a suitable magazine, and this compartment is provided at its point with an arrow head to stick into the side of a wooden ship.”5 Since, as Barber noted, “Mr. Whitehead has so far succeeded in keeping the vital portions of his inventions perfectly secret,” he included some speculative designs of his own.

  Torpedo boat

  Barber’s exhaustive research was for naught; he remained unsuccessful in softening the prejudices of his superiors. Still, despite a lack of specifics as to how to replicate Whitehead’s invention, just the fact of its existence began to impact the design of surface ships. Once John Holland began to experiment, it was applied to submarines as well. In fact, he based the shape of what would be called the Holland 1 on Whitehead’s design.

  But Holland did not include the torpedo itself. For his prototype, he was unconcerned with armaments. He was interested only in making navigation practicable and for that, stability was the key. Although his improved design was also a one-man affair, it would be much larger—fourteen feet long, although only three feet across. To keep weight distribution equal, the Brayton motor would be mounted in a center compartment, just forward of the conning tower. Compressed air tanks would be used to blow ballast, to surface, and to allow the operator to breathe if the vessel remained submerged for any length of time.

  Even in this first model, two of Holland’s great contributions to submarine technology were manifest. For the first, just as flight pioneers often studied birds to derive their designs, Holland took the porpoise as his model. To dive, rather than establish negative buoyancy, which would make handling more cumbersome, he used diving planes mounted just forward of center that could be swiveled downward. With the motor providing sufficient power, the boat could be forced under by the water flowing over the planes. In addition, if for any reason the engine were disabled, the vessel would float to the surface instead of sinking to the bottom, a feature that submarine crews would find appealing. Demonstrating that a craft that retained a store of positive buoyancy could submerge and run effectively proved key to the development of more advanced submarines.

  His second insight was that a submarine needed a fixed center of gravity to maintain stability. If weight inside the craft shifted, either from movement within ballast tanks or the firing of a weapon, the center of gravity would shift as well. To counteract such changes, Holland installed a series of “trimming tanks,” which would take on or discharge small amounts of ballast as needed to keep the boat on an even keel under the water. For general ballast and to help withstand water pressure, Holland employed a “double hull” a cylindrical chamber inside the outside skin. Water could be taken into or expelled from the gap between the two shells as needed.

  He engaged the Albany City Iron Works in New York City to fashion his prototype and then moved it near his home in Paterson, New Jersey, for testing. In May 1878, Holland’s machine was dragged by ropes from the back of a wagon into the Upper Passaic River. Although the Brayton motor proved balky at best—Holland was forced to run a steam line from a surface ship to get the engine to fire—the Holland 1 actually performed like a submarine. In three different tests, for which John Breslin and two other Skirmishing Fund trustees were among the witnesses, Holland successfully submerged, cruised under the water at a depth of twelve feet, and then surfaced. William Dunkerly, an engineer Holland had hired to assist in the construction, patrolled along the surface in a launch, and described the event.

  Mr. Holland climbed into the submarine, closed the hatch, and started the engine. The bow went down first, and before we realized the fact, the boat was under twelve feet of water. The ropes were a safeguard in case the compressed air should not prove sufficient to expel the water from the ballast tanks. Holland was also given a hammer with which to rap upon the shell of the boat should he find himself in difficulties. After being submerged one hour, Holland brought the boat to the surface, to the great relief of all who were witnessing the test. As soon as the boat came up, the turret opened and Holland bobbed up smiling. He repeated his dive several times, and then he invited us to try it, but we preferred to “stick to the ropes.” About the third trip we made up the river, a stranger was seen hiding behind the rocks on the river road. He had a powerful field glass, and it was said that he was an agent of the British Government.6

  Even if the successful tests had not provided sufficient incentive, the rumor that the British might be interested surely did. The Skirmishing Fund trustees immediately offered to finance a larger Holland boat.

  But the tests had
also exposed flaws in Holland’s design that would need to be corrected. “The vertical rudders, those that controlled horizontal motion, proved to be very effective,” he noted, “but the horizontal rudders, placed on the level of the centre of buoyancy, proved to be useless. The boat should move three or four times more rapidly before they could produce a useful effect. This experiment showed the folly of attempting to control the degree of submergence of the boat by the employment of central horizontal rudders, a method on which so much importance was placed by some of my predecessors and successors.”7 From that point forward, Holland would not place diving planes amidships, but rather forward or aft, near the propellers, as all modern submarines are configured.

  With no need to retain a model already obsolete, Holland removed all the equipment from his prototype and scuttled the Holland 1 near the Spruce Street Bridge. Some local men retrieved the turret to sell as scrap and it was not until more than fifty years later that the remains of the hull of the first true submarine were raised and presented to the Paterson Museum, where they have been on exhibit ever since.

  _____________

  *With so many Irish immigrants drafted to fight for the Union in the Civil War, the Fenians had a wealth of army veterans on whom to call. They sought to draw on the animosity toward Canada that had festered since Confederate raiders had openly used Quebec as a staging ground for attacks in Vermont in 1864. Fenians also believed that they had received veiled assurances that President Andrew Johnson would recognize an Irish republic north of the American border, although no formal commitment was ever forthcoming.

  †Devoy was one of a number of Fenians imprisoned in England who had been granted amnesty if he agreed to leave Great Britain. Almost all of the amnestied prisoners settled in America. Devoy had secured employment at the New York Herald, while O’Reilly was working for a newspaper in Boston.

  ‡Petroleum had been used as a crude lighting fuel for centuries, but the vast industrial potential of oil and its distillates was only then coming to be understood. The first modern refinery had been built less than twenty years earlier and America’s first oil well had not been sunk until 1859. As petroleum and its by-products became adapted to commercial uses, it eventually became clear that pushing a piston by exploding a compressed mixture of, say, atomized gasoline and air was more efficient than steam power. In the early 1900s, with automobiles as the primary spur, internal combustion would replace steam.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE FENIAN RAM

  By 1879, the good fellowship engendered by the Catalpa rescue had faded—Fenian factions were again more bickering internally than fighting for an independent Ireland.

  The most serious dispute was between Clan na Gael, among whose leaders were Devoy and Breslin, and an even more extreme and violent offshoot, which had retained the name Fenian Brotherhood. This latter sect was led by a fire-breathing, exiled former prisoner, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. In 1864, Rossa had been given a life sentence for treason, but so harsh were his years in various British jails—at one point his hands were manacled behind his back for thirty-five straight days—that his treatment was widely seen as the impetus for William Gladstone to initiate the commutation for exile arrangement. (In 1874, Rossa published a detailed record of his captivity, Prison Life: Six Years in Six English Prisons, which scandalized the British and brought sympathy, particularly in America, to the Fenian cause.)

  Rossa and Devoy, who had been serving a fifteen-year sentence, were released together, on the condition that they both leave Ireland forever. Those two, plus three other exiles, were placed on the SS Cuba—they became known as the “Cuba Five”—and shipped to the United States. On his arrival in America, Rossa and Devoy were greeted with an immense celebration, which included a torchlight parade. As did a number of other exiles, both took to journalism. Devoy got a job with the New York Herald, and Rossa started a nationalist newspaper, The United Irishman.

  The two, each strong-willed and fervent, almost immediately came into conflict over tactics. Where Devoy thought in practical terms and favored “honorable warfare,” Rossa was determined to initiate a bombing campaign—he would later be called “O’Dynamite Rossa”—to bring England to heel through terror. It was Rossa, and another radical, Patrick Ford—editor of another newspaper, The Irish World—who had first suggested the Skirmishing Fund, with whose proceeds they intended to fund their dynamite campaign against British interests in Europe and North America.

  His enemies in Clan na Gael attempted to paint him as an unstable madman who drank too much and might sink them all, but Rossa was in reality more theatric than crazed. He favored guerilla warfare because he believed conventional military tactics would be useless against the British. (Even today, there is debate in Ireland over whether Rossa should be thought of as “the first terrorist.”) He was also a charismatic showman who would have three wives and eighteen children, and had little patience for skulking about in secret. In his newspaper, Rossa took credit for any mishap that befell prominent Englishmen. When Queen Victoria slipped on a flight of stairs, Rossa insisted his followers had treated them with oil. He did not shy from American politics either—he railed against Tammany Hall corruption and Boss Tweed, and then ran for local office as a Republican (and lost). What infuriated Devoy and his fellow conspirators the most, however, was that Rossa had succeeded in making himself the face of the Irish rebellion in America.

  Rossa had been against funding the submarine from the start. For him, every dollar not used to buy and plant dynamite was a dollar wasted. But Devoy was not without political skills of his own. He maneuvered to deny access to the Skirmishing Fund to Rossa and Ford—although Rossa remained a trustee—and in 1878 had it renamed the “National Fund,” to make clear that the money would be allocated as Clan na Gael saw fit. Devoy had become enamored with Holland’s submarine and so Holland was given the go-ahead to set to work in May 1879. While it would be two years before it was ready for even preliminary testing, the Holland 2, as it was initially called, would represent a stunning leap forward in submarine technology.

  Perhaps too stunning. Although sworn to the strictest secrecy, the Fenians once again proved completely inept in maintaining even a semblance of internal discipline. Whether it was Devoy’s allies unable to keep quiet or Rossa’s trying to sabotage the project, so public was the awareness of what Holland was up to that it could not even rise to the status of open secret. At least a half-dozen foreign navies heard about the project and pronounced themselves eager for a demonstration, and a seventh, Britain’s, monitored Holland’s progress as closely as if the boat were being built on the Thames. Moreover, progress reports appeared regularly in New York newspapers, along with the inconvenient snippet that the new craft had been financed by Irish nationalists. Because of the design, Blakely Hall, a reporter at the New York Sun dubbed the boat the Fenian Ram, and that was what it was called from then on, even by Holland.

  With secrecy by then out of the question, and “public curiosity aroused,” Hall pressed Holland to allow a series of feature articles to announce his invention publicly. “The same Mr. Blakely Hall seldom missed reporting every run or experiment we made while at Bay Ridge,” Holland reported. “He explained to me that I was foolish in not wishing to advertise my invention, because the Government would certainly wish to acquire boats of the same type, as he could see by the newspaper reports that they were already preparing to build them in France.”1 But Holland was aware that the French experiments were not nearly as advanced as his own and also that if he drew further attention to himself, his access to Fenian funds might cease.

  By June 1881, Holland was ready to put his boat in the water. Although it seemed clear that his creation would eventually work, refining the design would take almost two years, delays that only inflamed the volatile Rossa. “Fifty fires like that,” he would write in the United Irishman, referring to dynamite blasts, “would frighten England more than fifty rams lying dead in Jersey mud.”2 Had Rossa know that Holland
’s experiments would cost nearly $60,000 of the $90,000 the Skirmishing—now National—Fund had taken in between 1877 and 1880, he might have been moved to violence against his former brethren, but Devoy made certain to keep itemized expenditures secret.

  Whether or not he would create the means to cripple the British navy, what the Fenians did get for their money was an extraordinary machine, by far the most advanced undersea vessel ever conceived. Holland’s boat was thirty-one feet long, six in diameter, and sharply tapered at either end. It had a shallow conning turret, and was powered by a two-cylinder, seventeen-horsepower Brayton-cycle engine that Holland had reworked to improve its performance. Compressed air compartments in the bow and stern kept the Ram positively buoyant, while also providing breathable air to the crew. Compartments for water ballast were placed fore and aft, both capable of being minutely adjusted to maintain an even keel. The design was ingenious—the Fenian Ram was the first submarine able to maintain a fixed center of gravity and therefore longitudinal stability. Holland had solved the exhaust problem by installing a “check valve,” a one-way door that would close when no exhaust was emitting from the motor, with a compressed air barrier serving to prevent leakage.