![]() He then installed water tanks outfitted with a stop-cock, an externally operated valve, that permitted water to flow into a tank to submerge the vessel. The resulting underwater vessel was four feet wide and five feet deep. Next, Hunley extended the structure by fitting it with a tapering iron section both fore and aft that extended it to 40 feet in length. He cut the boiler in half lengthwise and installed two half-inch iron straps on each side. He constructed his crude, hand-powered submarine from a 25-foot-long cylinder boiler that was 48 inches in diameter. Hunley. The third vessel was primarily Hunley’s project. The submarine sank in Mobile Bay during a storm and was never recovered.Īfter the loss of the American Diver, work began on a new vessel known as the H.L. An attack by the American Diver on Union vessels the following month was unsuccessful. ![]() The trials revealed that its propulsion system was too slow to be practical. The American Diver underwent trials in Mobile Bay in January 1863. ![]() In the course of its construction, the marine engineers experimented with electromagnetic and steam propulsion before deciding on a simple hand-cranked propulsion system. Lieutenant William Alexander of the 21st Alabama Infantry Regiment stepped in to oversee the work. The men resumed their work in Mobile, Alabama, where they teamed up with Thomas Park and Thomas Lyons to develop a second vessel, the American Diver. The design team received substantial assistance from the Confederate Army. But the Union advance on New Orleans the following month prompted the men to scuttle the Pioneer in the New Basin Canal on April 25, 1862. In February 1862, they tested the vessel in the muddy waters of the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. The three inventors built a prototype submarine they named the Pioneer. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hunley was a special collector for the Port of New Orleans, which made him an agent of the Confederate government. In 1857 he was appointed to serve as a clerk in the U.S. Hunley amassed considerable wealth as a sugar and cotton planter in Lafourche Parish during the 1850s. He went on to study law and was admitted to the bar in 1849. A native of Tennesee, he attended the University of Lousiana. Horace Lawson Hunley was the most influential and resourceful of the trio of Southern inventors. James McClintock, left, and Horace Hunley, right. It met a swift demise when it sank in rough seas in April 1863. Navy ultimately purchased the vessel, named the Alligator , when it was completed in June 1862. Navy entered into a contract with French inventor Brutus de Villeroi, who lived in Philadelphia, to develop a hand-cranked, screw-propeller submarine. Navy also was at work on a submersible to use against Confederate ships. ![]() Three visionary naval engineers-Horace Hunley, James McClintock, and Baxter Watson-gathered in New Orleans in 1861 to build an underwater vessel that might serve as a much-needed nautical weapon against the Union blockade. Most of the work related to submersibles during the late 18th century was theoretical rather than practical, though. The Turtle had conducted an unsuccessful attack in September 1776 against the British 64-gun Eagle anchored in New York Harbor. Inventor David Bushnell had introduced the submarine Turtle during the Revolutionary War. The idea of submersibles was not a new one. Inventors put their minds to developing an underwater vessel that could attack the blockading ships. The Confederate government offered private contractors a bounty of 20 percent of the value of any warship sunk by a licensed privateer. Southern inventors sought to develop a weapon that could counter the blockade fleet. The Union blockade quickly slowed the Confederacy’s exports and imports to a crawl. Yet the privateers met only a fraction of the Confederacy’s need in regard to getting sufficient exports of cotton to foreign markets and importing enough munitions and other war materials. A partial answer to the blockade lay in the privateers’ use of steam-powered ships that could run the Union blockade. The Confederacy ruled out constructing a comparable fleet because of a shortage of funds. The Confederate Navy endeavored to break the Union blockade, but it was seriously inferior to the vastly larger U.S. The primary targets of the blockade were the 12 largest ports. This entailed guarding 3,500 miles of coastline along the Atlantic seaboard and Gulf of Mexico. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that he planned to blockade the Confederacy by stationing warships in waters off its shores. At the start of the American Civil War in April 1861, U.S.
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