The weekly Alaska citizen., 1918-07-15
THE U-BOAT

THE U-BOAT
 Probably the average persons concep- tion of the submarine has been more or less influenced by the fascinating pages of Jules Verne, who launched the famous Nautilus upon the sea of his brilliant fiction, in charge of the inventor, Captain Memo. The Nautilus was vessel of peace and not of war. "And our arms?" asks M Arronax, one of the party. Our guns?" Guns! What for?' exclaims Captain Memo. In the same way, the submarine con jured up visions, not of war, but of submarine exploration and ad venture. The glass-bottomed boat, with its fairy visions of sea fauna and flora, had stimulated imagination to an intense degree. Perhaps the submarine would help men to trace the much-debated sea serpent to his lair; to recover the treasure of the ships which dot the marine valleys and groves of Davy-J onesand. Perhaps voyages would soon be made free of storms and their physical lnconveniences, submerged continents like the tabled Atlantis be explored, and the watery ways of vanished cities be traversed
 But the historical development of the submarine has not usually been along peace
 
 and not the peaceful adventuring of the TO- mantle Nautilus and her crew, has proved to be the animus moving the inventor from the earliest times. The expression "earliest times IS not by any means misplaced. The sub marine is an ancient and not a modern con- ception, and the thought of destruction usu- ally seems to have actuated those olden-time inventors, in spite of their limitations con- corning weapons of offense It is thus an anachronism to think of the submarine in terms of Fulton or a Holland, or as the invention of any one nation Submarine ori- gins are actually lost ill obscurity. It is even said that Alexander the Great, who contem- plated developing great sea-borne trade and huge mercantile marine, was interested in submarine invention Men worked out plans for subaqueous attack upon vessels in me dievaf times, and M. Delpeuch records that some English ships were actually destroyed in 1872, by fire carried under water. In the early part of the Seventeenth Century, Cor nelius Drebbel exhibited to King James l. on own design, which, one may fairly presume, was intended for the purpose of naval de- struction. Less than hundred years later at least fourteen types of submarines had been patented in England, and at Plymouth, in l774, an inventor named Day was con ducting experiments with his submarine boat In the following year, David Bushnell had completed a submarine, with which Sergeant Lee attacked the British man-of-war Eagle in New York harbor Lee claims to have got under the ship with his boat, but the attack failed because the screw by which the tor pedo was to be attached to the hull of the English vessel was not sharp enough. It is needless to say that with Robert. Fulton the thought of the submarines powers of de- struction must have been paramount. He was living in Paris when he constructed his Nau- titus; the invention was brought to the knowl- edge of Napoleon, and the power inherent within the new weapon undoubtedly appealed to the conqueror of Europe. To him the pos session of the new weapon would appear as the solution of his great problem, the de- struction of the British fleet, that one bar rier which lay between him and sea power. He appointed commission to test the Nau- titus in Brest harbor, in 1901, and Fulton was so far successful that he actually blew up a small vessel with his torpedo.