The Rise and Fall of Electric Submarines
On the basis that electricity and water are not the best of companions, particularly when people are in close proximity to each at the same time, it would seem that an electrically powered submarine might not be the way forward for undersea exploration. Victorian inventors thought otherwise.
There was, at this time, nothing new about the actual theory of building a submarine. As early as 1580, amateur scientist William Bourne suggested a way of making a boat capable of travelling underwater by use of expanding and contracting chambers to decrease the volume of a vessel to make it sink, and then to increase the volume, causing it to rise again. In 1623, Dutch innovator Cornelis Drebbel built what is usually recognised as the first submarine, which was little more than an enclosed rowing boat powered by twelve oarsmen on a voyage 15 feet below the surface of the river Thames. Other ideas were put forward by numerous English, French, German and American inventors over the following years, some of which were actually built, others existing only as proposals on paper.
Into the Victorian era, there came designs from Prussian Army Colonel Wilhelm Bauer for a sheet iron submarine powered by a two-man treadmill; one from American shoemaker Lodner D. Phillips for a hand-cranked, one-man submarine; another from Wilhelm Bauer for a sixteen-man vessel; one from French engineer Brutus de Villeroi for a vessel 46 feet long, propelled by sixteen oarsmen and a 3-foot diameter hand-cranked propeller … and these examples are only a few of the many. Some of the designs enjoyed success, others sunk without trace.
But then came Claude Goubet with his design for the first electric submarine. Born in Lyon in 1837, Goubet became an inventor who filed a great many patents in the field of mechanics before getting interested in submarine design in 1880 and beginning to look at actual construction in 1881. Four years later, he filed a patent for his vessel, which he called the Goubet I. It was launched in 1887.
Goubet’s electric submarine in profile and from above.
The Goubet I was cigar shaped with a raised dome in the centre, through which the two-man crew entered and was then hermetically sealed with a cap. The two men sat on seats, back to back, with their heads in the dome. Small glass peepholes that allowed them to see out could be quickly sealed with caps if the glass was accidentally broken.
In the base of the vessel there were watertight chambers. When water was allowed into either or both of these chambers, the submarine sank. When a motor was used to pump the water out again, it rose to the surface.
Above the tanks and below the seats on which the sailors sat, there was a chamber full of compressed air. Pipes from the compressed air chamber led to the top of the dome, where they discharged air to the crew close to their faces. Stale air was evacuated by an air pump.
A motor, connected to a drive shaft, was used to drive the propeller and so move the vessel through the water. Alternatively, one of the two-man crew, sitting in extremely cramped conditions, was able to turn a crank to rotate the propeller. The propeller could be angled left and right to steer the vessel without the use of a rudder. A third method of propulsion came from oars that passed from the inside to the outside through watertight apertures.
To keep the submarine level in the water, a swinging pendulum was connected to pumps that drove water into tanks at the front or back of the vessel, depending on its angle in the water. If the submarine tilted backwards or forwards, the pendulum compensated to activate the appropriate pump, the weight of water pumped into the tanks quickly stabilising the angle of the vessel.
The motor that drove the propeller, the water pumps and air pumps was electric; its power came from accumulators stored in lockers at the front of the vessel.
The Goubet I was also equipped with an electrically exploding torpedo, so that the submarine might be used to attack enemy ships. According to Goubet’s patent, the torpedo was attached to the back of the submarine’s dome by means of a fastening that could be operated from the inside. A long wire ran from the torpedo and onto a drum.
For the purposes of attack, one of the crew sighted and lined the submarine up with the enemy ship before submerging, noting the bearing on a compass. The vessel was then submerged, and using the compass bearing, headed for the target. Once it reached the enemy ship, a crew member caused the submarine to submerge to a depth that took it under the ship. Once in place, the torpedo was released to rise in the water and fix itself to the underside of the hull above.
The submarine then moved away, paying out the wire from the drum to the torpedo as it went. The number of revolutions of the drum indicated to the submarine crew the distance that they had moved. When the submarine had positioned itself at a safe enough distance, one crew member closed an electric circuit inside the dome, which sent an electrical charge along the wire to fire the torpedo.
Initially, the French naval and military authorities took a keen interest as the Goubet I was tested and demonstrated, first in the river Seine in Paris and later in Cherbourg and Toulon harbours. In the end, however, Goubet’s submarine was rejected as being too small and he was invited to submit a design for something lager.
The Goubet II, powered by a more powerful electric motor, added three fins to improve stability and had provision for an extra torpedo. Despite the improvements and with problems from backers, the Goubet II suffered the same fate as the Goubet I. The inventor was ruined, and died in 1903.
Launching the Goubet I.
When the French authorities rejected the Goubet submarines, they turned their attention to another electrically powered submarine called the Gymnote, launched a year after the Goubet I, in 1888.
The Gymnote was based on experiments by French naval architect Stanislas Charles Henri Dupuy de Lôme, who died in 1885, after which his work was carried on by marine engineer Gustave Zédé and automotive engineering pioneer Arthur Krebs. Together, the latter two engineers designed a submarine that was more practical than Goubet’s vessels. The Gymnote was fitted with the first naval periscope and the first naval electrical gyrocompass. For these reasons, it is the Gymnote, rather than the Goubet I or II, that is more often recognised as history’s first successful submarine.
The Gymnote.
Arthur Krebbs designed the electric motor that powered the submarine. The motor was connected directly to the vessel’s propeller, which was capable of rotating at 250 revolutions per minute. The batteries to power the motor were in the bow of the submarine, arranged in six banks of cells. In this way the motor developed a maximum of 55 horsepower at 200 volts. The speed with which the motor turned and therefore the submarine travelled was controlled by the number of batteries used and the ways they were connected to vary the voltage, either in series (positive pole on one battery to negative pole on the next) or parallel (negative to negative and positive to positive).
The hull of the Gymnote was made of steel, supported by thirty-one circular frames. Three ballast tanks in the front, centre and rear were filled with water or emptied by electric or compressed air pumps, in order to control the sinking and rising of the vessel.
Although it was the first to use a periscope, the device was soon abandoned due to difficulties with raising and lowering it and inefficient water seals that led to serious flooding on at least one occasion.
Nevertheless, the Gymnote made about 2,000 dives during nearly twenty years of service in the French Navy, until 1907, when it ran aground and was seriously damaged. Abandoned in dry dock, a valve was accidentally left open and the Gymnote flooded. Repairs were considered to be impractical and it was eventually sold for scrap in 1911.
Half a century later, in France in the 1960s, an experimental submarine was trialled to carry and fire ballistic missiles. It was named the Gymnote in honour of what has come to be remembered as the world’s first all-electric submarine. Few who award the Gymnote this honour remembered the Goubet I, a lot less successful than the Gymnote, but actually more entitled to the accolade.