The Story of the Submarine

In an age before electricity, before steel, before modern engineering, a handful of visionaries obsessed over a seemingly impossible idea: can a machine breathe underwater? This is their story, and Farnham Bishop tells it with the verve of an adventure novel. The book traces submarine development from 14th century pipe-diving experiments through Cornelius Van Drebel's mysterious wooden rowboats that silently glided beneath the Thames in the early 1600s, all the way to the terrifying weapons reshaping World War I. Bishop spotlights figures like David Bushnell, whose revolutionary Turtle was designed to attach explosives to British warships, and Robert Fulton, whose long obsession with underwater warfare nearly bankrupted him. This isn't a dry technical manual. It is a vivid account of human stubbornness in the face of ridicule, of inventors who bet everything on a vision the world dismissed as fantasy. By 1916, when Bishop wrote these words, submarines had become indispensable instruments of naval warfare. The book captures a pivotal moment when the underwater boat was no longer a curiosity but a decisive force in global conflict.