There are a couple of men whose name remain mostly unsung, but who were instrumental in preventing nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War. One of them was Vasili Arkhipov.
As early as 1955, the Soviets launched the world’s first Sea Launched Ballistic Missile, besting the USA and so introducing the world’s first SSBN. They probably could not have done that without the help of a banished man.
One man was instrumental in fomenting a revolution in the US Navy. What if you installed a nuclear reactor on a sub?, he thought.
When we think of submarines, we’re likely to conjure in our mind photos and videos of German U-boats sinking British transports in the Atlantic, accidents with Russian subs or American nuclear submarines. But it was actually the French who...
Most submarine development action in the 1870-1900 period took place on the European continent. But though the British admiralty wasn’t interested in submarines, that didn’t mean that no one on the isles was dabbling in it. George Garrett of...
Every new development depends on geniuses. One of those was Narcis Monturiol.The American Civil War had ended and the US government was demobilizing fast. In Europe, though, submarine development was picking up, mainly thanks to French government...
Robert Fulton invented the Nautilus submarine, another milestone future inventors would build upon. Fulton was born on November 14, 1765 in the town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He went to a Quaker school and acquainted himself with minitiature...
The first submersible to be built after Drebbel’s devices was the Rotterdam Boat, named after the Dutch city where a French inventor known to history only as De Son built it in 1653. At the time, the United Provinces – currently known as The...
Cornelis Drebbel is generally seen as the father of all submarines. He laid down the groundwork for submarine basics, the general concepts of which are still in use today. Cornelis Drebbel was born in 1572 in the town of Alkmaar, in the north-west...
As explained in the first podcast episode of A History Of Submarines – Submersibles: The First Submarines, the first serious description of a submarine is found in the work ‘Inventions or Devices’, published in 1578 by William Bourne. Bourne...