Who Invented The Submarine? The submarine has origins in different parts of our history. The first was simply an image created by Leonardo da Vinci, although there was also a British-born mathematician named Willian Burne who drew different diagrams for a submarine in the year 1570. But the truth is that both only made images and neither created it.

It was not until the year 1620 that Cornelius Van Drebbel covered a wooden boat with pieces of the foot, which in turn he covered with wax to make it bear the water.

On each side of the boat were the holes for introducing the oars, which were also covered with a light layer of leather, also waterproof.

In order to stay underwater, it is believed that there were tubes that kept floating on the surface and provided air to the men who were in the boat.

They are also thought to have had a liquid that converted carbon dioxide into oxygen. What is known is that there were pig bladders on the edges of the boat so that the boat could sink as they filled with water. To go up, you just had to empty them.

Between 1620 and 1624 this contraption was tested on the River Thames.

Who Invented The Submarine?

The Submarine for Military Use

The first to create a submarine for military use was David Bushnell in 1776 creating a wooden one, which was powered by propellers. The first idea was to use it to stick small explosives to the bottom of English ships, and although the submarine worked very well, the explosives failed to sink any ship.

  • John P. Holland and Simon Lake were two rival inventors against each other who were responsible for creating the first real forms of a nephew.
  • Japan and Russia liked the design created by Simon Lake, while the United States preferred Holland’s designs. Both used steam or gas engines to propel the trip to the surface, and when submerging, in both cases, electric motors were used.

But the first submarine that can be considered a military type and in turn useful, was the one built by Isaac Peral at the end of the 19th century.

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But it was not until the First World War, almost three hundred years later after the first patch of what was known at the time as “submersible” was sketched, when the effectiveness of this peculiar weapon of war known as a submarine was verified.

In fact, one of these submarines sank a passenger ship in 1915 in which hundreds of passengers of American origin were traveling, and which is considered one of the reasons why the United States subsequently declared war on Germany.

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Although if there is a submarine famous around the world and for very different and much more entertaining reasons, that is the one that appears in “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea“, a work by Jules Verne inspired by the French submarine known as Nautilus and built in the year 1800, although it must be said that the fictional writer was much more evolved than the real one.