250 and Counting

Tag: American Turtle

  • All Under Heaven Is Chaos–September 7, 1776

    Cover art for September 7, 1776: Cutaway diagram of the Turtle, drawn by Lt.C. Francis M. Barber of the US Navy in 1875. via Library of Congress.

    …but the situation was not excellent, for the American side, anyway.

    George Washington got a wake-up call in the form of a letter from Congress. In that letter he was told that it was not a good idea to burn down New York City; what’s more, they weren’t quite so invested in his holding the City as he thought they were. This was a good news/bad news situation for him, since he knew that strategically, the British occupying New York had the potential to be a huge problem, especially if they were able to take the entire Hudson Valley.

    But even if they didn’t, having one of our biggest and busiest ports was going to create a lot of headaches, regardless of what was supposed to be moving in or out of the city.

    Meanwhile, we have Ezra Lee making his first attempt at genuinely deploying the Turtle submersible. The currents plus the darkness made maneuvering very difficult, and while he did get close enough to Admiral Howe’s ship to stick the explosive charge to it, the spear he used couldn’t penetrate the hull enough to stick. In recent years it’s thought that he tried to pierce the hull near the rudder, which had an iron plate on it; another theory involved the recent use of copper on ships’ bottoms, but this copper was quite thin and would have been easily pierced.

    Lee made one more attempt with the Turtle, on October 6, but that try also failed. The Turtle was lost less than a week later when the sloop serving as her tender was sunk by British ships. Who knows? Maybe there are still pieces of her in the Hudson River.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

  • Testing A Turtle–July 21, 1776

    Cover art for July 21, 1776: line drawing of "Bushnell's American Turtle" (detail), date unknown. Via Library of Congress.

    David Bushnell came up with the idea for the Turtle submersible only days after Lexington and Concord. He’d been working on several different experiments he’d conducted at Yale College, and found a way to integrate them into a single device to use against the British.

    The Turtle was revolutionary (heh) in a couple of ways: first, nobody had successfully created anything like it before, and more importantly, Bushnell (along with Isaac Doolittle) came up with the screw propeller as a means of maneuvering the vehicle. No water vehicle had ever used a propeller as a means of getting from one place to another, and while the design has been refined for various purposes and to improve efficiency, Bushnell’s propeller is easily recognizable today for what it is.

    It was pretty brilliant for its time, and in September we’ll see it in action, in New York Harbor.

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

  • September 7, 1775: Submarine Warfare is Revolutionary

    Cover art for September 7, 1775: the full-size cutaway model of the American Turtle at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, UK

    The Turtle, or the American Turtle as it’s often called, was invented by a man who thought it should be possible to stealthily attach a bomb to a ship and then detonate it shortly thereafter, by approaching the ship from under the waterline.

    The Turtle was a brilliant idea in concept, if not in execution. There were just too many things that had to go exactly right for the turtle to successfully execute its design purpose, and when it was first tried in genuine combat on this day in 1775, unfortunately it was not successful.

    But every failure is one step closer to success, right?

    Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed