The first steam-powered submarine

After leaving Trinity College, Dublin, George William Garrett went home to Moss Side in Manchester to be a curate in his father’s parish. Later he became a commander in the Turkish navy, a farmer in Florida, and a corporal in the US Army Corps of Engineers.

While he was in Moss Side, he formed the Garrett Submarine, Navigation, and Pneumatophore Company Ltd, and built the world’s first steam-powered submarine, which he launched at Birkenhead in 1879. After getting up steam, the crew closed the furnace and chimney before diving, and the submarine was claimed to be able to travel ten miles under water.

Unfortunately she ran into bad weather on her maiden voyage. The crew had to be taken off, and the submarine sank off Rhyl in North Wales. She was called Resurgam, meaning “I will come up again”, but she never did. Press reports at the time said that the submarine was “very nearly successful”, but that is not quite good enough, especially for a submarine.

Amazingly, the rusting remains were found on the seabed in 1997, still in reasonable condition; so perhaps one day someone will bring her up and the submarine will live up to her name.

The anti-seasickness boat

Henry Bessemer was a prolific inventor. He took out more than a hundred patents and made a couple of fortunes: the first from a brass-grinding machine, and the second from a new steel-making process—the Bessemer Converter. However, he did make one expensive mistake.

Every time he crossed the Channel to do business with the French, he was seasick; so he designed a boat that would prevent seasickness. His colleagues told him it would never work, but he went ahead anyway and spent £40,000 on building the SS Bessemer.

She was very long, so that she would ride on four or five waves, and would not pitch fore and aft. The boat might roll horribly on bad sea, but the main saloon was mounted on trunnions (axles) with a heavy weight underneath, so that however the ship rolled the saloon would always stay horizontal.

She sailed from Dover on her maiden voyage on May 8, 1875, slowly crossed the channel on a fine calm day, and completely demolished the pier at Calais. Her captain said she was impossible to steer with the huge weight swinging about amidships.

The SS Bessemer never put to sea again.

Better bicycles

The first bicycle seems to have been made in Scotland in 1839 by Kirkpatrick Macmillan, but the idea did not catch on until the 1860s, when bikes made by Michaux in Paris were imported into Britain. By the 1890s bicycles were everywhere, and inventors were falling over themselves trying to improve them.

In the late 1830s, when Queen Victoria had just come to the throne, about 500 patents were applied for each year. Sixty years later, as her reign drew to a close, this had increased to 25,000 every year, and when I read through a few hundred patent applications from 1897, I found that about one in ten were for bicycle improvements.

There were bicycles with brushes to take mud from the spokes, bicycles with levers instead of chains, and bicycles with propellers to go faster into the wind. There were saddles with rollers in front to prevent ladies’ skirts from getting pulled down as they mounted, and inflatable saddles to protect the “organic parts”.

My favourites among this stable of bikes were the one with a hollow frame and a pair of cylinders that pumped it full of compressed air going downhill, so that the pressure would help you get up the other side; the bike-powered, sheep-shearing machine; and the bicycle—including its wheels—made entirely of cane tied together with string.

I wonder why none of these curious machines has survived.

The atmospheric railway

In 1804 Richard Trevithick broke new ground by using a steam locomotive to pull a train, and in due course this became the standard method to power trains. However, the engineers of the time were always looking for different and potentially better ways to do things, and George Medhurst invented the atmospheric propulsion system, which was developed by the Samuda brothers, and then used by Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the South Devon Railway between Exeter and Newton Abbott.

There was no locomotive. Instead the leading carriage was connected by an iron rod to a piston running inside a 15-in (38-cm) diameter cast-iron tube between the rails. All the air in the tube in front of the train was pumped out by steam engines in pumping houses every few miles along the track, and because of the vacuum in the tube the pressure of the atmosphere pushed the piston forwards and so propelled the train; hence the name “atmospheric railway”.

The iron bar from the piston to the carriage passed through a narrow slot in the top of the tube, and to maintain the vacuum in front of the train this slot was sealed with a hinged leather flap. Unfortunately, the leather tended to dry out in summer and to freeze in winter; so the valve never worked well. Men were sent to paint the leather with grease and whale oil, but this attracted rats, and the rats ate the leather, and air leaked in. What’s more, there was no way of bringing two lines together—they could never have had points—because the tube would have been in the way.

The South Devon atmospheric railway ran for nine months from September 1847 and the passengers loved it—the train was fast and quiet, with no smoke or smuts. But then Brunel was forced to close the whole thing down, with losses of almost half a million pounds.