Ezra Lee, the pilot of the Turtle, tried very hard. According to some sources, George Washington-who, though skeptical, had funded most of the development of the Turtle-was watching from the shore. Finally, on September 6, it was time to go after a real target, the Eagle.

His brother Ezra practiced piloting the sub in the Connecticut River until he could steer it with “perfect dexterity,” as military surgeon James Thacher later wrote. But to Bushnell, its overall structure bore “some resemblance to two upper tortoise shells, of equal size, joined together”-thus its name.īushnell tweaked and tested the Turtle repeatedly. Lee compared the submarine to a clam, and modern onlookers might be reminded of a human-sized hand grenade. Another set of gizmos let him automatically attach the underwater bomb to the keel of the ship, and set off the clockwork mechanism that would trigger the explosion. At night, he had to go by the barometer and compass, which were illuminated by foxfire: wood infested with a bioluminescent fungus, which glowed well in the pitch-black water and, unlike a flame, didn’t use up any oxygen. For daytime visibility, he could peer through a series of glass peepholes. Geni/CC BY-SA 4.0Ī complex series of pedals, cranks and hand rudders allowed said adventurer to move in all three dimensions: to sink and rise, move forwards and backwards, and turn. Another model, at the Royal Navy submarine museum in England. He was accompanied by half an hour’s worth of breathable air, which he could replenish by bobbing up to the surface and uncapping a couple of bronze tubes in the ceiling. The pilot-or, as one admirer put it, “the adventurer concealed within”-sat on a chair in the middle. (A local clockmaker, Isaac Doolittle, helped design and construct some of the most ingenious parts.) About seven feet across in each direction, the whole thing was basically one giant cockpit. Over the next year, the Turtle began to take shape. Freshly motivated, he pursued the next logical step: a machine that could quietly bring these submersible explosives where they needed to go. In 1775, after the battles of Lexington and Concord, Bushnell graduated and went back to his family farm. Bushnell was interested in the problem of underwater explosions: after much study, he managed to create the first ever underwater time bomb, packing gunpowder into a waterproof keg and creating a clock-based trigger mechanism.

The Turtle was the brainchild of David Bushnell, who began work on it in the early 1770s, when he was a student at Yale College. A model of the Turtle, at the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. Built by Americans during the Revolutionary War, it never had a successful mission, despite all of the out-of-the-shell thinking it displayed. When Lee tried to blow up the Eagle, he was piloting the Turtle, the world’s first combat submarine. His mode of transportation-made of wood, covered in tar, and shaped (as Lee put it) “like a round clam, but longer”-was completely unprecedented. About an hour later, it exploded, and everyone on both sides watched as it sent a massive jet of water up into the air. When he saw that British soldiers were following him, he dropped the bomb into the water, frightening them away. Fearful of being spotted, he hightailed it out of there. The ship’s side was metal, not wood, and the explosive wouldn’t screw in. Army Corps of Engineers stationed at West Point.Lee soon ran into trouble. After the war, he became commander of the U.S. During the Battle of Fort Lee, the Turtle was lost when the American sloop transporting it was sunk by the British.ĭespite the failures of the Turtle, General George Washington gave Bushnell a commission as an Army engineer, and the drifting mines he constructed destroyed the British frigate Cereberus and wreaked havoc against other British ships. Only Bushnell was really able to competently execute the submarine’s complicated functions, but because of his physical frailty he was unable to pilot the Turtle in any of its combat missions. He retreated, and the bomb exploded nearby, causing no harm to either the Eagle or the Turtle.ĭuring the next week, the Turtle made several more attempts to sink British ships on the Hudson River, but each time it failed, owing to the operator’s lack of skill.

Lee had almost secured the bomb when his boring tools failed to penetrate a layer of iron sheathing. As Lee worked to anchor a time bomb to the hull, he could see British seamen on the deck above, but they failed to notice the strange craft below the surface. Donated to the Patriot cause after the outbreak of war with Britain in 1775, Ezra Lee piloted the craft unnoticed out to the 64-gun HMS Eagle in New York Harbor on September 7, 1776.

Turtle first submarine