The Story of the Submarine

Both Admiral von Tirpitz and the Austrian Admiralty seem to have begun their submarine campaigns after the method of Captain John Sirius: to starve the enemy any way they could...

Lieutenant Perry Scope, commanding the X-class flotilla, was sitting in his comfortable little office on the mother-ship _Ozark_, when I entered with a letter from the secretary...

“Hit and hard hit! The blow went home The muffled knocking stroke, The steam that overrides the foam, The foam that thins to smoke, The smoke that cloaks the deep aboil, The dee...

John P. Holland was not the only inventor who responded to the invitation of the United States navy department to submit designs for a proposed submarine boat in 1893. That invi...

_Date_ _Name_ _Nationality_ _Men Lost_ March 18, 1904 A-1 British 11 June 20, 1904 Delfin Russian 26 June 8, 1905 A-8 British 14 July 6, 1905 Farfadet French 14 October 16, 1906...

A mine is a torpedo that has no motive-power of its own but is either anchored or set adrift in the supposed path of an enemy’s ship. We have already seen how Bushnell used drif...

In the first week of September, 1776, the American army defending New York still held Manhattan Island, but nothing more. Hastily improvised, badly equipped, and worse disciplin...

“It is true that submarine boats have improved, but they are as useless as ever. Nevertheless, the German navy is carefully watching their progress, though it has no reason to m...

How best to float a charge of explosives against the hull of an enemy’s ship and there explode it is the great problem of torpedo warfare. The spar-torpedo, that did such effect...

When the _Merrimac_ rammed the _Cumberland_, burned the _Congress_, and was fought to a standstill next day by the little _Monitor_, all the world realized that there had been a...

Robert Fulton was probably the first American who ever went to Paris for the purpose of selling war-supplies to the French government. Unlike his compatriots of to-day, he found...

During the half-century following the death of Fulton, scarcely a year went by without the designing or launching of a new man-power submarine. Some of these boats, notably thos...

I’ll show you, sir, It is an automa, runs under water With a snug nose, and has a nimble tail Made like an auger, with which tail she wriggles Betwixt the costs of a ship and si...

The most powerful battleship in the world, half a century ago, was the U.S.S. _New Ironsides_. She was a wooden-hulled, ship-rigged steamer of 3486 tons displacement--about one...

If you had been in London in the year 1624, and had gone to the theater to see “The Staple of News,” a new and very dull comedy by Shakespeare’s friend Ben Jonson, you would hav...