Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World

I came across this book in a store and discovered a virtual unknown, who appears to have received essentially no credit for invented a modern submarine. It is a fascinating story both from a romantic and technical viewpoint. Highly recommend!

Narcís Monturiol dreamed of bringing peace and democracy to the whole world. He did not just dream, but he acted. He was an inventor, and he meant for his great invention to become the revolutionary spark to bring humankind into the rosy and egalitarian future. His invention: the most advanced and only reliable submarine of his time, the mid-nineteenth century. In _Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World_ (Pantheon), Matthew Stewart has written an entertaining biography of the forgotten submariner, whose name is absent even from many histories of the submarine. There are many contingencies that conspired to keep him an unknown, and many tiny events that could have gone differently so that his invention would have descendants and we would know him as "The Father of the Modern Submarine." As it turned out, he was one of those inventors that didn't get the recognition he deserved, and his life only seems successful in retrospect. Nonetheless, he was a fabulous dreamer, thinker, and tinkerer, and deserves the rescue from oblivion provided by this volume. Monturiol, born in 1819, was a surprise entry into the submarine inventing game. By 1856, he was "pretty much your typical utopian socialist revolutionary." He was not an engineer. He had much to learn, teaching himself the chemistry by which he could produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the air. He developed thick glass for portholes, and once he realized how dark it was down there, he developed an external lighting system that worked just fine. He was the first to insist on double hulling for a sub; the external one protected the craft and gave it a hydrodynamic shape (these were good-looking, streamlined vessels that resembled giant fish), while the inner one had the safety sealing to protect the crew. It could dive to 20 meters, although with his perfectionism for safety, he made the craft far more pressure-resistant than that. It was steerable, and was propelled by its crew of sixteen cranking a shaft connected to a propeller. The propulsion system was not up to Monturiol's standards, as it could not reach what he thought was an acceptable minimum speed of three knots. When he realized this, he looked for another way of powering the ship; electrical motors (which would be used on the first military subs of the twentieth century) were not yet feasible, and steam had the hazard of fire within the confines of the vessel. Monturiol performed thousands of experiments to find a heat-producing chemical reaction that would generate steam and also produce oxygen as a useful waste product. It was a brilliant solution that never got a good try. Monturiol, never a good business planner, eventually had no funds for further prototypes. He had spent years of trying, and had sacrificed parts of his utopian dream to bring his machine into reality: a pacifist, he had tried to get military support; a communist, he had tried