Kröhl-"Explorer" U-Boot (1864) found

[Amethystfretchen]

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478215,00.jpg

On the webpage of the German news-magazine DER SPIEGEL there is an article about an old submarine-wreck found by a British researcher on the shore of Panama. Is seems it is the "Explorer" of the german-american inventor Julius Kröhl. He had offered his invention to the northern Union-states in the American Civil War of 1861-65, but they showed no interest. Kröhl wanted to build his invention and he found a partner in the Pacific Pearl Company. They gave him the money for building the U-boot to dive for pearls. This boat with a lenght of 12 meters even had a underwater egress-system to allow a member of the crew to leave the u-boot underwater to collect pearls. This is something thought to inventeted only in the 20th century. There is a opinion that the "Explorer" inspired Jules Verne for his "Nautilus" of Captain Nemo in "20.000 miles below the sea" .Julius Kröhl is said to have died after a week with very much diving, because of bends, which was not known to this time. The "Explorer" was to left on the shore of Panama and forgotten.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478258,00.jpghttp://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478260,00.jpg
http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478264,00.jpghttp://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478266,00.jpg

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,359448,00.html
http://www.navyandmarine.org/alligator/underwaterprints.htm

[Shiftyfive]

Huh, interesting

[Stolly]

Thats amazing, they going to recover it ?

[Amethystfretchen]

The SPIEGEL-article says: The british guy who found it is Colonel John Blashford-Snell founder of the british Scientific Exploration Society. He has heard about this sub, which comes to light each day only during ebb, some 20 years ago. But he was told that it would be a japanese sub from WW2. So there was no reason for a instant expedition. But now he had assignment from a canadian museum to look for it. There are plans now to recover the "Explorer" and to restaurate her in the Warren Lasch Conservation Center which is located in North Charleston (USA).

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478072,00.jpg

[Amethystfretchen]

Explorer finds sub that may have inspired Verne's Nautilus

Steven Morris
Monday June 6, 2005
The Guardian

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478262,00.jpg

A British explorer has discovered an abandoned 19th-century submarine which may have been the inspiration for Captain Nemo's vessel Nautilus in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Colonel John Blashford-Snell found the cast-iron submarine, named Explorer, half-submerged in three metres of water off the coast of Panama.

Like Nautilus, the craft is cigar-shaped and has a lock-out system, which allows submariners to leave, collect items from the seabed and then return to the vessel.

It was built in 1864, five years before Verne's classic adventure story was published, and it is thought that the French writer would have read about the sub's specifications.

Col Blashford-Snell, 67, who runs the Dorset-based Scientific Exploration Society, heard about the object 20 years ago. At first he was told she was a Japanese mini-sub but someone else insisted it was just an old boiler so he forgot about it.

But when he returned to Panama recently looking for ancient ruins, a maritime museum in Canada asked him to examine the object.

"We were very lucky to find it because at high tide it is totally submerged, but we got there at low tide when about half of it is showing," he said.

"We waited until high tide so we could dive on it properly and do a full survey. It was quite an experience because we had an expert with us who said it was much earlier than we had thought and dated from the American civil war."

The 10-metre long vessel was built by a visionary inventor called Julius Kroehl for the Union forces but it was not used in the war. It ended up in Panama where the lock-out system made it a useful tool in the pearl trade.

"I realised it was identical to the system used in Nautilus," Col Blashford-Snell said, adding that Verne must have read about the Explorer's lock-out system and used it in his book.

The Explorer was abandoned after all its crew died of what was reported to be a fever but may well have been the bends.

One of Britain's most noted maritime heritage experts, Wyn Davies, agreed that the Explorer may well have inspired Verne.

"If Jules Verne was researching the relatively new world of submersible vessels, he would probably have heard of the Explorer's lock-out system," he said. "Submarine inventors were keen to sell their products so there would have been none of today's secrecy and technologies would have been keenly scrutinised on both sides of the Atlantic.

"As far as I'm aware the Explorer possessed the world's first lock-out system and its very uniqueness might have stimulated Verne's imagination.

"The cigar shape is also a clue that Verne might have borrowed his concept from the Explorer because other submersibles of this era came in a variety of shapes."

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1500156,00.html

[Amethystfretchen]

To sum it up: German inventor emigrates to America and trys to sell his sub-patent to yankee-military. Yanks are not interested but he manages to get money from company to build it for commercial disposal. French best-seller-author hears story and writes roman everybody knows. German inventor dies because of nescience. Sub is forgotten in Panama. British explorer hears from it but thinks it is a japanese sub or some old boiler. Canadians commission him to look for it. Now it gets restored in former confederate state. p-)

[Vivelamorte]

To sum it up: German inventor emigrates to America and trys to sell his sub-patent to yankee-military. Yanks are not interested but he manages to get money from company to build it for commercial disposal. French best-seller-author hears story and writes roman everybody knows. German inventor dies because of nescience. Sub is forgotten in Panama. British explorer hears from it but thinks it is a japanese sub or some old boiler. Canadians commission him to look for it. Now it gets restored in former confederate state. p-)

History is always full of great jokes and misses. I could write a lengthy post on how slow the US phone companeis were at adopting Telephones and electromechanic switches, but that's a totally different story.....

[Amethystfretchen]

SAVE THE SUBMERSIBLE
From The Post and Courier, submitted by Stephen A. Buckler, Ruffin, SC

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478209,00.jpg

Every day, the tides uncover the football-shaped iron hulk, left to rot just off the beach of a deserted island near Panama.

The locals call it a death machine, and the ebb and flow of the Pacific creates the ghostly illusion that it is endlessly diving and re-surfacing.

When the maritime archaeologist James Delgado arrived in Panama on a cruise ship in 2001, locals told him about the ship, claiming it was a Japanese sub abandoned after World War II.

Faced with the prospect of another boring bird-watching tour, he hired a boat to the remote island for a peek. There, in the surf of Isla San Telmo, Delgado found a forgotten chapter in submarine history, a Civil War-era cousin of the H.L. Hunley.

"It looked like something out of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Delgado said. "At first I thought it looked like a Holland submarine, but it was much smaller."

Delgado climbed around the sub, and was struck by its strange construction. Some of its design elements appeared to date to 1900, but the strange iron bars between its two hulls seemed like they'd been forged in the 1850s.

A few years later, Delgado got his answers. He has identified the wreck as the Sub Marine Explorer, a submersible built in New York in the waning days of the Civil War. Turned down by the U.S. Navy, its builder took the sub to Central America to make a fortune in pearl diving.

Before it was over, the sub's builder made another important - and deadly - discovery about deep-water diving.

Delgado says the submarine, which in some ways is even more advanced than the Hunley, is a unique maritime treasure that should be saved. Now he's looking for a way to rescue the fallen fish-boat from the waters of Central America.

Ideally, he says, the Explorer should be brought to the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, where it could benefit from the cutting-edge technology being used to save the Hunley.

"I can't imagine a better place for it," Delgado said after a tour of the North Charleston lab earlier this week. "If the funding could be found, it would be a great fit."

The two 1860s subs have much in common: design elements, similar conservation problems and, perhaps most notably, tragic pasts.

Delgado could not get the sub out of his mind.

After returning to Canada, where he is executive director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum, he sent photos of the boat to every maritime historian he knew, and he knows a lot of them. Delgado, co-host with Clive Cussler of National Geographic International's "The Sea Hunters," has been in the shipwreck business for decades, and as formerly maritime historian for the U.S. National Park Service.

For a long while, however none of his contacts could offer much advice about the fat little sub. One friend mentioned it looked like the Intelligent Whale, a Civil War-era sub, and that made Delgado think: Could it be that old?

Then, one day last year, Rich Wills, a Navy archaeologist, said the sub resembled drawings he'd seen of the Sub Marine Explorer, built for the U.S. Navy during the Civil War by a German immigrant and engineering whiz kid named Julius Kroehl.

Delgado got the drawings and any doubt he had melted away. He had his sub. The final confirmation was found in the article accompanying the drawings in the 1902 journal. It said the sub had been abandoned off Panama in 1869.

This research is the final chapter of a long, intriguing story...

Kroehl immigrated to America in 1838, where he studied to become an engineer. He took to the work like a duck to water, and by 1845 had patented a flange-bending machine for ironwork. More than a decade later, while blasting away at a reef causing problems for ships in the East River channel, Kroehl hired Van Buren Ryerson, who had crafted a pressured diving bell, to help. Kroehl would remember the bell and its name, Sub Marine Explorer.

Delgado says that in 1861 Kroehl became the first inventor to offer the U.S. Navy a submarine to sneak into Southern ports and attack from beneath the surface. Officials instead chose to go with Brutus de Villeroi, who eventually built the USS Alligator, the Navy's first submarine.

Kroehl instead spent most of the war as an underwater explosives expert for the Union, working the Mississippi River circuit until he was discharged with malaria.

While recuperating, he came up with the idea of a submarine that divers could get in and out of underwater, from which they could set charges and disarm enemy torpedoes. Delgado says Kroehl was smart, and knew the Navy wouldn't pay for the construction of such an experimental boat. So he joined up with the Pacific Pearl Company, which was itching to mine the pearl beds off the Central American coast.

While Kroehl was building his submarine in early 1864, the "shot heard around the world' in the underwater arms race was fired off Charleston. The privateer H.L. Hunley had sunk the USS Housatonic four miles offshore.

The boat, which Kroehl called the Sub Marine Explorer, was 36 feet long and 10 feet wide and could carry six to eight men. It was notable for its odd elliptical shape, its flat bottom and its separate chamber for pressurized air, which could be pumped into the crew compartment to equalize the pressure enough so the hatches could be opened under water.

It was, Delgado said, the first self-propelled "lock out" dive chamber, an invention most historians have thought didn't come along until the 20th century.

By the time the Explorer sailed, the Civil War was just about over. The Navy passed on the boat, but the Pacific Pearl Co. was ready for business. They used tests of the sub in the East River to attract investors.

The New York Times covered one such demonstration in May 1866, when Kroehl took the sub down for an hour and a half, leaving the people on the dock afraid that he had perished beneath the surface.

"Kroehl popped out of the hatch smoking a Meerschaum pipe, holding a bucket of mud scooped off the bottom of the channel," Delgado said.

Soon after that, Pacific Pearl shipped Explorer to Panama, where it gathered pearls successfully for almost three years.

Kroehl did not make it so long. After one dive, Kroehl became ill. The locals said he had the "fever" and died shortly thereafter.

Delgado believes there is more to the story. In 1869, according to some accounts, the Explorer was abandoned in Panama Bay after a stint of heavy use. For 10 straight days, divers were taking the sub to a nearby pearl bed 100 feet below the surface, working for four hours and then returning to the surface. To some degree, all of them fell deathly ill.

Reading of Kroehl's symptoms, Delgado says he doesn't believe the engineer had a relapse of his malaria. His symptoms sounded, like those of the other workers who got sick in the sub, much more like the bends.

"They didn't know about decompression," he said. "It was unknown until workers on the Brooklyn Bridge started getting caisson's disease, and wasn't known as the bends until years later. I think Julius Kroehl may have died of the first recorded case of the bends."

The future of the submarine is uncertain. Exposed to the air, sea, and intrepid tourists, its hull is deteriorating badly, and it has apparently fallen victim to looters - the propeller and conning tower hatch are missing.

Delgado took a crew of scientists down in 2002 to map the sub and give it a more careful examination. Recently, Delgado said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is looking for the Alligator, has set aside money for a fact-finding expedition to Panama next year. Scientists want to find out if the sub, apparently made almost entirely of brittle cast iron, is too fragile to move, or if it can be saved.

Then - if it is determined that Explorer can be rescued - comes the hard part: finding the money to bring it up and care for it. Delgado says if it can be salvaged, it could be put in a tank of cold freshwater to desalinate it until technology invents a way to preserve it for posterity.

The Hunley lab, with its cutting-edge research on preserving Charleston's Civil War sub, is an obvious place for Explorer, says Delgado. But for the foreseeable future, scientists there have their hands full with their own crusty sub.

"It is an interesting parallel story to the Hunley," said Maria Jacobsen, senior archaeologist for the Hunley project. "It furthers our understanding of the evolution of diving technology. But they are two different things. The Explorer is an evolved concept of a dive bell, while the Hunley is a highly maneuverable, hydrodynamic stealth boat. In its case, it is the weapon."

Jacobsen said that the Hunley lab is the ideal place for such a ship, but it will be years before scientists there will have any time or energy to tackle another major project. But if the sub had to sit in holding tanks at the lab, like the cannons from the Alabama, Delgado says that would be better than allowing it to rot off the beach of Isla San Telmo.

"I'd just like to see ol' Uncle Julius's sub saved," Delgado said.

http://www.spiegel.de/img/0,1020,478205,00.jpg

http://www.treasurenet.com/westeast/data/headlines/robots/200503.htm

[Abolith]

To sum it up: German inventor emigrates to America and trys to sell his sub-patent to yankee-military. Yanks are not interested but he manages to get money from company to build it for commercial disposal. French best-seller-author hears story and writes roman everybody knows. German inventor dies because of nescience. Sub is forgotten in Panama. British explorer hears from it but thinks it is a japanese sub or some old boiler. Canadians commission him to look for it. Now it gets restored in former confederate state. p-)

History is always full of great jokes and misses. I could write a lengthy post on how slow the US phone companeis were at adopting Telephones and electromechanic switches, but that's a totally different story.....

but one I would be curious to read myself.....