How The Submarines Of The Civil War Were Made – SlashGear

While both sides were working on the development of submersibles, it was the Confederacy that turned them into practical weapons of war in an effort to combat the Union blockade of Confederate ports. Before inventor Horace Lawson Hunley designed the vessel that bore his name, he a demonstrator dubbed The Pioneer, in 1861. That same year, the U.S. Navy commissioned its first submarine, a 275-ton green-painted beast that became known as the Alligator.

The H.L. Hunley and the Alligator were constructed from iron and wood, and both were human powered. Of the Hunley’s eight-man crew, seven powered its single propeller by hand, while the Alligator was originally powered by 16 hand-rowed oars before getting upgraded to a hand-cranked propeller. Both submarines could manage a speed of only around four knots (about 4.5 mph). Still, by the standards of the time, they were highly advanced vessels that introduced many features that modern-day submariners would recognize, including ballast tanks and movable “hydroplanes” for directional control.

The weapons that they carried, however, were very different. The “spar torpedoes” Confederate submersibles used had little in common with the torpedoes we know today. Technically, they were contact mines with barbed points attached to a long boom extending from the front of the vessels. The submarine attacked by ramming its target, hopefully embedding the barbed mine in its hull. The attacker would then hopefully back away, detaching the mine and unspooling a trigger cable that detonated the device automatically from a safe distance.