Rotterdam ship
 The Rotterdam ship
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The Rotterdammer Schiff (short for Rotterdammer Schiff, which will destroy the English under water ) or fighting submersible was the first submersible in history designed for military use. It was constructed in 1653 by the French De Son in Rotterdam , Holland .
Seen from the side, the boat had a roughly diamond-shaped cross - section. The center was a cubic box with paddle wheels mounted on the sides. In the box, the pretensioned spring was similar to the spring mechanism of a clock to turn the paddle wheel. A pyramidal hull was attached to the front and rear of the box. A massive wooden beam with iron fittings at the ends was attached along the entire length of the ship's hull. This was supposed to serve as a ram and to leak and sink enemy ships below the waterline. The boat had to reach a sufficient speed for this.
The inventor proclaimed that the boat could sink hundreds of ships in one day and go from Rotterdam to London and back in one day. He declared that the ship was invulnerable, impregnable and only he knew how to steer it. He even announced that he would make the route from Rotterdam to East India in six weeks .
The boat was a complete faulty design and was never used in practice because it could not move. The drive mechanism was ineffective in practical use, although the tests in the dock out of the water were probably positive. The inventor of the boat obviously did not understand the principle of flow resistance.
The boat was 22 m long, 3.6 m high and 2.4 m wide and had a crew of 4. It was suspected that the ship was a submarine, although the descriptions do not give any information about the diving skills. Only Henry Foulis mentions that the submerged Rotterdamm ship kills the English. Cyril Field, Lieutenant Colonel of the Royal Navy Light Infantry , suspected that it was not a submarine, but a low- freeboard ram ship similar to the ships HMS Polyphemus and USS Katahdin .
literature
- Jeffrey Tall, Submarines and Deep Sea Vehicles , Kaiser Verlag, ISBN 3-7043-9016-X
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Eberhard Werner Happel : EG Happelii Greatest Memories of the World or so-called Relationes curiosae , Part 4, Hamburg 1689, p. 742 ( online )
- ^ Henry Foulis: The history of the wicked plots and conspiracies of our pretended saints , London 1662, p. 141 ( online )
- ↑ Cyril Field: The Story Of The Submarine , Philadelphia 1908, pp. 34-37 ( online )