You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [41]
The Hunley would be the perfect new Confederate terror weapon with which they could reclaim control of their harbor…but unfortunately this technological marvel of military malevolence never made it back to port.
Its first mission was also its last.
The problem was that in the haste to take action against the Union forces, a few design flaws were overlooked.
First, there was its weight problem. The ship itself was already heavy, and the addition of a few gallons of seawater from a precipitate leak could very well upset its already tenuous buoyancy and send it on a one-way trip to the ocean floor.
Second, it had a precarious trim and was negatively affected by the slightest changes in weight or movement on board, thus requiring the crew to remain stationary at all times, or risk tipping its delicate and weighted equilibrium to yet another possible one-way trip to the ocean floor.
Third, though the escape hatches worked fine on shore, the weight of the water above, once the submarine had been submerged, made them fairly immobile, affording no real escape and yet again acting as a portal to that classic one-way trip to the ocean floor.
Finally, there was a problem with the mounted spar torpedo that had been suggested by Beauregard. It failed to disengage from the sub once it had made contact with its target (the hull of the Housatonic), thus ensuring the destruction of not just its intended prey but the Hunley as well.
As they say in medical school, the operation was a success but the patient died, and so did a third complete crew. As the result of a few design flaws, the entire concept of the submarine was shelved for a few more decades before it would once again surface as an instrument of naval military glory.
You’re Building What, Where?
Sometimes it is not yet the right time for a good idea….
FERDINAND DE LESSEPS AND FRANCE
PANAMA, 1881
Jody Lynn Nye
Few feats of engineering are as impressive as the Panama Canal. Completed in 1914 by an army of American laborers, it made possible easy and swift passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
It had taken four hundred years for such a thing to become possible. The New World, opened to European exploitation by Spain in 1492 by Christopher Columbus, was a source of gold, new food, spices, goods and, above all, vast lands for the expansionist dreams of the post-Renaissance Old World. Columbus’s original plan was to find a means of shortening the trip between Asia and Europe, a transit that at the time was possible only by an arduous overland journey, or by sailing all the way around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. The explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa mapped the Pacific coast of Panama in 1513, proving to his Spanish masters how narrow that part of the continent was. At the time all goods from the west had to be transported by mule along a slender road from Peru and Colombia to ships waiting on the eastern edge. A water-filled shortcut through that land would shave 12,000 miles off any sea journey from Europe to the west coast of the Americas or to Asia. In 1524, it was proposed to King Charles V of Spain that a canal across Panama would accomplish that goal.
Plans were drawn up for a canal as early as 1529, and a route was chosen within five years, but growing unrest in Europe stopped the plans from being carried out at that time. Though the idea was occasionally revived by philosophers and great thinkers, it was almost three more centuries before any practical interest was shown in digging a canal through Central America. Some proposals were floated during the early half of the nineteenth century, but what finally brought attention back to easy access to the Pacific coast from Europe was the discovery of gold in California in 1848. Prospectors took ships to Panama, traversed the by-now well-worn road across Panama, and sailed from the west coast north to their goal. Every treasure seeker was now motivated to find a shorter way, and a canal was the obvious answer.
It is no longer widely remembered that there