There is some dispute over exactly who invented the submarine, with the British, Dutch and Catalans all claiming the honour.
The Ictíneo
Man has always wanted to fly through the air and breathe under water. Images painted in 2000 BC on the temple walls in Thebes show men spear fishing using hollow sticks like snorkels. According to the ‘History of the Peloponnesian War,’ at the siege of Tyre (332BC), Alexander the Great descended into the sea in a giant diving bell.
Leonardo da Vinci in 1515 made drawings of what looks surprisingly like a modern-day submarine and, not long after, in 1578, the English carpenter, William Bourne, built an enclosed wooden vessel that could be submerged and rowed beneath the waves for short distances. Also in England, in 1620, the Dutchman Cornelius Van Drebbel, in the service of James I, improved on Bourne’s design and launched a submersible propelled by a team of rowers in what some historians have called the first submarine.
Catalans disagree. They believe the honour belongs to Narcís Monturiol, who set about building a submarine in which men could breathe under water after watching a diver who had stayed too long cutting coral on the sea bed and rose lifeless to the surface in the bay of Cadaqués, the Spanish fishing village.
Monturiol was the original Renaissance Man born in Figueres in 1819, the son of a cooper. He won scholarships to the best schools, graduated with a degree in law and decided as he walked from college with his certificate that being a lawyer was far from the best way to serve humanity.
He set up a small press that produced journals and pamphlets with iconoclastic notions on equality, fairness and feminism. He believed the legal system that permitted a man to beat his wife needed changing and founded ‘La Madre de Familia,’ a newspaper in which he promised ‘to defend women from the tyranny of men.’
When he launched Spain’s first communist weekly, ‘La Fraternidad,’ the authorities took a closer look at their rebellious scholarship boy.
Call for Equality
The Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was published in 1848. It called for workers to rise up against factory and pit owners and establish a classless society without private ownership, a world where everyone had work and greater equality.
In its wake, a wave of revolutions that became known as the Springtime of the Nations spread across Europe. Workers took to the streets in virtually every capital to demand the right to form trade unions, fair wages, the recognition of political parties and an open democracy.
Monturiol’s articles in ‘Las Fraternidad’ supported the springtime insurrections. When workers massed in Madrid and Barcelona, the police came hammering at his door. They smashed his printing presses and drove him out of the country. After a year in exile in France, Monturiol found a fisherman who smuggled him around the coast back to Spain. He stepped ashore in Cadaqués with his carpet bag and a case of books.
On his morning walks out to the lighthouse at Cala Nans, he became intrigued by the divers. They were Greeks from the island of Simi who had moved to Catalonia and made their home in the village, exiles like himself. He admired their courage swimming down 20 or 30 meters with knives in their teeth and string bags around their waists to harvest the coral and sponges.
That day, when a diver drowned, Monturiol had what he called his eureka moment. He went back to the cottage he was renting with a vision in his mind he had to put down on paper.
Building a Submarine
The pioneering internal combustion engine was created in France by Étienne Lenoir in 1860. Using this technology, Narcís Monturiol designed the Ictíneo I, an air independent, combustion powered submarine which required 16 rowers and was launched in Cadaqués in 1864, according to John Parker’s World Encyclopaedia of Submarines.
In another three years, Monturiol made the break through building the first submarine driven by steam. The 14 metre Ictíneo II, constructed from olive wood and reinforced with copper rings, was designed for a crew of two and could dive to 30 metres. Monturiol created the conditions for breathing underwater with an air-independent propulsion system that released oxygen into the crew’s quarters. With the double-hulled Ictíneo II, he had solved the problems of pressure, buoyancy, stability, diving and ascending. The prodigal son launched the craft before the mayor and his coterie in the harbour of Barcelona in 1867 and was forgiven for being a communist.
Narcís Monturiol’s legacy may have been lost to history, but the technology was revived by the Germans for their U-boats in the Great War. One of these deadly subs left off the coast of Cadaqués the wreck of the British steamship Llaisken of Cardiff – now a popular destination for scuba divers, the dive masters and boat captains the grandsons of the coraleros who came from Simi to reap the coral.
The word Ictíneo combines the Greek words for fish and boat. A model of Ictíneo I stands at the entrance of the Marine Museum in Barcelona. A replica of the Ictíneo II was built in 1992 and is on display in the harbour.
Like Narcís Monturiol, Salvador Dalí was also born in Figueres, in Carrer Monturiol. The painter enjoyed this chance connection and when he gave a lecture in London in 1936 on diving into the depths of the subconscious, he wore an old-fashioned diving suit and almost suffocated when the helmet got stuck. Forty years later, when Dalí built the Teatro Museo in Figueres from the ruins of the municipal theatre bombed in the Spanish Civil War, he placed the same suit in a window above the entrance.