Turtle

The second one is the continuing ventures of the twin boys in the series.

This time, though, they have to operate the American Turtle submarine.

A lot of people don't know that we actually invented a submarine during the American Revolution, right? Who would think in colonial times when everything is powered by candles that we could invent a submarine, right, that actually worked? And so that was kind of fun to learn about that and then use that as the hook for the second book in the series.

And then the third one, we live over here on the East Coast in New Jersey, West Point's a little over an hour away.

It is now time to press on to the subject at hand.

Last time we discussed submarines from Genesis from David Bushnell's Turtle, which by the way, worked a lot better than I'd realized.

I mean, we discussed it on the channel from the perspective of not having quite worked because it didn't succeed in blowing up a British ship, but from a submarinal perspective, from being able to actually go under the water and so forth, it was a complete success.

Yes,

Another water screw regulated the depth to which the craft could descend.

This was the American Turtle, the first United States submarine.

179 years later, 1954, the United States came up with another first.

This time, however, it was a 3,000-ton, $55 million vessel powered by an atomic reactor.

It was the Nautilus, the world's first atom-powered submarine.

And where the American Turtle was a one-man operation dependent on courage and brawn, the Nautilus is a complicated network of advanced electronics, the operation of which is dependent upon a team of highly trained, skilled Navy men who know their jobs and do them well.

Yes, times have changed, and so has the man.

[door closing] There.

How do you fight the world's greatest navy from inside a hand-cranked wooden shell? During the American Revolution, a Connecticut inventor tried to sink a British warship using an acorn-shaped wooden box operated by a hand crank.

Published on September 3rd, 2026 in Smithsonian Magazine, the story of the Turtle, the world's first combat-ready submarine, is ultimately about a classic military problem.

When a rebellion realizes it can never match an imperial navy ship for ship, how does it fight back? The answer was a crude, desperate experiment in asymmetric warfare.

Written in Smithsonian Magazine.

David Bushnell developed the turtle submersible as a student at Yale University.

The vessel's attack on a British flagship failed, but the trailblazing boat's legacy endures 250 years later.

During the American Revolution, the Turtle made history as the world's first combat-ready submarine.

If all went according to plan, the driver of the acorn-shaped submersible, constructed out of oak and iron hoops, would descend, draw close enough to a warship to attach a bomb to its hull, and then make their escape by ascending to the surface.