Bushnell was interested in the problem of underwater explosions: after much study, he managed to create the first ever underwater time bomb, packing gunpowder into a waterproof keg and creating a clock-based trigger mechanism. The Turtle was the brainchild of David Bushnell, who began work on it in the early 1770s, when he was a student at Yale College. A model of the Turtle, at the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco. Built by Americans during the Revolutionary War, it never had a successful mission, despite all of the out-of-the-shell thinking it displayed. When Lee tried to blow up the Eagle, he was piloting the Turtle, the world’s first combat submarine. His mode of transportation-made of wood, covered in tar, and shaped (as Lee put it) “like a round clam, but longer”-was completely unprecedented. About an hour later, it exploded, and everyone on both sides watched as it sent a massive jet of water up into the air.

When he saw that British soldiers were following him, he dropped the bomb into the water, frightening them away. Fearful of being spotted, he hightailed it out of there. The ship’s side was metal, not wood, and the explosive wouldn’t screw in. The task required nerves of steel: “When I rowed under the stern of the ship,” he later wrote, “ could see the men on deck, & hear them talk.” His goal was to fix three time-delayed explosives to its side. The HMS Eagle, a 64-gun British warship moored in New York Harbor, was Lee’s target. Abbot/Library of CongressĮarly on the morning of September 7, 1776, an American soldier named Ezra Lee quietly approached the enemy.

First submarine