The above references are not a complete résumé of the early development of the underlying principles of the art of submarine navigation. They are nothing more than a brief recital of the salient and outstanding features that mark the path of progress like milestones along a road. With these and other similar impracticable conceptions, the art of submarine construction was found by an American, David Bushnell, born at Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1742, and graduated from Yale in 1775. In the war with Great Britain, which broke out shortly after his graduation, Bushnell conceived the idea of attacking the enemy’s ships under water and there is no doubt that he constructed a boat embodying among other novel devices a screw propeller. His boat, a small affair carrying but a single operator, was scarcely a submarine as it was not intended to plunge, but to float just “awash” or almost submerged. Like Rumsey and Fitch, Bushnell went abroad and, as Fulton did later, opened negotiations with the French Government. Delpeuch says, “Then (1797) there appeared an engineer who offered to the Directory a means quite as terrible as it was invisible to force the British to lift their blockade, and not only did this man undertake to drive the enemy from our shores, but he even proposed to carry the war to the shores and ports of Great Britain, heretofore inviolable.” Fulton undoubtedly became acquainted with Bushnell during the time they were both in France engaged in similar pursuits. But the failure to accomplish results or to get his ideas adopted by others disappointed Bushnell so keenly that he returned to his native country, went to Georgia, adopted the name of Bush, and began the practice of medicine. He died in 1826, at the age of 84, when his will disclosed his identity. CHAPTER III FULTON’S FIRST SUBMARINE Fulton begins work on a submarine (1797). Nautilus launched at Rouen (1800). Havre experiments. Fulton aided by Monge and Laplace. Received in audience by Napoleon Bonaparte. Hopes and disappointments. The previous chapter shows that not only was the principle of a submarine boat not novel when Fulton began his work on it, but that according to the record a competitor was actually in France urging upon the French Government the adoption of a design that, unlike the fantastic conceptions of Bourne and Drebbel, was capable of being moved by an invisible power and of making an attack beneath the surface. But if Fulton lacked initial originality he achieved practical success in his subsequent labors by greatly improving the plans of his predecessors, as he later did in the case of the steamboat.