The successful use in the Russian-Japanese war (as is supposed, for no official statement has come from the Japanese officials) of submarine boats has obscured the historic fact that one hundred and thirty years ago the first attempt of the kind was made in the harbor of New York. It is a fact that is not generally known, but which is of official record--that the first serious attempt in this line was the work of a Yale undergraduate. It was while a freshman at Yale, in the year 1771, that David Bushnell, an ingenious Connecticut boy, conceived the idea of a submarine vessel as a desirable means of defensive warfare. He kept at the problem throughout the four years of his college course, and by the time of his graduation, in 1775, had made several successful trial trips with his _American Turtle_, as his peculiar contrivance was called. The plans of this vessel were carefully examined a few years ago by Commander F. W. Barber, U. S. N., whose conclusion was that “it seems to have been the most perfect thing of its kind that has ever been constructed, either before or since the time of Bushnell.” Bushnell invented not only the first submarine boat of which there is any intelligent record, but the first torpedo as well. He discovered the principle of modern torpedo-mining--that is, the utilization of the pressure of the water to develop the desirable intensity of action in an explosion near the vessel to be destroyed. Furthermore, he was the first man to give the torpedo its modern name. All these triumphs he accomplished while an undergraduate student at Yale. He gathered an assemblage of what he called “the first personages in Connecticut” to prove to them that this strange thing could be done. He first exploded two ounces of powder four feet under water, and later blew up a hogshead filled with stones, a wooden bottle, and a two-inch oak plank, greatly to the astonishment of his learned associates. After this preliminary display of what he could do, young Bushnell’s theories were held in greater respect throughout the rest of his college course. He had one great idea, however, and this was the possibility of constructing a boat that could sail under the enemy’s ship, attach to it a magazine with a sufficient charge of powder to destroy the vessel and all its men--the operator, meanwhile, getting safely away. He kept hard at work throughout his four undergraduate years, and by the time he was graduated had constructed such a machine and experimented with the most encouraging success.