 You understand about the inventor, you have to understand the advances that have been made in submarine technology before him. The first submarine, a lot of people ask, was it humbly? Is it alligator? Was it turtle? No. Actually, it goes back to 1620. A Dutchman named Cornelius van Drebel meets all the criteria for a submarine. He has an ability to move on the X, Y, and Z axes, stays underwater for a while, and he has something mysterious called a chemical liquor to refresh the air. This will come back again and again and be referred to as the bucket and bellows approach. It may be something as simple as tossing water into a bucket of dried lime, which activates or slakes it and attracts the CO2 molecule. It doesn't split it like a modern air scrubber does, but it releases all the other gases you can breathe. This goes much further back than we thought it would be. Supposedly, King James II took a dive in this, too. That we can't prove. By the time of the 18th century, submarines are pretty calm, but every five or six years, someone has a functioning submarine. A lot of them are French at the beginning because they're involved in wars with England. There's also a theory that they wanted to get Napoleon out of exile, stuff like that. I think after a while, they were just bitten by the bug and liked the idea. The Germans have a couple. The U.S. has a couple. And Villeau makes a salvage boat in 1859 right before the beginning of the war. During the rebellion, there's good hard evidence for almost 30 submarines and oblique references here and there to a great many more. We don't talk about them too much up in the north because we won and they're considered illegal. At the very worst or very best, they're considered bad form. This is a period of the Victorian age. If I'm going to attack you, it's only gentlemanly to say on guard. If I'm not going to do that like a sniper, snipers are considered murderers. Well, a submarine is an underwater sniper. I can take out your ship with a several hundred men without giving any warning whatsoever. However, wartime sees both sides making submarines, hammers and tongs. Now, I would love to tell you this is Brutus Villeau. I would love to tell you any of these guys are Brutus Villeau. The truth is, despite almost 20 years of searching, we don't know of any picture of Brutus Villeau. Nor do we know who any of these guys are. So take your pick and that's Brutus if you want. We know a fair amount about his life. He's born in 1794, which is actually a fortunate time to be born, even though his country is involved in the old Napoleonic Wars, because they will end just as he comes of draftable age in France. So he never serves in the French military. His father's a printer and while we expect him to follow in that vein, he's sort of a renaissance man all over the map. We'll go through these pretty quickly here, but he has inventions that will span 20, 30 years and address a wide variety of fields. The important thing for us is in 1832 he designs, builds and demonstrates his first submarine. He may have cut his teeth with a fellow named Castera who actually never built a sub, but was recognized as the biggest French advocate of submarines under the Napoleon. He calls it a fish boat or a bateau poisson. It's got a few unique features because propellers are just now starting to catch on and it's really not sure they're going to really stay the course. He's got folding propellers. Now propeller just means something that pushes something else. The valves in your heart in a medical book of the period are called propellers because they push the blood around. You would call ski poles propellers. So this confused us for a while because there's obviously no prop on there, but even the folding ores are called propellers. He's got watertight gauntlets in there because the idea is you look through a glass hole in the bottom of the boat, look at your salvage, reach out with watertight gauntlets or opera gloves, and tie a rope around the salvage, go back to the surface. They're reasonably watertight. Most interestingly, he has what looks like a double hull ballast tank here. This is a small little boat. There's really no room for ballast tanks, but the double hull thing intrigues us. He goes on to do a whole variety of things. There he makes his one contribution to the world of printing. He has frictionless pump. He's a civil engineer, flotation devices. He works for the French government at one point in time. He is seconded then to the Royal Sugar Refinery in Greece, which seems an odd assignment, which you have to understand the French and British has just helped the Greeks toss the Turks out, and the price the Greeks are having to pay is that the French and British are coming in and taking over industry and the government. So in effect, he's working for France and all the proceeds are going back to France as well. This might be where he actually made his money. He's not only knighted by the French government for setting up the business and fails at attempting to introduce photography degrees, but he discovers Asphodel. Previous to this, sugar is made from beetroot, and there's a fair saccharine content in there. With Asphodel, it's six times the amount, plus this grows wild on the hills of Greece. So it revolutionizes the industry and puts a lot of money in the pockets of the shareholders back in France, and probably Vilaois as well. He's then knighted by the French government. He's now a double knight, and this is when his name legitimately changes to Vilaois. When we began researching, we thought, oh, he must have pulled an Ellis Island thing, where instead of V it, I'd become Von Veit when my ancestors get off the boat. No, he's legitimately a French knight at this point in time. He has all manner of patents here, an optical rangefinder. This is one he tried to push, and you would think it would catch on at the beginning of the Civil War, but the government wouldn't bite for some reason. And finally, his last patent is for a unique wind instrument. Again, all over the map. He's got a head for science and engineering. The episode in the woods of Pennsylvania from 1849 to 50 proves he has no head for business. He's working for a group called the DeRoy family. He is supposed to set up sawmills and coal mines, but he has no head for business whatsoever. This is a total, total failure. It ends up with lawsuits both in France and the United States, and we are not certain how much money or who's it was Vilaois lost. But he runs back to France with his tail between his legs and stays there for a couple of years. In 1856, he moves back to Philadelphia. Now, Philadelphia has a large enclave of French expats. So he never has to learn English and never will. Oddly enough, he marries Eulalie Deroux, who's a French spinster. Notice it's the Deroux family again. We don't really know if they bailed him out or they're forgiving him for spending their money. Doubtful it's true love, a reward, a penalty. It's probably more a deal. You take the spinster, we'll forgive you all the money you lost us because I want her married. We have no idea how that worked. Happily for historians, she speaks flawless English, and more importantly, she has perfect penmanship. Thank goodness, because he has neither. In 1857, there's an accident that changes the course of Vilaois' life. The Central America was $72 million in period money and gold founders off the coast of the Carolinas. We sort of lose track nowadays just how much gold was transiting the oceans and the isthmus of Panama from the gold fields in California. This was not an uncommon amount of money to bring back. They would actually have parades from the docks to the banks in the streets of New York and Philadelphia. They'd bring literally through wagons of gold. The banks said we have to loan more money. We have so much gold in the vaults we can't store anymore. This is how much gold there is out there. This ship would not be found until like the past decade or so, way deeper than anybody could have managed at this point in time, but they don't know that. They think it's going down just a couple hundred feet of water, which is just about the limit of salvage divers and also submarines. There's a coalition made up a lot of the DeRue family and other mostly French lawyers, politicians, gentlemen of the means, if you will, they hire Vilaois to build them a submarine because he has experience. He's recognized as a civil engineer of the first grade in France. His reputation has preceded him despite the fiasco in the woods of Pennsylvania. They used to build a sub. The salvage boat, which is what we'll call this stage of it, is begun in Philadelphia at Bush Hill Ironworks, and we may have our only portrait of Vilaois here, the gentleman towing something in the foreground there, which looks suspiciously like his first submarine. Unfortunately, it's from his back. This is about 1857, 1858. This is our only peak inside the submarine at this time. A reporter's allowed in for about five minutes. Vilaois keeps his cards very close to his vest. For instance, the ballast tanks are not shown here. We know the ballast tanks had pumps to admit water, but they were not rigid. They were actually rubber-coated or latex-coated canvas bags. And to push out ballast, the crew was told, lean against this one. Now, lean against that one. Of course, if they go down too deep and you can't lean hard enough, you all stay down there. So it's primitive. We've got some sort of propulsion here. The men would actually tug on these ropes back and forth, rotate the wheel on the back, which would spin a propeller. We've also got a diver's hatch. We know this worked because he is a bit of a showman. A couple of times, the sub is demonstrated and the crew would be on top, have it towed to where it was going to be demonstrated, waved to the crowd, get in the boat from the top hatch. The boat would disappear and a few minutes later, a couple divers would pop up and wave to the crowd, go back down and be in the boat when it comes up. Now, you'll notice this hatch is open to the entire hull of the submarine, which means he has to pressurize the entire hull to keep the water out. This is a very primitive approach to this that will be remedied with the coming of war. It's demonstrated twice in 1859. This is sort of a super-sized version of it. One thing that's not showing here that we know existed in reality, and Villawa may be the inventor, there are bow planes here. In doing the research for this book, I looked at every picture I could find and read every description I could of submarines before this salvage boat. I think Villawa invents the hydroplane. No sub before has bow planes on it until this boat. Unfortunately, it is never perfected. It never works totally properly. No salvage operation is ever undertaken and is invested for about $300,000. These are different sites along the river where it was built and then demonstrated and finally he ends up in Delanco across the river in New Jersey. Now, in the federal census, you might wonder why the book is called Natural Genius. I actually hate searching for it online because it's like Chuck V at Natural Genius. That's not what I meant at all. He's recorded twice at Marcus Hook in Pennsylvania where Villawa is working at the time. He puts down his correct age. He puts down he's a civil engineer. He lists his wife with her age and everything. But he lives in Philadelphia at a boarding house. It's run by an Irish woman, Mrs. Foy. And I can just hear her voice whenever the census taker says, what's he do? She's not really sure. Well, sure, he's a natural genius, don't you know? Hence the name of the book. And she gives him a few years off his age too. But Villawa never claimed that he was always a civil engineer, so we suspect that's not him answering that question. In 1861, of course, in April, Fort Sumter is fired upon. Villawa decides to donate his boat to his new country to help them win. He is a staunch abolitionist, and this is one way he can make a contribution. On the 17th of May, it is captured in Philadelphia by the suspicious Harbor police. It pops up. The two guys who are actually running it to go get pig-led for ballast, neither one speaks English and they're in an infernal machine, which is our cutes-onny word for meaning weapon from hell at the time. That's what they considered subs. It was also perilously near the Navy Yard, so they were arrested. Of course, the next day the civilians go to the Navy and say, you do know this guy's been demonstrating this boat for like two years now. Maybe you ought to take a look. The Navy does decide to take a look, mostly because the day after, the rebels raised the Merrimack and begin making the Virginia. Now there's an arms race on. There were three solutions to the monster Merrimack, and monster is the term they used at the time in the same way we would, and it's almost always used before the word Merrimack if you read the books. Plan A, of course, is iron clads. We know the monitor was successful, but the Navy wasn't certain that design was going to work. They had Galena and new iron sides on the ways as well. Neither one of those would be ready in time. Monitor barely was. Plan B, oddly enough, was a ram fleet of iron-hulled ships. This was Secretary of the Armies or Secretary of War Stanton's idea, and it was crazy. The Navy wanted nothing to do with it. Lincoln, sadly for Secretary Wells, said, it floats, right? Stanton goes, of course. Good, the Navy will take care of this. Oh, the Navy fought this tooth and nail because this was old school. But it would have worked. If you picture Virginia with the low freeboard, the distance from water to top deck, we think nowadays that might actually have been submerged a little. Ram ships would have worked fine. It might have taken out one or two port and starboard with the broadside, but others would have gotten through. And the idea was to have four or five of these station around Virginia, which took a half hour to come about. It wasn't a bad plan, really. Plan C, the submarine. Now, the Navy wants the boat, but they want it to be finished and proven. The same backers possibly foolishly say, okay, we'll fund the boat and we'll send you receipts and you pay us as we need materials and then pay us when it's all done and we get a bounty when Merrimack is sunk, right? The Navy agrees. July of 1861, a commander Hoff is sent across the river to take a look at the boat along with a couple of other officers, and it does meet their criteria. It can dive repeatedly. It can stay down for a while. It can question the part about without the least fatigue or exertion to the men because it's all manual labor. It can do it as often as they want to. It can actually deploy a diver underwater and get him back and support him always outside with a tube. There's no mention of pumps, but this is almost a necessity for the diver. It can generate an artificial atmosphere by some chemical process that's not specified. Their major concern is speed. This thing can only go about one and a half miles per hour. That will barely stem the current in a stream, but they want a bigger, better boat that will go faster. First mission for what they're now calling the iron fish, or at least one of the backers is calling it, is to destroy the Virginia at Gosport as she's aborning. Now she has an official target. This was probably an impossible mission. Even being dropped off as close as was safely possible under Rebels guns out here, it's a 10-mile journey underwater with bonfires and flares and picket boats watching for you the whole time. Once you attack Gosport Navy Yard and maybe sink Virginia, now they're really watching for you in mad. You've got 20 miles to row back again. I don't know if it would have been physically possible to do, but desperate times. On November 7th, construction actually begins at Nephi and Levy in Philadelphia on the brand new boat. The fate of the salvage boat we know is just left to settle in the mud. Somewhere across the river in Rancocos Creek near Delanco, New Jersey is a pre-Civil War submarine that we have written proof that we just let it settle in the water. This is an archeologist's dream. We've joked for years about hosing it off and looking for the keys under the seat. That would answer so many questions because there's technology on the board there that we have no idea how they made things work. We haven't found it yet. We have a couple sites that we've found magnetometer hits that look like promising sites. Same size, same mass, as the sub. Unfortunately, there are a lot of hitches. For the entire winter, there are delays with the boat. The Navy wanted this done in 40 days and it ends up being months overdue. The workmen, understandably, have never made a sub before. Villawa is very picky. He hates being questioned whenever he says I want this, that, and the other thing. His investors have learned from working with Villawa. They don't just give him a blank check. Every time he wants something, as much as a pipe or a wrench or a pump, it's like what are you going to use it for? Tell me how you're going to use it. Why do you need this model? Why not a cheaper model? It just bugs the devil out of him. One thing to keep in mind, we'll discuss this at the end of the show. The thing that sticks in his craw the most is he wants a certain quantity of silver. It is known at this time that if you take very thin little plates of silver and use them as one end of an electrical connection it will make a spark. All scientists know how to do this. Children in school know how to do this. It takes, I think, a period of money worth of silver plates to do this. Villawa wants about $2,000 worth of silver, specifically in 12 inch sheets and eighth of an inch thick, and he won't say why. Some researchers at work at least said, oh, he's trying to steal from the Navy. There were safeguards in place. He never got his silver. He had to justify it. At one point, his contractor who is the gateway for buying him anything has the stupid idea of sending him a quote from a child's high school textbook saying, here's all the silver you need and Villawa just flips out because you're questioning me and I'm not going to tell you because you can't understand what I'm doing. So keep that thought in mind. I have an idea of what he might have been doing. The sub is months overdue and what's more, by February its target is now floating off Gosport Navy. This is an ideal situation for the submarine. The water, there's only 30 feet deep. It's just perfect to attack this boat. But the sub is far, far from ready. On the 7th of March, obviously it goes on what the crew thinks. The shakedown crews, they're actually going into combat and it strikes the next day and Monitor Happley gets here in time. By April, Villawa has had enough of their ongoing issues about his commission as a Navy officer. This isn't his ego at work here. If he's captured as a civilian he can be hung as a pirate. So yes, I'm going to go into combat by the way with a crew that speaks all French. Our first combat mission would have been all in French. He wants a commission. There's a delay in that. There's confusion over pay for his crew and everything, not so much how much how they get paid and he doesn't understand what's going on. He's infuriated that the contractor continues to question him and he's insisting upon pointless protocols. He won't talk to anyone lower than basically the Secretary of the Navy. And it's like, I have a water run, dude. I'm paraphrasing here. We don't know if he's confused, if he's persecuted, if he's aging. It's hard to say. His men are very loyal to him. They do say at one point though in a letter that survived that we really would like someone younger and more dynamic. They treat him sort of like their favorite uncle or a grandfather. They don't want to hurt his feelings. This is his baby, the culmination of all his experiments over the years. But God, they want somebody with a little more, you know, gung-ho. Finally, at the beginning of May, the submarine is launched in the river. This is a painting by Jim Chrisley of one of the backers, Hearst, who insisted after all this pain of riding into the water. So it goes into the river on May 1st. And again, I already explained why a propeller. It is rowed by a crew of 18 men down, nine on each side, like a bunch of vikings. Unlike the fish boat, these oars are a little unique. They're all mechanical now and solid iron, but they will deploy on the power stroke and fold on the return stroke. Unfortunately, of course, there's resistance on the return stroke too, so the speed isn't really not more than three or four knots. But that's why it's called a propeller because those propel it along. This is a quick schematic of it with Sailor in there for scale. It is claustrophobic as all get out. There are 18 men rowing. There's one captain and one possibly two divers. We now have an airlock or an air chamber up front here with a bulkhead that can be sealed. So now we only have to pressurize that one chamber in the bow instead of the entire boat. And we know that's what they did because one of the men who years later went after an invalid pension for ruptured eardrums says, my eardrums ruptured when the valves around the door broke one day and the pressure just, you know, popped my eardrums. The boat was leaky. It was, guys were laying claim for rheumatism and sore joints and everything, especially because you had to manually load all the lead ballast. It had to be handed down the hatch and passed back like this from man to man because each seat you would take the top off and put the lead ballast in there. This is how you trim the boat, Portra Starboard. If two of us get on and I ate more over the weekend than the guy next to me some of the ballast under my seat has to go to him. So it has to get passed down and then pass side to side. Those seats are sitting on the liquid ballast tanks. There are four of those that we know of and we also know how they were filled. It's intricate and it took probably about two weeks with an Excel spreadsheet to figure out how you could do this safely. There is a procedure for loading and lead and ballast and crew that will make this a successful boat. It's just incredibly intricate and only a veteran crew could do it reasonably safely. On the 11th, its target is scuttled. Now we have a submarine with no target involved anymore. It has no mission. So the Navy is, people say, well the Navy didn't really accept the boat. It's the middle of the Civil War. The Navy is never going to call this USS. There's no christening ceremony. At this point it still has a civilian crew, but the Navy wants the submarine. And here's an opportunity. Now it is still a civilian owned boat. At the end of the seven days battles, the Navy is tasked with a mission it does not want by President Lincoln. Deploying forces from Fortress Monroe and being towed all the way up near City Point right after the end of Malvern Hill which is the last of the seven days battles. Its target is the obstruction of the Drewries Bluff. This is the cork in the bottle of the James River. The Navy's tried taking this on before but been stopped by the obstructions and the guns from the fort on the top of the hill, Drewries Bluff, just can't be hit by the Navy. Our guns are made to fire at enemy ships, not up over the hills. We can't get past. The alternative is a bridge at Swiflund Creek. This is critical simply because the railroad that supplies Richmond goes through Petersburg and crosses both Athmetics Creek and Swiflund Creek over two bridges. The Navy is told to drop that in the water. It's important enough that Commander John Rogers doesn't like it but he's given the entire James River squadron. He has given 11 of the 12 ships plus the submarine. He says I don't think this is going to work but when Abe Lincoln says do it he's going to do it. He has a new commander because DeVillawa has skipped town. This is Sam Eakins. Sam as a first submarine commander in the Navy is probably the most qualified person on the planet. Considering we have no training for submarine commanders at this point in time. In the Mexican war he was stationed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where he learned to deal with explosives. He's an ordinance officer. His family business is electroplating. Now he can use sparks with gunpowder which is a dangerous combination. What's more he's an expert salvage diver. He worked for John Gowan over in Sevastopol bringing up the Russian Black Sea fleet of about 80 ships in the mid 1850s. This is perfect. He can make things go boom with sparks underwater. It's exactly what we want in a submarine commander. However he has mere weeks to recruit and train a crew of totally green sailors. He just goes to one of the receiving ships in Philadelphia and takes volunteers. Remember I said how you can only make this boat function with a trained crew. Eakins doesn't know even how to train them. It's a ridiculous request for him but we want the river raid done. It is a complete failure. The sub is deemed too valuable. Roger takes one look at it and says to Eakins when he gets down and he goes how how tall is the sub from the keel to the domed hatch. Six feet. Did the guys in Washington not realize that the little blue line under the bridge is four feet deep and when they capture it with a net they'll figure it out and come against my fleet which is all wood. So it doesn't even get in a combat zone. It just gets hauled back. The squadron from the James River they get hung up on Appomatto's Creek for two solid days. If Lee had sent just one battery of artillery down it would have changed the course of the war. He's too focused on McClellan at Malvern Hill. His only concern is he keeps on asking are they landing troops? Are they landing troops? They're not but the ships are bottled up grounded for two solid days till they finally get out of there. The boat at this time does acquire its nickname the name we know it by alligator. A reporter supposedly sees this green thing coming through the water doing this. He says God it looks like an alligator. Officially it was always the submarine propeller if you look in the Navy history books but everyone else calls it alligator. Finally in August they get around to testing the boat after it's been deployed once. Tom Selfridge is a logical choice but he's death on underwater warfare. For one thing he's he was stationed aboard Cumberland when she was sunk by the Merrimack and he has even less training in submarines than he does and he manages to almost drown the crew one day because again they don't know how the boat works and there's a great little terrifying drawing of with stick figures of the boat on its fanny like this off the Washington Navy Yard with like 18 little figures down there like this. According to the story they climbed their way back up the rowing benches to rebalance the boat pumped her out and surfaced and no one died. I'm sorry Selfridge and the entire crew requested surface duty and were sent west. His report though is incredibly damning. The Navy doesn't want the submarine. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to. It doesn't go fast. They can't figure out how to make the thing work because villa law is nowhere to be found. The contractors are desperate for some kind of payback and they agree to make whatever changes the Navy sees fit to force on them and they'll pay for it just because they're under budget right now they spend about 8,000 to 14,000 the Navy is allocated and they just want to get paid back. The way to refit 62 to 63 is under Sam Eakins he's back on the job at this point in time and speed is the big issue plus with 18 men in there you're using up a lot of oxygen you don't need to they pull out the oars and put in a more standard propeller this has an axle that runs on the center of the sub now nine guys can sit kitty corner from each other turn the same axle and turn the prop. This halves the amount of CO2 that's being spewed out and halves the amount of oxygen being breathed so your dive time now goes from about two hours to four plus which is incredible for a Civil War submarine one little side note here at this point in time there is the distinct possibility that Abe Lincoln scooped Teddy Roosevelt in being the first U.S. President to set foot aboard a U.S. sub in Lincoln's spare time which there wasn't much if you look at his diaries and his itinerary most times he had free time he would go down and visit his buddy Dolgren Admiral Dolgren at the Washington Navy Yard they would look at new stuff they would sit and smoke cigars and drink brandy they would fish and Lincoln just loved to see new technology had to try everything there is no way he could do more than stick his head down the hatch of alligator the chance of him touching are very very good finally in April of 63 alligator has a mission that's Taylor made and I should point out when we look at subs like Hunley and then subs like alligator there are two different kinds of sub there and I use modern technology Confederate submarines are made as attack submarines they want to break the blockade by sinking ships we don't care that much about Confederate ships we have a massive surface fleet what we want to do is tear out the obstructions that are keeping out our surface fleet so most union boats northern boats come from a long tradition of salvage well this is perfect because what we want to do is get down there tear out the bases of obstructions and the torpedoes which are suspended from the bottom there are no number of these blocking the channel in and Admiral DuPont who is aware of alligator he was in charge of the Navy Yard when she first appeared knows that she's available and he wants to use her unfortunately the one thing that bill wall had always told the Navy and everyone else was this is meant for rivers and harbors she's not meant for the open ocean don't tow her on the open sea the Navy tows on the open sea and they get hit with the storm that it's out of season but the description is like a hurricane couple guys are washed overboard he can smash so hard against the railing in the mass he's missing molars and have nerves damaged in his face the rest of his life he busts up a couple organs inside he's pretty much debilitated after this cruise it goes down somewhere in the graveyard of the Atlantic we're not really sure where because they were just happy on board the tow ship to still be on the right side of the water they limped back two days later after preparing the ship to report the loss we don't know if it floated around it went to the bottom what shape it is in at all Jim Chrisley who started all this research has done all these drawings of retired Submariner and was funded the first symposium we had in 2002 in all serious since he gets up there to Admiral Bowen who was monitoring the project he said so we're not sure where the sub went after it was cut loose no no Jim or not well I want to volunteer to do some research what's that Jim could have drifted right yeah if the Navy will pay for it I'll check all the beaches in the Caribbean that's about as far as that went the backers never get paid the Navy never really accepts the boat now she's lost and they've never found any evidence that they need their money back whatsoever they can't find Villawa he disappears and will eventually die in 1875 a poppered old man our interest in submarines goes away after this the only there's one here that's close to finish a fairly modern looking sub which is to Ligo was being built in Cambridge, Massachusetts it was about two thirds of the way done it's actually the first sub to use a periscope periscopes were known at the time that they're used by riverine surface ships so commanders and officers can check for snipers they can't stop otherwise you stay down below where it's safe that we pull the plug on that the only one that survives intact is the intelligent whale which oddly enough is in secret New Jersey at a New Jersey National Guard Army base but to give you an idea of what a dope slap all this research has been not just for me but for all the researchers here's an attack submarine everything inside is intact but there's no owner's manual I've read an excellent dissertation by a fellow who wrote it years ago and it's yay thick all different systems and we still know exactly how it works at one point one of the animals on the project called me up and said well we want to figure out how it works what are we going to do? well our idea is we're going to take it to test facilities we're going to put on rebreathers and we're going to flood it and take it down and then when we stay there we figure out how to get it up I said cool then I told my wife all the guys told their wives so it's still in secret New Jersey but it made sense to me we can't figure out how to get the dang thing to work and it's intact there are two enduring mysteries around alligator the first one can only be proven by finding the boat and that's the way it finally looked Eacons makes reference to a second mode of attack and it's interesting because his second mode of attack is pretty much drawn by an unknown Navy officer on the blockade off mobile in 1865 this has been done before again we started researching this 15 years ago we thought all this is all unique stuff then we start realizing other countries have been doing the same sort of thing when you look at this drawing it's not a man exiting the sub for one if you exit the top hatch you flood the sub you notice it's a dashed line the artist is somehow delineating the suit but showing you it's part of the sub also every kid since 1828 when these came out knows how to draw a deep sea diver it always has a separate helmet it's not part of the suit this is cloth this is metal, brass or something like that what's with the funny position for the arms to me he's showing the arms are flexible he's got a chamber up here for a torpedo with insulated wire which is perfect which is exactly what I think Eacons is trying to hear this is my reconstruction of how alligator might have looked in the end, again we can't tell the reason why I theorize this is Eacons was asked by an admiral who was not in the need to know loop how were you going to make the attack and Eacons basically says I'm not leaving the boat I don't want somebody else doing it because he's sitting there doing this hoping the diver actually sinks the enemy ship but it's his career on the line then he says to the animal you don't need to know so the animal tossed him out of the navy for two weeks until his civilian friends say I'm not, you know I don't have to keep my mouth shut like Eacons does let me explain what he wants to do and this is pretty much what he describes as the second mode of attack this makes it a much more lethal weapon because instead of parking it on the bottom and deploying a diver who has to get a mine if it floats up to the target now he can come up under that chain in Charleston he's in direct communication with his crew like he's inside a tank he can say I see it 15 feet ahead of us we have to come up a little drop a couple pounds of ballast go a little faster back up a little bit hook a grappling hook on and start backing off to pay out the electric wire it's a much more lethal weapon if this is the way the thing looks this is a lot more intriguing I put this in the book simply because I could not figure out why Villawaugh was willing to be tossed off his own project remember I mentioned the silver plates for making a spark and how much Villawaugh wanted $2,000 worth of fixed silver plates and a dozen or sixteen of things I went to a couple of science professors at a local college up in Massachusetts and sort of said what else can you do with this stuff and they thought about it for a while did a little research and they said you know, at a primitive level this could be used to do what NASA does on the space station which is generate air there's no way Villawaugh has enough silver or energy to feed the whole crew the oxygen it will need but at a very primitive level is this what he was trying to do remember we mentioned the chemical liquor there I refer to it as bucket and bellows we thought Villawaugh was the first one to do this basically just take down a bucket of lime spritz water on it, it sucks up the CO2 turns out farmers if not von Drebbel knew how to do this back in the early 1800s almanac entries if you've dug a well you need to make deeper you don't want to just jump down there because it could be filled with CO2 so you lower a bucket with lime in it and when it hits the bottom you sprinkle water down that sucks up the CO2 you bring it up and lower a candle in a bucket if it gutters out there's more CO2 you do this until the candle stays lit this is what we think von Drebbel was doing and everyone else since then was taking this bucket and bellows approach they also had compressed air at this point in time and we know Villawaugh had some aboard his fish boat the bucket and bellows approach this gets to be so common place they don't delineate it it's like go forward 200 years from now and find a description from today about how to tie your shoes everyone does it, everyone knows no one's going to detail it no one talks about this sort of thing you just get oblique references here's an entire compressed air chamber pay air and submarine august the entire stern of the thing is full of air plus he has a bucket and bellows approach he also has the luxury of not having to go anywhere his job of clearing shareboard harbor of rocks allows him to anchor the boat a couple feet off the ground open the hatch because the air pressure keeps the water out the flowing current will actually cleanse the air when it's still got stale they would spritz lime on water and freshen the air up Villawaugh may have had or tempted an air generator this isn't as far fetched as it sounds although his approach is unique because a few years later ectinio is a submarine that was theorized and built and demonstrated successfully by a fellow named Narcisse Montreal from Barcelona Spain he had a chemical reaction engine that provided enough heat to actually boil water to make steam and the byproduct the waste product of the chemical reaction was oxygen at one point he goes to do a duration dive and the crowd gathers to watch him you know and they don't know if he's going to come back up or be hauled up how long is he going to be down there and he's down there for hours the day gets hot, the crowd gets thinner finally towards evening there's one reporter there he threw him hell or high water and he sees bubbles and he sees ectinio's hatch and the hatch breaks the surface and they open it up and there's Narcisse and he looks down and he goes are you okay? Narcisse goes see why'd you come up? we were bored as long as he has chemicals which unfortunately were terribly expensive his engine works and he's making oxygen so these guys are already thinking if I can't replenish it, if I can't bring enough with me can I make more while I'm down there so it seems terribly advanced but it's not by their standards judging by the number of people who have already started asking questions before this began we're going to open it up for Q&A now so thank you