Speaker 1: With technology with tech Stuff from storks dot com. Hey there, everybody,
Speaker 1: and welcome to Tech Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer here at how Stuff Works. And
Speaker 1: joining me today is Mr Scott. Benjamin Scott, welcome back
Speaker 1: to the show. Thank you very much. Always a pleasure
Speaker 1: to be here. And Scott, I always like to ask
Speaker 1: you in so that whenever I'm doing a show that
Speaker 1: has to do with like vehicles, because of course everyone
Speaker 1: knows you as like the the incredibly insightful wise expert
Speaker 1: in all things vehicular, or at least you've got enough
Speaker 1: of a basis to get the rest of us all
Speaker 1: buzzing because our heads are just totally stuffed with nonsense.
Speaker 1: You know what, you do it better than anyone else
Speaker 1: I know. So I'm I had to have you on
Speaker 1: the show. Thank you. I promise I am not going
Speaker 1: to break your heart in this episode. I know it's
Speaker 1: a change. I was just talking about that with Ramseyr, producer.
Speaker 1: That's I'm waiting for that gotcha moment. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: doing that this time. I People who have been listening
Speaker 1: to Tech Stuff you know that in past episodes I
Speaker 1: have found ways to have little moments where I I
Speaker 1: can actually sit across the table and watch Scott's heartbreak
Speaker 1: right in front of my eyes. It's all in good fun.
Speaker 1: And you know what I was, I was waiting for it,
Speaker 1: but I figured, you know, like, well, what's he really
Speaker 1: going to break my heart about? With this topic. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of I would say, I'm I'm not indifferent
Speaker 1: to this, but um, I really don't have a whole
Speaker 1: lot of personal experience with with this type of vehicle.
Speaker 1: I'd say that this, this, this whole world is a
Speaker 1: little outside of our tax bracket. Yeah, I would say
Speaker 1: far outside of our text. We're talking about personal submarines
Speaker 1: today now before we jump into the world of personal submarines,
Speaker 1: which is pretty fascinating and also head scratching. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about not just stuff that you could,
Speaker 1: in theory go out and buy if you had let's
Speaker 1: call it a metric crap ton of money, but also
Speaker 1: some stuff that, as far as we can tell, has
Speaker 1: yet to actually exist in any real form. Right. I
Speaker 1: actually mentioned on Twitter earlier today. The day we're recording
Speaker 1: this is on on January nine, two thousand and eighteen,
Speaker 1: and I had mentioned that one of the things that's
Speaker 1: perplexing and frustrating covering this kind of technology is that
Speaker 1: when you start covering tech at a certain luxury level,
Speaker 1: you frequently will encounter examples where you see lots of
Speaker 1: concept art, but you don't see any evidence of anyone
Speaker 1: actually making anything. Yeah, and we've got a good example
Speaker 1: of that that we're gonna share with you today. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So before we go into that, I wanted to give
Speaker 1: you guys a bit of the history of the development
Speaker 1: of the submarine, because it's a fascinating one and it's
Speaker 1: centuries old, and I mostly wanted to do this so
Speaker 1: that Scott, you and I can have a little discussions
Speaker 1: about this too. I can tell you some facts. If
Speaker 1: you have any questions or anything that I happen to
Speaker 1: know the answer to, we can chat about that. But
Speaker 1: just also just hearing about the ingenuity and in some cases,
Speaker 1: uh uh, insanity of the people who decided to go
Speaker 1: and try and make stuff that would go under water
Speaker 1: and let them live their definite insanity. I don't know
Speaker 1: a whole lot about the history of submarines, I'll have
Speaker 1: to admit. Yeah, so you're gonna be teaching me some
Speaker 1: new things, and I'm sure I'll have some questions along
Speaker 1: the way. Sure, So where would you like to start, Well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna start in the sixteenth century. Yeah, this would
Speaker 1: be around the time that Shakespeare is writing stuff. Actually
Speaker 1: this is technically before, because we're gonna go all the
Speaker 1: way back to fifteen seventy eight when William Bourne, who
Speaker 1: was an English innkeeper in a little bit of an
Speaker 1: eccentric dreamer, decided to put some of his ideas together
Speaker 1: in book format. He published a book titled Inventions and
Speaker 1: Devices and include all sorts of ideas, including a boat
Speaker 1: that he imagined that would be able to go under
Speaker 1: the water, thus a submarine. Now he knew, as did
Speaker 1: plenty of people before him, that solid matter will displace
Speaker 1: a volume of water equal to that solid objects weight,
Speaker 1: right you, it's something in a body of water. It's
Speaker 1: going to displace the water by a volume that's equal
Speaker 1: to the weight of the object. Everyone had known that
Speaker 1: for millennia, but born maybe millennia is exaggerating, but for
Speaker 1: hundreds of years. Borne went further. He said, boats float
Speaker 1: because of that property, and if the boat were to
Speaker 1: take on water, it would technically be displacing less water
Speaker 1: than what it weighed, because it's actually bringing water into
Speaker 1: the form of the boat itself, and that's what would
Speaker 1: cause a boat to sink. So boats sink because they
Speaker 1: end up displacing less water than what they weigh and
Speaker 1: then because of that ratio, they plummet to the bottom
Speaker 1: of the ocean or rivers or lakes. Is that you're
Speaker 1: in the boat. Yeah, that turns out that of sailors
Speaker 1: hate it when this happens. They're not big fans of it.
Speaker 1: But he said, if you could control this in some
Speaker 1: way and keep the water separate from you know, the
Speaker 1: people in the boat, then you could possibly go under
Speaker 1: the water, and that there could be all sorts of
Speaker 1: potential applications for that, particularly as would turn out to
Speaker 1: be the case, military applications. And so he came up
Speaker 1: with this idea, uh that he didn't he never built
Speaker 1: as far as we know, but he came up with
Speaker 1: an idea that he proposed could work, which involved having
Speaker 1: a a boat made out of wood that is completely covered. Right,
Speaker 1: you then cover the wood with special treated leather to
Speaker 1: waterproof the boat so it's water tights and water is
Speaker 1: not gonna come in. Fantastic technology at the time. Yes,
Speaker 1: And the leather itself would be attached to the boat
Speaker 1: with a device where you could loosen the leather or
Speaker 1: tighten it against the boat and thus allow water to
Speaker 1: seep in between the leather and the exterior of the boat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you can start to displace less water. You're taking
Speaker 1: water on almost this ballast, liked, Yes, exactly, And then
Speaker 1: that would allow you to sink under the water and
Speaker 1: then you would be able to tighten it again to
Speaker 1: expel water and regain buoyancy come back up. Uh. He
Speaker 1: said that this he thought would probably work pretty well.
Speaker 1: He even thought about air because he said, well, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be an issue. He said, what would the
Speaker 1: boat would also have a mast in the center that
Speaker 1: would extend up and go through the surface of the
Speaker 1: water at the top, so you would have sort of
Speaker 1: like a snorkele poking out all the time. You would
Speaker 1: never submerge to the point where the mast itself would
Speaker 1: go under the surface of the water. So it's hollow,
Speaker 1: and it's got a whole board in the middle. And
Speaker 1: he actually wrote a very helpful sentence to explain his rationality.
Speaker 1: Said for the whole that goeth through. The mask must
Speaker 1: give you air, as men cannot live without it. True
Speaker 1: words were never spoken, so Borne was really smart, I
Speaker 1: guess now. Sometime later there was a drawing that surface
Speaker 1: that some would ascribe to his his actual description, but
Speaker 1: they may have also just been drawn by someone else
Speaker 1: with a similar idea. Uh, this one is one if
Speaker 1: you ever see it. It looks like a boat that
Speaker 1: has two segments on the side that are on screws,
Speaker 1: and if you turn the screws one way, it pulls
Speaker 1: them inward to the boat, allowing water to come into
Speaker 1: certain chambers that are sealed off from the rest of
Speaker 1: the boat. And if you turn the screws the other way,
Speaker 1: it pushes the panels back to be flushed with the boat.
Speaker 1: But according to all the resources I was looking at,
Speaker 1: they said that that was a different enough design from
Speaker 1: what Born had been describing in his book that it's
Speaker 1: quite possible it was drawn by someone else, but dates
Speaker 1: who around the same time. You know what's funny, if
Speaker 1: if you had asked me this question, you know, without
Speaker 1: telling me who it was that that created the first submarine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would have credited this to Leonardo da Vinci. Sure,
Speaker 1: I think most people would think that that was the
Speaker 1: mind that created something like this, because I mean, he
Speaker 1: has so many other just incredible spectacular adventures that that
Speaker 1: later were built and functional. Well, I mean he proposed
Speaker 1: the air screw, which was essentially a predecessor to the hellic, right,
Speaker 1: So I mean submarine is not that far of a stress. No,
Speaker 1: I would I would have definitely thought this would appear
Speaker 1: in somewhere in his sketch books. It's possible that there
Speaker 1: are other inventors who came before born who proposed something similar.
Speaker 1: Borns is the earliest one that we have on records.
Speaker 1: In sixty five, you have Cornelius Drebble. By the way,
Speaker 1: the names I came across while researching this, I love
Speaker 1: Cornelius Drebble is a great name. Not many people named
Speaker 1: their kids Cornelius. But my wife does work with the
Speaker 1: Cornelius right now. Though that's a great name. Strange. Cornelius
Speaker 1: is a great name. Also, Uh, fantastic character in the
Speaker 1: show Hello Dolly must be a family name, must be. Uh.
Speaker 1: This Cornelius was the court inventor for James the first
Speaker 1: of England, which I did not know that was a position. Interesting, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I assume he invented stuff, not courts that would have
Speaker 1: just been weird tennis courts, yeah, exactly, racketball courts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just yeah, food courts. So he created what many
Speaker 1: considered to be the first working submarine, and supposedly it
Speaker 1: traveled down and under the Thames River at a depth
Speaker 1: of fifteen feet or so when it got to its deepest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially when you consider how it did this. It was
Speaker 1: propelled by twelve oarsmen. So the oars extended out the
Speaker 1: side of this weatherproof boat that also had a leather
Speaker 1: you know, like a weather a waterproofed leather covering. The
Speaker 1: oars protruded through the covering obviously, and then metal clamps
Speaker 1: were used to clamp the leather covering tight against the
Speaker 1: oars to maintain that water tight seal. Yeah. They were
Speaker 1: incredible for the time, you know, and they used a
Speaker 1: design that's very similar to what a lot of personal
Speaker 1: subs use, and that the thing that allowed the boat
Speaker 1: to go under the water was it's it's a hydrodynamic design.
Speaker 1: So the deck of this boat, the upper deck slope
Speaker 1: down toward the water's surface, so it's almost like a
Speaker 1: ramp on the front. The forward momentum of the oarsmen
Speaker 1: would cause the boat's uh bow to go under the
Speaker 1: surface of the water. So the harder you row, the
Speaker 1: further down you would go. So you row faster, it
Speaker 1: dives deeper, and you have to keep that forward momentum
Speaker 1: because as soon as you stop, the buoyancy pushes the
Speaker 1: boat back up to the surface of the water, as
Speaker 1: you would want with the submarine. Yes, so, I mean
Speaker 1: you get your your oarsmen get tired, you might want
Speaker 1: to get up to the air pretty soon. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: would think so, and you know, your pass out or
Speaker 1: whatever they do. Yeah, which would happen right. You breathe
Speaker 1: in enough carbon dioxide, you pass out, the boat comes
Speaker 1: up to the top, hopefully someone's cognizant enough to open
Speaker 1: a hatch and you can breathe again. I've seen early
Speaker 1: drawings of submarines and they're typically very, very cramp they're
Speaker 1: not the monster ships that we think of now, very small,
Speaker 1: so it wouldn't take long to extinguish all the air
Speaker 1: that you have available to I mean, if you just
Speaker 1: look at World War two era submarines and that that's
Speaker 1: late in the game for submarines, uh, you feel like, well,
Speaker 1: I'd be comfortable moving through this if I were about
Speaker 1: five ft four, but then he tolder than that, and
Speaker 1: I've got to be real cognizant of where my head is.
Speaker 1: And there's other people in there. Yeah, and I'm not
Speaker 1: just the only person here. I need to know. Six
Speaker 1: foot bill has really taken up a lot of space. So, uh,
Speaker 1: there are no illustrations or anything of this particular boat,
Speaker 1: but there were a lot of reports about it actually
Speaker 1: working with people along the Thames were really impressed by it.
Speaker 1: James the First was impressed by it. There's some stories
Speaker 1: that say that he even took a ride on it,
Speaker 1: but most people dismissed that because James the First was
Speaker 1: uh known to be risk averse. Yeah, he was not
Speaker 1: someone who would put his body in direct peril. Well,
Speaker 1: I was thinking that maybe there were some people that
Speaker 1: advised him maybe not to try. Probably Ben Johnson, the
Speaker 1: famous writer, actually referred to it as an invisible eel.
Speaker 1: That's what he called the boat. So that was kind
Speaker 1: of a cool design. Moving on to sixteen thirty four,
Speaker 1: that's when a French priest named Marin Mersen worked out
Speaker 1: that a submarine should probably may be made up of
Speaker 1: some pretty strong stuff to withstand water pressure, which we're
Speaker 1: gonna learn later was very important that some people did
Speaker 1: not pick up on. That's a horrible, terrible spoiler. So
Speaker 1: they're they're talking about going deeper than fifteen feet obviously,
Speaker 1: And he said that, you know, if you wanted to
Speaker 1: actually have a submarine that could go to sufficient depths,
Speaker 1: you probably want to make it up of something like copper. Use,
Speaker 1: you know, a nice strong frame and coated with copper,
Speaker 1: counting not the strongest metal, no, but stronger than would.
Speaker 1: He also thought that both ends should taper to a point,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that was that you could then
Speaker 1: reverse just as easily as you could go forward. And otherwise,
Speaker 1: if you have one end that comes to a point
Speaker 1: and the other end doesn't, you have to make a
Speaker 1: really wide turn to go back the way you came.
Speaker 1: Also makes it a little harder for the whale to
Speaker 1: swallow you. Yes, anything that makes it, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: whales swallowing the whole thing more difficult. Definitely, Sailors are
Speaker 1: in favor of that. On the outside, you know, don't
Speaker 1: don't use the easy to swallow gel covering on your
Speaker 1: copper submarine, and don't try and try not to look
Speaker 1: like a fish and distressed while you're out. There also
Speaker 1: also words to live by. Uh. There was a guy
Speaker 1: named that we only know as Di san d E
Speaker 1: s o N, a Frenchman in sixteen fifty four who
Speaker 1: designed what he claimed would be a ni unstoppable warship
Speaker 1: that was semi submerged, so not a full submersible the
Speaker 1: way we consider submarines. It was essentially a floating battering
Speaker 1: ram and it was designed to sink enemy ships. So
Speaker 1: the battering ram itself was under the surface of the water.
Speaker 1: Only a little bit of the boat would protrude, so
Speaker 1: that you know, enemy ships wouldn't necessarily notice you when
Speaker 1: you're coming up on them. Very difficult to detect, especially
Speaker 1: at night. Yes, his design was seventy two ft long.
Speaker 1: It is called the Rotterdam boat because he built it
Speaker 1: in Rotterdam, and he claimed that the clockwork propulsion system
Speaker 1: that he had installed in it would allow him to
Speaker 1: go from Rotterdam to London and back within the span
Speaker 1: of a day, which is remarkable in sixteen fifty four.
Speaker 1: Only problem is he miscalculated how much work it would
Speaker 1: take to move a boat through the water, and it
Speaker 1: didn't move him at all. The clockwork failed and so
Speaker 1: the boat was never used. But we could have had
Speaker 1: underwater battering rams as early as the mid seventeenth century
Speaker 1: had it not been for that. Yeah, he did try.
Speaker 1: Another Frenchman named Denise pop In, a mathematician in six
Speaker 1: said hey, what have we used an air pump in
Speaker 1: order to change the buoyancy of a ship? He was
Speaker 1: actually thinking along lines of let's not try and take
Speaker 1: on water, let's change the air pressure inside the ship. Uh.
Speaker 1: There are no records of any of his designs, but
Speaker 1: the story says that he built a working submarine and
Speaker 1: was starting to build a second one and funding fell
Speaker 1: through and he scrapped the project, which I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people can identify with because that happens all
Speaker 1: the time and all sorts of technologies. It never gets
Speaker 1: past prototype a lot of times. Yeah, and a lot
Speaker 1: of these prototypes end up being things where people say
Speaker 1: that's a great idea, thank you for the idea, never
Speaker 1: doing anything with it, or they they adapted to their
Speaker 1: own needs and or or change it in some way
Speaker 1: that and then take advantage of them unfortunately, be like, hey,
Speaker 1: that's a great idea, I'm changing two things about it. Now,
Speaker 1: it's my idea. It's right trademark. Yeah t M. You
Speaker 1: didn't think about it, buddy, uh nine, and I'm skipping
Speaker 1: over by the way. There are tons of examples of
Speaker 1: different early submarines, many of which did not end well.
Speaker 1: In seventeen nine, there was a guy named Nathaniel Simmons
Speaker 1: or Simon's s y M O. N. S. He was
Speaker 1: a carpenter in England. He built a submarine that consisted
Speaker 1: of two wooden sections front and the back, joined in
Speaker 1: the middle by a panel of pleaded leather. So think
Speaker 1: of like an accordion or a concertina, right, So it
Speaker 1: can it can scrunch in and get make the whole
Speaker 1: ship shorter, or it can extend and make the whole
Speaker 1: ship longer. And this is how you would either sink
Speaker 1: it or float it based upon the amount of displacement
Speaker 1: that he was creating. Uh. It had no means of propulsion, however,
Speaker 1: so we could go down into the water and it
Speaker 1: could come back up from the bottom of the river
Speaker 1: that he was using it. And what his plan was
Speaker 1: was to make such a spectacle that people would be
Speaker 1: overcome with amazement that a man could go down to
Speaker 1: the bottom of a river and live there for more
Speaker 1: than an hour and then come back up none the
Speaker 1: worse for wear, and then they throw money at him.
Speaker 1: This is like a water elevator, Yeah, except it didn't
Speaker 1: go anywhere. It was more like like think of like
Speaker 1: a magician, a busker who's trying to or like just
Speaker 1: someone just playing a song, just trying to hope for tips.
Speaker 1: They got their little guitar case out there, excep. In
Speaker 1: this case, he's got an enormous boat. It sinks into
Speaker 1: a river and occasionally comes back up again. Uh. People
Speaker 1: did not leave a lot of tips in his tip jar. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They probably left when he submerged himself, thinking well that
Speaker 1: guy's gone. Yeah, they see you later, loser. Uh. Turns
Speaker 1: out it did not pay for itself, so it ended
Speaker 1: up being just a curiosity. And of course, like I said,
Speaker 1: there's no propulsion system and there was no practical application
Speaker 1: for it. A strange bit of history, Yes, I thought
Speaker 1: so too. I should make a note of that for
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History. By the way, if you weren't subscribed to
Speaker 1: Ridiculous History, you should totally subscribe to Ridiculous History. It's
Speaker 1: a fun show. SEO. John Day, an English shipbuilder created
Speaker 1: a fairly small water tight chamber that was weighed down
Speaker 1: by stones, So again not really a submarine. It's something
Speaker 1: that would allow you to sink to the bottom of
Speaker 1: a body of water. Uh. The chamber had these stones
Speaker 1: attached to it, like strung along the outside of it,
Speaker 1: and on the inside of the chamber were bolts that
Speaker 1: if you pulled the bolt, it would release a stone.
Speaker 1: So that was how you could release stones and allow
Speaker 1: yourself to pop back up to the surface. And the
Speaker 1: whole point of this was very similar to what Simons
Speaker 1: was trying to do. It was an idea of like,
Speaker 1: I can make money by convincing people. Hey, like I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do this crazy stunt. Pay me. So he goes
Speaker 1: out and he finds another guy named Christopher Blake. Christopher
Speaker 1: Blake was a bit of a gambler, a risk taker,
Speaker 1: and he said to Blake, here's my idea. We build
Speaker 1: a bigger one of these, and we make a claim
Speaker 1: saying that I'm going to go down to the bottom
Speaker 1: of Plymouth Harbor and I'm going to stay there for
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, and after twenty four hours, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: come back up and if I can do it. We
Speaker 1: win the bet, and I just need you to back me.
Speaker 1: Because you have money, you can back my part of
Speaker 1: the bet. And Blake says this is interesting. Well, we'll
Speaker 1: see if anyone will take us up on the bet,
Speaker 1: and if we win, you get ten percent of the winnings.
Speaker 1: And so Day says, let's do it. So they did.
Speaker 1: They got lots and lots of people to bet on it,
Speaker 1: so tons of money going into this. The day comes
Speaker 1: and John Day gets into his larger watertight container using
Speaker 1: the exact same premise. Now before he had been practicing
Speaker 1: in a river, not in a harbor. You might see
Speaker 1: where this is going. Rivers are not as deep as
Speaker 1: harbors are. He had not tested this in uh water
Speaker 1: that was as deep, which was a hundred feet deep,
Speaker 1: and as a wooden structure yep, turned out to be
Speaker 1: too much ah, the structure collapsed. Day did not survive,
Speaker 1: He did not win his bet. Blake did not get
Speaker 1: to collect lots of money from people, and people who
Speaker 1: were perhaps a little more sensible, made a little money
Speaker 1: that day in a very sad way, no kidding. So
Speaker 1: he jumped into the harbor essentially with a bunch of
Speaker 1: rocks tied to him, and that was it sunk to
Speaker 1: the san too, about hundred feet. The pressure caused the
Speaker 1: structure to fail, and yeah, he drowned. Yeah. Not not
Speaker 1: a good way to go. Um. Not a great element
Speaker 1: of the submarine story, but one that I thought was
Speaker 1: really interesting because a century earlier you had a French
Speaker 1: priests say, you know, if you want to go deep,
Speaker 1: you should probably use something sturdier than would so people
Speaker 1: have been talking about for a hundred years, but we didn't.
Speaker 1: You know, this guy wasn't really taking it to heart,
Speaker 1: and it turned out that that was his fatal undoing. Now,
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy six is a great musical. It's also an
Speaker 1: important year in American history. It's a musical, Yes it is.
Speaker 1: Sit down, John, It's it's a very important year in
Speaker 1: American history. And in fact it features the first time
Speaker 1: that someone was attempting to use a submarine in actual
Speaker 1: wartime during the Revolutionary War here in what is now America,
Speaker 1: but at the time was a British colony, and colonist
Speaker 1: David Bushnell built the submarine. It's called the Turtle. You
Speaker 1: may have heard of this. It was kind of egg shaped. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's the first submarine ever to actually attack an enemy ship,
Speaker 1: not successfully, but we'll get into it. Bushnell supposedly talked
Speaker 1: with another luminary of the time, a certain Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 1: a smarty pants, who kind of advised him on his plan,
Speaker 1: and they built this egg shaped submarine that had two propellers,
Speaker 1: so sort of screw shaped propellers, one facing directly in
Speaker 1: front of the person, so rotating a hand crank one
Speaker 1: direction would cause you it to pull the submarine along,
Speaker 1: so you would go forward. The second propeller was in
Speaker 1: a vertical alignment, so it allow you to sink lower
Speaker 1: or surface again. Um And the whole purpose of this
Speaker 1: was to allow someone to very secretly and sneakily get
Speaker 1: up to enemy ships. So British Navy ships surface, drill
Speaker 1: a hole into the enemy shop, attach a mine that
Speaker 1: has a clockwork mechanism to allow it to detonate. I
Speaker 1: didn't get the heck out of dodge before things go
Speaker 1: what's a simple plan, simple plan? What could go wrong
Speaker 1: could possibly happen in that time for a minute, would
Speaker 1: cause some kind of disasters. Now now, fortunately spoiler alert
Speaker 1: for people who get really anxious about this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: No disaster occurred, but it was unsuccessful. So it was
Speaker 1: unsuccessful but not tragic for Bushnell, or to that matter,
Speaker 1: for Ezra Lee, who was the sergeant who actually piloted
Speaker 1: the turtle. Uh. Bushnell said, here's the thing. I built,
Speaker 1: the darn thing. I'm not strong enough. We're skilled enough
Speaker 1: to actually pilot it. Like there's a foot pedal that
Speaker 1: would allow you to control the bladders that would that
Speaker 1: would bring on water or remove water. There were the
Speaker 1: two hand cranks for navigation. Uh, it was very hot work.
Speaker 1: It's extremely physical. Yeah, you know, to to propel this
Speaker 1: thing through the water, I get it. Yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: this was not hydrodynamically designed. Really, and so as really
Speaker 1: did it. He managed to get up to a British
Speaker 1: ship called the Eagle, but he was unable to penetrate
Speaker 1: the eagles hull with a drill. And there's some conjecture
Speaker 1: about why this is. Some people think that perhaps he
Speaker 1: was even suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, that he had
Speaker 1: been breathing so heavily and breathing his own air for
Speaker 1: so long that that that made it exacerbated things, made
Speaker 1: him weaker than he otherwise would have been. Sure and
Speaker 1: I think that's the case in all of these we
Speaker 1: talked about so far. When you're under the surface, you're
Speaker 1: you're physically powering the ship, and you're you're you're exercising,
Speaker 1: you're breathing more than you would at rest. Sure, so
Speaker 1: that becomes a factor in all of these. I doubt
Speaker 1: that any people earlier than this and even considered that possibility, right.
Speaker 1: And you know, some of the earlier submarines had things
Speaker 1: like air tubes that would extend up above the surface.
Speaker 1: But obviously if you want something that's going to be sneaky,
Speaker 1: you can't do that. You know, hard it would be
Speaker 1: to breathe through a snorkele that it would be let's say,
Speaker 1: even even ten ft long, be very difficult. So I
Speaker 1: don't I doubt the effectiveness of that long for a
Speaker 1: crew of men, right, And so yeah, until you get
Speaker 1: to the point where you have things like carbon dioxide scrubbers,
Speaker 1: which is much much much later, it's just it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a you can just imagine it being a miserable
Speaker 1: experience to the inside one of these. Sure, so they
Speaker 1: think he may have when he exited the ship, he
Speaker 1: might have been a little bit delirious. Sure, Okay. Now
Speaker 1: he realized that he wasn't gonna be able to complete
Speaker 1: his mission, so the best thing he could do is
Speaker 1: try and escape. So he gets back into the turtle
Speaker 1: and starts to move away, and the British see that
Speaker 1: there's something flowing in the water, and like, what the
Speaker 1: heck is that, Let's send some roboats out there to
Speaker 1: check it out. So some British sailors get into rowboats
Speaker 1: and you know, they've got guns and stuff. Turtles not
Speaker 1: really gonna be able to withstand too much punishment. So
Speaker 1: what Lee does is he's pretty smart. He he lets
Speaker 1: loose the mind so that it's a distraction. It doesn't
Speaker 1: blow up, but it does create another thing for everyone
Speaker 1: to go check out. While he continues to try and scaaddle.
Speaker 1: He manages to get a safe distance away and escapes.
Speaker 1: He does not know the turtle does not collapse. He
Speaker 1: managed to get away. It does not mark a successful
Speaker 1: attempt to attack an enemy ship, but it is the
Speaker 1: first time in recorded history where we have someone using
Speaker 1: a submarine to try to attack annoy. Yes. Now, in
Speaker 1: the sevent nineties, a guy comes up with his own
Speaker 1: idea for submarines and things that would be a great
Speaker 1: weapon in war. This guy would later on become incredibly
Speaker 1: famous for a related technology. And that guy is Robert Fulton.
Speaker 1: And if the name sounds familiar, it's because you probably
Speaker 1: are like a fan of things like like Mark Twain,
Speaker 1: because Fulton was the guy who made the steamship really famous.
Speaker 1: So late seventeen hundreds, you know, it's almost the almost
Speaker 1: the turn of the century. He comes up with this
Speaker 1: idea for submarines and he at the time not real
Speaker 1: crazy about the British Navy, not a big fan. He
Speaker 1: goes over to France, meets a meets a guy named Bony.
Speaker 1: Nappy Bony Napoleon Bonaparte is friends. That's funny, so Nappy
Speaker 1: Bony he says to him, Hey, buddy, uh short stuff,
Speaker 1: just kidding. It really wasn't. But he said, hey, buddy,
Speaker 1: I got this idea. This if you if you make
Speaker 1: this this underwater boat, not only will you be incredibly
Speaker 1: effective against enemy ships, but ultimately you'll be so effective
Speaker 1: that no one will ever dare use their navy against you,
Speaker 1: because you'll just decimate that name. In fact, we'll eventually
Speaker 1: get to a point. And I can't believe that Robert
Speaker 1: Fulton was arguing this, but it's so funny that history
Speaker 1: repeats itself. We'll get to a point where everyone will
Speaker 1: build these underwater ships, and then no one will ever
Speaker 1: declare war on anyone else, because if you were, you
Speaker 1: would be reigning down destruction on yourself. He was arguing
Speaker 1: about mutually assured destruction via submarine battle. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: flash forward a couple hundred years and you've got the
Speaker 1: whole basis of the Cold War. Right, was really talking
Speaker 1: up the submarine capabilities here well, and he really believed it.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was sure that he could do this,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he created some pretty innovative features in
Speaker 1: his design. He created some fins, some stabilization fins that
Speaker 1: also would allow for controlled diving so that you'd be
Speaker 1: able to steer while diving, which was brand new before
Speaker 1: it either would start sinking or would start surfacing. And
Speaker 1: that was it. But his design got a little more
Speaker 1: sophisticated in that. So are we talking like a nuclear warheads?
Speaker 1: You know, like like nuclear tipped ballistic missiles and things
Speaker 1: like that. Now we're talking still like clockwork mine. I
Speaker 1: guess I jumped ahead a little bit. Yeah, still a
Speaker 1: little he did have. He did add a periscope. He's
Speaker 1: the first guy to add a periscope to a submarine.
Speaker 1: Well that's pretty cool. Yeah. Now, periscopes have been around
Speaker 1: for a while, but they have been used on land.
Speaker 1: They had not been used on submersibles. So if you
Speaker 1: happen to, let's say I want to attend the town parade,
Speaker 1: but perhaps you are on the shorter side, you could
Speaker 1: get a periscope and see over the crowd. Right. It's
Speaker 1: just a series of mirrors and lenses, is all. It
Speaker 1: is perfect use of one. Yeah, And so he came
Speaker 1: up with the idea of actually incorporating that in the
Speaker 1: design of submarines, so that you could peek up above
Speaker 1: the surface of the water without completely coming up right
Speaker 1: giving it away. Yeah, I mean, the whole point of
Speaker 1: this was to try and create a secret stealth vehicle.
Speaker 1: He gave his prototype. He actually built one of these,
Speaker 1: and he gave his prototype an awesome name that would
Speaker 1: be used for other summary, the nautilus. Oh yeah, a
Speaker 1: great name for a submarine. But the French looked at
Speaker 1: it and they said, here's the problem. Because at this
Speaker 1: point it's still manpowered. It's too slow it's too cumbersome.
Speaker 1: It's not a good vehicle for war because by the
Speaker 1: time we actually deploy one and get toward a ship,
Speaker 1: you're moving so slowly that if you are detected, there's
Speaker 1: really nothing else you can You can't really take a
Speaker 1: base of maneuvers. You're not gonna be able to outrun anybody.
Speaker 1: Um It to us is too much expense, not enough
Speaker 1: reward for that expense. So Fulton's heartbroken. He's tried to
Speaker 1: push this on the French because of his hatred of
Speaker 1: the British Navy. So then he does the only thing
Speaker 1: and he smart businessman does. He goes to England and
Speaker 1: he says to the English government, Hey, you know, the
Speaker 1: French we're thinking about this submersible thing. But I've got
Speaker 1: the idea, I got the plans right here, buddy. I
Speaker 1: can give it to you today for half true capitalist
Speaker 1: right there, right. So he comes up to them and uh,
Speaker 1: Prime Minister William Pitt looks in and says, this is
Speaker 1: really interesting, but I would much prefer to hire you
Speaker 1: to create what we're called torpedoes. But they were not
Speaker 1: the kind of torpedoes we think of today. They were
Speaker 1: still essentially clockwork mines. His idea was to create a
Speaker 1: raft that would have a mine mounted on the underside
Speaker 1: of the raft. You would have a sailor paddle a
Speaker 1: raft that has a lower profile than most boats out
Speaker 1: to a ship attached the mind to an enemy ship,
Speaker 1: paddle away and then eventually the timer would go off
Speaker 1: and the mind would explode. Uh. And that he got
Speaker 1: paid for, but no one want the nautilus. Eventually it
Speaker 1: would get junked. And then he would come back to
Speaker 1: the United States and get into steamships in a big way.
Speaker 1: So his story ended. Uh. You know, he didn't end
Speaker 1: in defeat. He did plenty well for himself and until
Speaker 1: he Uh. In a semi related view, we talked about steamboats,
Speaker 1: like paddle boat steamboats. Yeah in Mississippi. Yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what, there's still there's still examples of those around.
Speaker 1: People still jump on those for riverboat cruises down the
Speaker 1: down the Mississippi and things like that. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a fun time. People tried using steam engines to power submarines.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine a couple of problems with that? You
Speaker 1: can imagine lots of problems with it. Yes, So one
Speaker 1: is that you have to have fire yes, which which
Speaker 1: would take up quite a bit of oxygen, and oxygen
Speaker 1: is at a premium when you're underwater. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: that was the biggest issue. Heat also another one, but
Speaker 1: oxygen being very important, that was that was one. Another
Speaker 1: big problem actually is that steamships use boilers. Right, You've
Speaker 1: got a container filled with water, right, So it turns
Speaker 1: out you've got a container of water inside a vessel
Speaker 1: that itself is in a body of water. Whenever that
Speaker 1: vessel would change in attitude right, starting to point down
Speaker 1: or point up or left or right, the water slashes around.
Speaker 1: This causes more internal momentum, which changes the motion of
Speaker 1: the overall vessel, which meant that for those particular early submarines,
Speaker 1: when you were diving, you were diving at a real
Speaker 1: steep descent, and same thing when you were coming up,
Speaker 1: you were ascending at a very steep angle. So imagine
Speaker 1: those old episodes of Star Trek where the entire crew
Speaker 1: is being is like throwing themselves left and right on
Speaker 1: the bridge, except that's really happening and going forward and
Speaker 1: backward every single time. Oh my gosh, there's no there's
Speaker 1: no walking between um and parts of the vessel. When
Speaker 1: it's ascending or decent. It's more like rolling between the
Speaker 1: You're you're just hanging on and hoping that you don't
Speaker 1: fall to the bottom if you're lucky. Maybe maybe you're
Speaker 1: strapped into something if you're really fortunate. But yes, there
Speaker 1: was a real problem, and that was a problem for
Speaker 1: submarines really leading all the way up to the electrical age.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of other really cool historical ones.
Speaker 1: Well that and well one last thing on the steam
Speaker 1: powered ones. Boilers had a propensity to explode sometimes. Yep,
Speaker 1: that was also an issue. Weren't well put together. They
Speaker 1: were also sometimes converted into submarines. One of the ones
Speaker 1: during the Civil War was there are actually a few
Speaker 1: submarines that were built and submersible semi submersibles that were
Speaker 1: built during the Civil War. Here in the United States,
Speaker 1: the Union had one called the Alligator, which is kind
Speaker 1: of cool. There was a human powered submarine used by
Speaker 1: the Union forces and a sealable hatchway that allowed a
Speaker 1: diver to leave the boat while it was underwater for
Speaker 1: the purposes of attaching a mind to an enemy ship.
Speaker 1: Now that's a cool idea, and it was the first
Speaker 1: time anyone had managed to make one of those. By
Speaker 1: the way, Alligator is a great name for one of
Speaker 1: those because it looks like an alligator on the surface.
Speaker 1: It does. Uh, that particular design was just looking at
Speaker 1: it's pretty terrifying. But yeah, this idea of having essentially
Speaker 1: like an airlock style a diver's lock was really innovative
Speaker 1: and allowed them to do stuff that other ships could
Speaker 1: not do. They'd have to surface in order for someone
Speaker 1: to get out, right, they couldn't just let them out
Speaker 1: in the underwater. But on the Confederate side of the war,
Speaker 1: you had one of these boilers that got converted into
Speaker 1: a submarine. That was done by a guy named H. L. Huntley,
Speaker 1: and the Confederates were really determined to use this submarine.
Speaker 1: You can tell because on the first two test runs,
Speaker 1: not actual deployments of the Hunley, but the first two
Speaker 1: test runs it sank both times. The first time it
Speaker 1: killed five crew members. The second time it killed everyone aboard,
Speaker 1: including Hunley himself. Yeah, so all the crew perished. They
Speaker 1: still used it. The Confederates deployed it um and it
Speaker 1: even was used to sink a ship. It actually sank
Speaker 1: the USS who Satonic in a successful attack. But the
Speaker 1: Hunley also sank. Uh. Some people think that maybe it
Speaker 1: suffered damage because it it's weapon was essentially a long
Speaker 1: spear tipped with an explosive, so he had to actually
Speaker 1: ram into the side of the enemy show. So the
Speaker 1: inventor then didn't get to see the success of his
Speaker 1: own invention, right, he had already drowned in a trial,
Speaker 1: and then as the Hunley was sailing away from the
Speaker 1: housatanic Uh, it sank, either because it suffered damage from
Speaker 1: that explosion, or there's also the possibility that a nearby
Speaker 1: ship that was rushing to the aid of the Union
Speaker 1: vessel that was struck the wake that it was creating
Speaker 1: was enough to slash over and open hatch on the
Speaker 1: Hunley and thus flooded. You know what, I just hearing
Speaker 1: the story, it seems like the explosive on a stick
Speaker 1: might be the might be the problem. Probably probably problem
Speaker 1: number one you're gonna get I mean, you don't have
Speaker 1: a whole lot of control, you know, the longer that
Speaker 1: stick gets, really so, so I'm assuming that it was
Speaker 1: a fairly short stick, and probably they did sustain some damage.
Speaker 1: I'm sure, yeah, I mean, and like I said, it
Speaker 1: was the fact that they had already lost a crew
Speaker 1: plus five crew all but five crew members two in trials.
Speaker 1: We're talking like two essentially two full cruise really man. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and yet they were determined to try and get this
Speaker 1: to Yeah. I guess so. The first and then none
Speaker 1: of those, by the way, we're mechanical. Those were all
Speaker 1: human powered submarines. The first mechanical submarine didn't launch until
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty three in France, called Le plongeur y because
Speaker 1: it takes the plant. Yeah, and it used compressed air.
Speaker 1: It also had that same problem I was talking about
Speaker 1: with the stability issues with with the steam powered ones,
Speaker 1: and that it would do those very steep dives and
Speaker 1: ascensions back up to the surface, to the point where
Speaker 1: no one thought of it as practical. It was just
Speaker 1: two It was too unwieldy, too uncontrollable, whenever you wanted
Speaker 1: to dive or surface. Man, that's something I don't want
Speaker 1: to hear when I get into a submarine, is it's
Speaker 1: it's uncontrollable. Yeah, not not the best adjective. It doesn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't give you a whole lot of confidence as
Speaker 1: they're stealing that hatch. That's like, that's like hearing it's
Speaker 1: almost water tight, and most of them were almost water sure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're getting up to the end of my my
Speaker 1: history lesson here. In the eighteen eighties, that's when the
Speaker 1: battery technology was starting to get to the point where
Speaker 1: you were beginning to see people put in electric motors
Speaker 1: and experiment with that for submarines, which turned out to
Speaker 1: be fantastic because you no longer needed manpower to move
Speaker 1: the parts. You didn't have to worry about steam, you
Speaker 1: didn't have to worry about a fire, you didn't have
Speaker 1: to worry about that slashing that was creating stability issues.
Speaker 1: And that's really where the technology for submarines began to
Speaker 1: take off, and people began to refine things like the
Speaker 1: design of the submarine, the various instrumentation you would need
Speaker 1: on a submarine to be able to navigate effectively underwater,
Speaker 1: particularly once you start getting to depths where you can
Speaker 1: no longer have any sort of transparent window. You have
Speaker 1: to You're you're sailing by instrumentation alone. So clearly you
Speaker 1: have to have extremely precise maps and extremely precise instruments.
Speaker 1: And we're talking, Yeah, it's not exactly as precise as
Speaker 1: it is today. No, No, It wouldn't be until after
Speaker 1: like World War two era that we started getting really
Speaker 1: really accurate underwater maps. Terrifying after World War Two, and
Speaker 1: you know how extensively they were used in you know
Speaker 1: World War two. Sure, yeah, the U boats, I mean
Speaker 1: that was the Germany was infamous for their U boats.
Speaker 1: They were they were really inspired terror on the seat,
Speaker 1: so they were feared by all. Yeah, yeah, and so
Speaker 1: you know, but it was not it still wasn't an
Speaker 1: era where you really knew everything that you were going
Speaker 1: to encounter. And of course you can't see anything down there,
Speaker 1: so you're you're lying completely upon the records that have
Speaker 1: been generated over time and you know, keeping an eye
Speaker 1: on a watch to make sure, you know, okay, well,
Speaker 1: in five seconds, we need to have a twenty degree
Speaker 1: turned to port. Oh my gosh, I think think of
Speaker 1: what a what a map of the ocean floor might
Speaker 1: look like in eighteen sixty. I mean you're going by
Speaker 1: that here they're be squid essentially. Yeah, So that gives
Speaker 1: us our our background. And now it's finally time for
Speaker 1: us to talk about personal submarines. We're gonna skip ahead
Speaker 1: over all the different you know, the different evolutions of
Speaker 1: the battery powered and the diesel power the nuclear powered submarines,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go straight to pleasure craft, essentially, is what
Speaker 1: it comes down to. And in my research, I essentially
Speaker 1: came to the conclusion that that these personal submarines are
Speaker 1: meant for one of three potential markets. Market Number one
Speaker 1: is for perhaps organizations dedicated to studying the ocean, and
Speaker 1: they have a massed enough money to get some of
Speaker 1: these smaller submarines to allow for more maneuverability to study
Speaker 1: specific biomes under the sea. But a lot of them
Speaker 1: tend to be a little more um luxury bay faced
Speaker 1: them what you would typically think of for a research
Speaker 1: instat sure. Number two tourism, so to our companies, like
Speaker 1: you might go around on a cruise and you see
Speaker 1: on the excursions take a submarine ride on such and such.
Speaker 1: I can see that happening too, especially for some of
Speaker 1: the higher end ones, where you're going to a company
Speaker 1: that has invested money into buying one of these and
Speaker 1: then they make it back by selling admission to take
Speaker 1: rides on a vacation location which is going to have
Speaker 1: crystal clear waters and lots of wildlife. Th A're going
Speaker 1: to like st Thomas or something, and you want to
Speaker 1: be able to see the ocean. Third is fill these
Speaker 1: stink and rich billionaires who just want the adventure all
Speaker 1: about adventure. Yeah, I have a feeling that's and if
Speaker 1: you're looking at the marketing for most of these that
Speaker 1: seems to be who they're targeting, which you imagine has
Speaker 1: got to be a fairly small market. But it's a market.
Speaker 1: And you know what, they sell plenty of cars that
Speaker 1: are these ultra high luxury you know, extremely um expensive
Speaker 1: toys for the very wealthy, and they sell a lot
Speaker 1: of them every year. So there's there is a market
Speaker 1: out there. Yeah, it amazes me that. Well it's because
Speaker 1: again we're not in that tax bracket and so it's
Speaker 1: hard for me to imagine a life where I could
Speaker 1: uh one, where I could even afford one, and to
Speaker 1: where not only could I afford one, but I could
Speaker 1: buy it. And still you know, eat um because right
Speaker 1: now we're talking about vehicles that if I were to
Speaker 1: save up over the course of twenty years, I might
Speaker 1: be able to buy one. But that's if I didn't
Speaker 1: spend money on anything else, right, So saving every single
Speaker 1: penny make and nothing else right, right, Like just I've
Speaker 1: become an air terry and I'm just a breath area.
Speaker 1: That's when I'm just breathing air and taking them all
Speaker 1: my nutrients, which doesn't work. But it's very very expensive
Speaker 1: to get into this game, isn't it. Yeah? And I
Speaker 1: was looking around. I came across an organization called p
Speaker 1: subs p subs dot org, and they actually have some
Speaker 1: interesting information. First of all, uh, here is a definition
Speaker 1: for personal submarines that I pulled from the sites. Personal
Speaker 1: submarines are those submarines which are owned by some person
Speaker 1: as a personal property and not owned by a government
Speaker 1: or any public organization. They're usually used for recreational underwater
Speaker 1: experience exploration, or sometimes for scientific research. They're usually small
Speaker 1: size and sometimes are called many submarines. Their capacity ranges
Speaker 1: from one person to twenty five or more persons. At
Speaker 1: that point, I don't think I can call it really small. Uh.
Speaker 1: Usually five to nine seater submarines are used for research purpose,
Speaker 1: and submarines with higher capacity are used for tourism purposes.
Speaker 1: In nineteen the Personal Submersibles Organization or peace UBS was founded. Now,
Speaker 1: this started as a group of enthusiasts who were talking
Speaker 1: about boats on a list server, the old list servers
Speaker 1: of the real pre web days or early web days.
Speaker 1: So they would go to a list server called wreck
Speaker 1: dot Boats dot Building r EC, wreck like Recreation, so
Speaker 1: this people who build boats for fun, you know, things
Speaker 1: that they're building pleasure craft. Well, there were about four
Speaker 1: or five people on that list who wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about the possibility of a personal submarine, but that really
Speaker 1: didn't fit with the overall conversation that was going on
Speaker 1: in the group, so they took it offline. Well, they
Speaker 1: kept it online, but they took it off the list
Speaker 1: and they just started chatting through email. They just kind
Speaker 1: of had a group email going where they were talking
Speaker 1: about their interests. Eventually they decided to create their own
Speaker 1: list server. In they created an archive of it, and
Speaker 1: by October they secured the domain peace subs dot org.
Speaker 1: And uh, as it stands, if you go to that
Speaker 1: today p subs dot org, you can find tons of
Speaker 1: information about personal submarines and they're deep discussions about things
Speaker 1: and they have very important points to make about things
Speaker 1: like safety and reliability and how useful is that? How
Speaker 1: user friendly are some of these because as you can
Speaker 1: imagine Scott piloting one of these things underwater is not
Speaker 1: necessarily the most intuitive thing, especially when you get into
Speaker 1: more complicated environments like you're talking about reefs and things
Speaker 1: of that nature. And um, uh, I'm sure you could
Speaker 1: imagine that these are not vehicles that necessarily say stop
Speaker 1: on a dime. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's not as
Speaker 1: intuitive as it would be to drive a car or
Speaker 1: something in that same Uh. You know, you're not driving
Speaker 1: up to the edge of a cliff and stopping. You're
Speaker 1: also having to deal with with with currents, Yeah, exactly right,
Speaker 1: and uh, and just a host of other things that
Speaker 1: you're not even thinking about that you know, up down
Speaker 1: motion versus just you know, left right back forward. You've
Speaker 1: also got you know, another access to com you know,
Speaker 1: to be concerned with. And and not all of these,
Speaker 1: not all of them we're gonna talk about have those
Speaker 1: really really simple controls. But they're getting there. Some of
Speaker 1: the newer ones are very user friendly, and their goal
Speaker 1: is to make them easy enough for anybody to drive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to make it so intuitive that just with a simple
Speaker 1: training session you can get to a point where you're
Speaker 1: comfortable enough piloting around uh an open ocean environment, for example,
Speaker 1: or a lake environment in some cases, but it hasn't
Speaker 1: always been that way. No, No, And and you know
Speaker 1: it took a lot of work from a lot of
Speaker 1: people to get up to that point. Um. I'm sure
Speaker 1: when you were looking through all this you came across
Speaker 1: the name Graham Hawks. Yes, so Graham Hawks was He
Speaker 1: is a marine engineer who was born in London nineteen
Speaker 1: and uh. He was famous for lots of stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's built pretty much in the nine ninies, all of
Speaker 1: the small submersibles were based off of his designs. And
Speaker 1: he set a world record in two thousand seven for
Speaker 1: the deepest solo dive. That was when he went down
Speaker 1: around almost three thousand feet UM in a solo submarine.
Speaker 1: And he held that record for a long time until
Speaker 1: a certain Hollywood director smashed it. Yeah, but he was
Speaker 1: in the deep rover. And as it turns out, like
Speaker 1: a lot of the personal submarines that are out there
Speaker 1: now are are still they're they're his designs. Like if
Speaker 1: you see any of the deep flight stuff, most of
Speaker 1: the deep flight stuff comes directly from his design. Now,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm familiar with him and is in the
Speaker 1: deep flight in particular, in the is it. What's it
Speaker 1: called the Dragon? I think it's the one two person submersible.
Speaker 1: Looks an awful lot like, as he describes it, like
Speaker 1: a Formula one car does that goes underwater? Yeah, very cool.
Speaker 1: And he describes it as as almost like a quad
Speaker 1: copter that you're flying underwater, if you want to put
Speaker 1: it that way. Yeah. It's got two vertically aligned rotors
Speaker 1: that are on either side of the chassis where you
Speaker 1: would be sitting, and those allow you to have that
Speaker 1: hovering ability at a certain depth, right, Like you could
Speaker 1: actually set how deep you want to go up to,
Speaker 1: up to the vehicle's limit, Like you don't have unlimited diving.
Speaker 1: It can only go so far. It goes down to
Speaker 1: about just shy a four hundred feet. You know what's
Speaker 1: funny is, as we're talking about this now and you
Speaker 1: just mentioned that somebody had shattered his record, I hadn't
Speaker 1: been familiar with his record up and up until this point,
Speaker 1: but something that he said in one of the videos
Speaker 1: that I watched in preparation for today, it's telling. I
Speaker 1: guess he said, you know, it used to be all
Speaker 1: about we wanted to go deeper, deeper, deeper. That was
Speaker 1: one of the things he said, you know, that was
Speaker 1: the point ahead of time, and he said, now now
Speaker 1: we've we've kind of shifted to a different mindset. It's
Speaker 1: now that we want to make the ocean more accessible
Speaker 1: to everybody we wanted to be. Um is something that
Speaker 1: is a little more include that. You know, anybody can
Speaker 1: spend just a few bucks to rent a sub and
Speaker 1: go out and enjoy what we've been enjoying all along.
Speaker 1: But it has cost us millions of dollars. You can
Speaker 1: you can now just spend a few dollars and go
Speaker 1: out and you know, kind of get that experience, even
Speaker 1: if it's for one day. But we're not talking about
Speaker 1: as you just mentioned, and I'm getting us a little
Speaker 1: bit off track. I'm sorry, but the depth things, the
Speaker 1: depth thing really got to me. But you were saying that,
Speaker 1: you know, most of them are kind of limited to
Speaker 1: just ballparkable. We'll guess it's like feet. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: the majority of the personal subs that I looked up.
Speaker 1: Is that's your maximum death if you if you're looking
Speaker 1: at like the super expensive ones, the ones that are
Speaker 1: a couple of million dollars. Uh, some of the ones
Speaker 1: that U s submarines slash Titan do are tritting, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Triton do are are rated to go much deeper, but
Speaker 1: those are the ones that are incredibly expensive. Did you
Speaker 1: ever see the Abyss, the movie The Abyss? Yes, you
Speaker 1: know those those sort of orb shaped submersible as they use.
Speaker 1: Almost all of the Triton ones look like and there
Speaker 1: are several of those that are rated to go U
Speaker 1: really really deep. Um, but they you know, they don't
Speaker 1: look they're not sexy like the deep Flight ones. The
Speaker 1: deep flight ones. You look at that and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: that looks like it looks like a sports vehicle. Well,
Speaker 1: there's a good reason for all this too, and that's
Speaker 1: because the people that are going to be buying something
Speaker 1: like this, I mean, it's all about seeing what's down there, right,
Speaker 1: And when you get to a certain depth in anybody
Speaker 1: of water, there's going to be a point where sunlight
Speaker 1: doesn't penetrate anymore. It's it's black. So if let's say,
Speaker 1: for instance, you know the one video that I watched
Speaker 1: from Deep Flight was shot in Lake Tahoe, and Lake
Speaker 1: Tahoe very crystal clear blue water, right, but about four
Speaker 1: feet down, it's pointless to go any deeper than that
Speaker 1: in a submarine. That's meant just for observation. If you're
Speaker 1: going down to you know, take samples, that's something different.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't need to be able to see
Speaker 1: in order to do that. You have external lights and
Speaker 1: you can you can check out what's there. But if
Speaker 1: you're going down there just simply for the beauty of
Speaker 1: the lake and to really experience it into you know,
Speaker 1: at the wow factor, I guess it's pointless to go
Speaker 1: below about four feet in that lake with a passenger
Speaker 1: who's just more of a sightseer. And and that's what
Speaker 1: this type of craft is really for, so you know,
Speaker 1: they they've built it. That's a that's a test depth,
Speaker 1: I guess is that the depth there's you know, kind
Speaker 1: of mentioned something right now too what we're talking about this.
Speaker 1: There are three types of depth that will come up
Speaker 1: when you talk about submersibles, and the first one is
Speaker 1: test depth, or if you're reading about them, you'll you'll
Speaker 1: come across these. Test depth is the maximum depth that
Speaker 1: that a sub can go in normal operation. That's what
Speaker 1: that you know that they're saying like, probably shouldn't take
Speaker 1: a blow about three and thirty feet you want to
Speaker 1: stay ap of that, of course. Uh, there's design depth,
Speaker 1: and designed depth is a little bit different, but that's
Speaker 1: the depth of design engineers think that the sub can
Speaker 1: go and still be able to return to the surface safely,
Speaker 1: you know, without any kind of crushing, without any collapse
Speaker 1: of any of the structure of the of the sub
Speaker 1: because of the pressure. Uh. And then there is crushed depth. Now,
Speaker 1: crushed depth, that's something that you want to stay away from,
Speaker 1: of course. Unfortunately, that's the depth that happened that a
Speaker 1: lot of subs achieve when they they're out of control
Speaker 1: and they just simply dropped to the bottom. Now there's
Speaker 1: a there's a crush depth. Then what happens is that
Speaker 1: there's a rupture or a tear in the body. It's
Speaker 1: it's crushed by the pressure, the immense pressure on the outside.
Speaker 1: It just collapses it like a can. And what happens
Speaker 1: is that the pressure from the outside becomes instantly the
Speaker 1: same pressure on the inside and just rips everything apart.
Speaker 1: So implosure. Yeah. So if you hear of a sub
Speaker 1: that has dropped to the bottom of the ocean, there's
Speaker 1: a good chance that it has achieved crushed depth. And
Speaker 1: if it has. There's there's really no saving that crew
Speaker 1: or sub or you know, any of that. But there's
Speaker 1: a chance, there's a chance, there's a slight chance that
Speaker 1: you can come back from crush depth. You can get
Speaker 1: to a point where a sub will have exterior damage.
Speaker 1: You know that it does begin to collapse, and if
Speaker 1: it's recovered quickly enough, they can they can make it
Speaker 1: back to the surface. So you can get to what
Speaker 1: they do call crushed depth and then and still make it.
Speaker 1: But it's uh actually they say that, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's probably more common that you might think, because they
Speaker 1: realize something's wrong. You know, the spring a leak, there's
Speaker 1: there's some collapsing going on. You hear you hear groaning
Speaker 1: in the submarine that is beyond what you normally hear. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I heard a tail and this is just
Speaker 1: something that bread somewhere. I don't have a you know,
Speaker 1: a source for this because I just didn't write it down,
Speaker 1: but a couple of sailors that were in a submarine
Speaker 1: said that they would tie you know, the the ribs.
Speaker 1: I guess to go around the outside of the shub.
Speaker 1: And this is an older, primitive sub I think there
Speaker 1: were marine sub um sorry, not a marine sub, a
Speaker 1: naval sub and they tie they what they would do
Speaker 1: is they tie a string between the walls I guess,
Speaker 1: at the sub if you want to call it, at
Speaker 1: the rounded walls of the sub on a couple of
Speaker 1: these these these um just hooks that they had up there,
Speaker 1: and they would tie it tight and as the sub
Speaker 1: would descend, it would It was because the interiors being
Speaker 1: pushed in exactly right. So they knew if they were
Speaker 1: going deeper and deeper, there would be more and more
Speaker 1: slack in that line, and as they went and they
Speaker 1: started to rise to the surface that it would become
Speaker 1: tight again. They gets to a point where you're saying, captain,
Speaker 1: we might need to you know, we just just let's
Speaker 1: just go up a couple of feet. So what you
Speaker 1: might not want to do, though, is is is secure
Speaker 1: something like that. Let let's say if it was it
Speaker 1: was it was a wire wire instead of a rope.
Speaker 1: That's something that doesn't have any give. You definitely don't
Speaker 1: want to attach that while you're at depth ascend. It
Speaker 1: just tears. It's going to rip the walls apart. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that was a clever way, you know, for them
Speaker 1: just kind of wherever in the sub to kind of
Speaker 1: have a semi accurate measure of how deep they are.
Speaker 1: I like that idea. Uh. Fortunately, with the pleasure subs
Speaker 1: we're talking about, that would not really be a factor
Speaker 1: for most of them, because most of them, again are
Speaker 1: like one or two person ones for the for the
Speaker 1: real pleasure. So there's something that are like five or
Speaker 1: seven people. But that then it's like a pilot sitting
Speaker 1: in the front and then a group of people saying
Speaker 1: kind of behind or to the side of the pilot
Speaker 1: and you can kind of look through like an observation
Speaker 1: window an underwater bus. Yeah, yeah, with a big bubble front.
Speaker 1: And you know that's the thing is that all of
Speaker 1: these that we found, uh, sight seeing I guess, or
Speaker 1: just being able to see everything around you is keyed
Speaker 1: in this. It's not it's not like a military subwhere
Speaker 1: you know, again it's instruments and you're down in the
Speaker 1: depths where it's dark. This is all about being able
Speaker 1: to connect with the water, the you know, the the um,
Speaker 1: the aquali, the aquatic life. I guess it's a struggling
Speaker 1: for words. Yeah, it's all about being able to see,
Speaker 1: you know, animals like like dolphins and whales and all
Speaker 1: the varieties of fish. So you definitely want nice large
Speaker 1: viewable like ports that you can look out. You want
Speaker 1: and you want a a vehicle that you can operate
Speaker 1: by sight like you can you can navigate by sight,
Speaker 1: I mean, you would still have instrumentation to keep you
Speaker 1: aware of where your relative position is compared to say,
Speaker 1: let's be honest, you're super yacht, because chances are that's
Speaker 1: how you got out to wherever you are anyway, So
Speaker 1: you've gotta be able, you know, you need to know
Speaker 1: where you're super yacht is. The most of these have
Speaker 1: operating uh, like you small operating hours that range between
Speaker 1: like four and eight hours somewhere around there. Some of
Speaker 1: them are less than that. So obviously you don't want
Speaker 1: to go too far away because if you do, then
Speaker 1: that's gonna be a lot of rowing for you to
Speaker 1: get back to your super yacht. Almost all our electric
Speaker 1: operation as well, Yeah, yeah, they all all the ones
Speaker 1: I came across where lithium battery powered. Uh. A lot
Speaker 1: of them have a specific type of of buoyancy. It's
Speaker 1: fixed positive buoyancy is what's called yes. That means that
Speaker 1: when everything is turned off, it is naturally bullyant, so
Speaker 1: it'll it'll float to the top. So for example, the
Speaker 1: Dragon one you were mentioning earlier, it has those two
Speaker 1: rotors that are like almost like a drone rotors right
Speaker 1: that that are vertically aligned. Well, those are what allow
Speaker 1: you to stay under the water. Along with forward momentum.
Speaker 1: It's got some of that same design that I mentioned
Speaker 1: from centuries ago, where moving forward helps drive the nose
Speaker 1: of your vehicle down a little bit, so it keeps
Speaker 1: you submerged. But the two rotors definitely maintain that and
Speaker 1: allow you to have a nice level attitude while you're
Speaker 1: going down there. Uh, all that turns off, then it's
Speaker 1: just gonna rise up to the top of the water
Speaker 1: because it's positively bulliant. Yeah, and control of that is
Speaker 1: very simple. I mean I said, they're trying to make
Speaker 1: it as easy as possible for everybody now to use
Speaker 1: these and uh, you know, the the left hand I
Speaker 1: believe operates the up down attitude of the of the
Speaker 1: you know, of the ship, and the the other hand,
Speaker 1: your right hand would operate a joystick, which would allow
Speaker 1: you a little further movement left, right, you know, forward, backward,
Speaker 1: that type of thing. So it's very very simple. And
Speaker 1: these these particular ones we're talking about, like the Dragon,
Speaker 1: are design kind of like a fighter jet where you've
Speaker 1: got the the pilot and passenger. It's front and back
Speaker 1: type of seating arrangement, seated side by side, which actually
Speaker 1: kind of think is kind of cool. That's a real
Speaker 1: cool design. Yeah. They also have one called the super Falcon,
Speaker 1: which is it looks more like a jet than the Dragon.
Speaker 1: The Dragon looks kind of like a car, and the
Speaker 1: super Falcon looks kind of like a jet. It's a
Speaker 1: little or needle shaped. Um it's it's almost twenty ft long.
Speaker 1: So they still say it's one of the smaller personal
Speaker 1: submersibles that can fit on your typical super yacht. And
Speaker 1: I'm thinking all of these words don't make sense to me.
Speaker 1: Smaller personal submarine and typical super yacht. All of that
Speaker 1: is like so antithetical to my experience that I'm having
Speaker 1: difficulty imagining it. By the way, if you're a listener
Speaker 1: of tech stuff and you have a super yacht and
Speaker 1: you would like to show me what a super yacht's
Speaker 1: all about, I'll take you up on it. Um, Because
Speaker 1: I've never been on one. I've been on cruise ships.
Speaker 1: That's as close as I've managed to get personally own
Speaker 1: cruise ships. No, I know, the cruise ships I was
Speaker 1: on were owned by enormous corporations, including one that has
Speaker 1: a couple of really popular theme parks around the world. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, these are these are your basic kind of
Speaker 1: personal submarine craft. They use electric motors. Uh, they use
Speaker 1: electric propellers. Um. And you're showing me some more of
Speaker 1: the designs over here. Well, you know, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I when we were talking about personal watercraft, I was thinking,
Speaker 1: where have I seen some good examples of this? And
Speaker 1: I remember, you know, flying many years ago, and I
Speaker 1: fly all the time. But now they don't. Now they
Speaker 1: don't have that Skymall magazine thumb through anymore. But when
Speaker 1: they did have sky Mall, there was a company by
Speaker 1: the name of and I hope I don't botch this,
Speaker 1: but it's it's Hammocker Schlimmler, Hamaker, Schlimmer Schlimmer. That's that's
Speaker 1: a Hammerker Schlimmer. I was called Hsan. Yeah. I decided
Speaker 1: to check out their website because I knew the company
Speaker 1: was still around, so I did I did that searched
Speaker 1: for the word submarine or personal submarine or something like that.
Speaker 1: They make lots of toys for people who have way
Speaker 1: more money. Yes, it's a it's a very expensive toy
Speaker 1: store for adults. Right. And this is a uh, this
Speaker 1: is a list of the six personal submarine vehicles that
Speaker 1: they have for sale right now today. Yeah. They range
Speaker 1: as I'm looking at here from. Uh the low end
Speaker 1: is nine dollars, yeah, that's right now. The top end,
Speaker 1: the top end is a shocking two point seven million dollars.
Speaker 1: But you can fit five people, and well, that is
Speaker 1: a five person submarine, you're right, I mean that's a
Speaker 1: that's a big one that you were talking about before,
Speaker 1: with more like a mini bus. I so things you know,
Speaker 1: like you're you're you're shuttling a group of people. And
Speaker 1: the one that's ninety dollars is that one that I
Speaker 1: believe most people have probably seen this already. It's the
Speaker 1: one that looks like a whale, looks like an orca um.
Speaker 1: So this one, I've I've watched this one in action.
Speaker 1: It's got a it's got a gasoline motor. It's like
Speaker 1: a supercharged engine that you know, you you have to
Speaker 1: use fuel for and it can only go underwater briefly
Speaker 1: because gasolene motors also need absolutely right. And there's a
Speaker 1: maximum depth of somewhere I'm gonna ballpark this. I think
Speaker 1: it's around five feet because there's a snorkel on top
Speaker 1: that's disguised as a dorsal fin on this thing. And
Speaker 1: it does do you know, the the surface breaching where
Speaker 1: you know you can jump through the water, but and
Speaker 1: you can go under water. The problem is when you
Speaker 1: go under water, you have to be going so fast.
Speaker 1: You have to because you have to you know, have
Speaker 1: enough drive to push yourself under the water and it's
Speaker 1: pop back out again exactly that forward momentum. And I'm
Speaker 1: not saying this isn't really cool, but this isn't one
Speaker 1: of the subs like we're talking about where you can
Speaker 1: go under and kind of really get a look around
Speaker 1: and it's very peaceful and everything. This is more like
Speaker 1: a jet ski that can take you underwater. Absolutely, but
Speaker 1: you're you're underwater and you're going twenty five miles per
Speaker 1: hour when you're submerged, and on the surface you go
Speaker 1: as fast as fifty miles per hour. So it's fast
Speaker 1: and and it's it's clever looking, and I agree, it's
Speaker 1: really it really is cool and it'd be fun to
Speaker 1: be able to do that jumping motion. But it's not
Speaker 1: actually one of these, you know, I guess a sight
Speaker 1: seeing sub like some of the other ones we're talking about.
Speaker 1: And there's some weird designs here too, and if you
Speaker 1: if you look, I mean there's the of course, I
Speaker 1: think most people are familiar with this one. You've we've
Speaker 1: seen this one recently in the news. A lot um
Speaker 1: maybe not a lot but the submarine sports cars what
Speaker 1: they call it. It's two million dollars. It looks like
Speaker 1: a lotus a lease. And the problem with this one though,
Speaker 1: is that it's it's all open to the to the water.
Speaker 1: You're not inside in our krylic you know, sphere or
Speaker 1: anything like that. Like the rest of them. You have
Speaker 1: to wear scuba gear. Yeah, this one relies on Scooba gear.
Speaker 1: It's it's what is called a wet submarine. They have
Speaker 1: wet submarines and dry submarines, and wet submarine is any submersible.
Speaker 1: It's really people some people get really picky, they say
Speaker 1: you should call this submersible, not a submarine. It's a
Speaker 1: submersible that the cockpit is open, it is exposed to
Speaker 1: the environment, which means that obviously, if you're gonna be
Speaker 1: underwater for any extended a period of time rains, you've
Speaker 1: got to be wearing scuba gear, so you have to
Speaker 1: have your own personal oxygen supply and probably a mask
Speaker 1: of some sort, unless you really are comfortable with your
Speaker 1: eyes stinging like crazy, I guess so. Yeah. But the
Speaker 1: cool thing about this one, though, I mean, for that
Speaker 1: two million dollars, you can also just drive that one
Speaker 1: right out of the lake or the the ocean right
Speaker 1: and go right on the street. It has a maximum
Speaker 1: speed on land of seventy five miles per hour, so
Speaker 1: you can use it as a real car, an electric car,
Speaker 1: so it's like a super fast one of those super
Speaker 1: fast amphibious ducks, you know they take people on tours,
Speaker 1: except this one actually goes under one seventy five land,
Speaker 1: but underwater you're you're limited to about two knots when
Speaker 1: you're submerged, so it's not very quick underwater knots a
Speaker 1: nautical miles, And it's an electric car that only has
Speaker 1: an eighty mile range when you're on land, so it's
Speaker 1: it's fairly limited in that. And that's well for an
Speaker 1: eight you know, I'm sorry, a two million dollar cars.
Speaker 1: So you're essentially putting it into the trailer of a
Speaker 1: truck and then you're hauling it to the somewhere near
Speaker 1: the east side. What I do is I drive it
Speaker 1: near the beach and then just for the show, you know,
Speaker 1: you drive it right right onto the boat launch and
Speaker 1: right in the wall. Think and if you're a real character,
Speaker 1: you might be like, oh no, I've lost control and
Speaker 1: you just slowly drive right into the lake or ocean
Speaker 1: or whatever. Folks, well, who wouldn't do that at least once? Right,
Speaker 1: It might be a little hard to understand you because
Speaker 1: you'll probably have some some like the you know, the rebreather,
Speaker 1: the scuba rebreather and your own. But the effect will
Speaker 1: be there, Yeah, the effect would be there. And there's
Speaker 1: another one that's maybe the most unusual looking one really,
Speaker 1: and that's this one they call the Amphibious Subsurface Watercraft.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and this is the one that I probably
Speaker 1: remember seeing in this magazine for years. It seems like
Speaker 1: an older design. Uh. This one has two parts to
Speaker 1: it and it doesn't really go as deep as you
Speaker 1: might expect either. It's it's the well, the top part
Speaker 1: floats like and you can you know, have your head
Speaker 1: up in the upper area there. It's also enclosed and
Speaker 1: it flows. It floats with that almost like a raft
Speaker 1: above above the water below. It is kind of this,
Speaker 1: I guess it would hang down below the water surface,
Speaker 1: and it's a it's a sphere, another arcroic sphere where
Speaker 1: two people can sit and observe whatever is below you.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like a glass bottom boat, except
Speaker 1: that it actually has a secondary almost like a secondary
Speaker 1: vehicle position below the primary one, and that one is
Speaker 1: under the water, yes, and that has tracks as well.
Speaker 1: So this is another one you can drive into the
Speaker 1: water and you know, right onto a trailer if you want.
Speaker 1: Now it's it's not roadworthy. It's not something that you
Speaker 1: can take on you know, the streets and drive you know,
Speaker 1: to the ocean or whatever you have to. You have
Speaker 1: to get this one to the water. But you know,
Speaker 1: within the case with the other ones, you would have
Speaker 1: to find a dock or you'd have to find a
Speaker 1: crane something like that, or launch it from your super Yet,
Speaker 1: as you said, right, so they're even more you know, difficult,
Speaker 1: more complex to launch than than would be one of
Speaker 1: these two that you can drive in to the water.
Speaker 1: But a man, I mean that Okay, that one we
Speaker 1: just talked about, that that subsurface warcraft. That's that's three
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, so you're still talking a pretty
Speaker 1: high entry price for something like this. So you know
Speaker 1: that Richard Branson he famously purchased a deep flight Merlin submersible,
Speaker 1: so same company that does the deep Flight Challenger, which
Speaker 1: was the one that James Cameron took down to the
Speaker 1: Marianna Trench the deepest dive. He he did two of
Speaker 1: those two deepest dives. Um he uh. He got that
Speaker 1: one down there and was uh, you know that that
Speaker 1: got all the news. But Richard Branson went out had
Speaker 1: and bought a deep flight Merlin. Slightly different is a
Speaker 1: wet sub so it's open cockpit um exposed to the ocean.
Speaker 1: That one only six hundred thousand dollars, so only twice
Speaker 1: as much as the one you were looking at their
Speaker 1: um and it was called the Necker Nymph. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't ask questions and just read this the information. Uh.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about a couple of others before
Speaker 1: we sign off, because we've we've got there's so many
Speaker 1: that we can chat about that are ridiculous. There there
Speaker 1: are two things that we've got to talk about. Thing
Speaker 1: number one. We started off this conversation early on you
Speaker 1: talked about how there's a market for this because as
Speaker 1: as evidence, there's a market for high end, handmade luxury cars.
Speaker 1: We've talked about those in the past, like things like
Speaker 1: Bentley's and stuff. Aston Martin made a big announcement last
Speaker 1: year about how the company was partnering with the personal
Speaker 1: submarine company Triton to create a new high end luxury
Speaker 1: personal sub and so all we know is the barement
Speaker 1: oum that Aston Martin has gotten involved in the design stage.
Speaker 1: We've seen a picture of the concept, although it's a
Speaker 1: computer generated image. It's not an actual prototype. Um not yet,
Speaker 1: not yet. It is more of that floating orb style
Speaker 1: of submarine. It's less of like the sports car looking
Speaker 1: type thing. Uh, it's still in the concept stage. We
Speaker 1: have no idea how much it's gonna cost, but if
Speaker 1: it's by Aston Martin, I would suspect pretty penny would
Speaker 1: be in the range. Well, I've seen numbers around, like
Speaker 1: you know, four million, dollars. That that to me is
Speaker 1: not at all surprising because you look at just Aston
Speaker 1: Martin sports cars. Depending on the ones you're looking at,
Speaker 1: like the the Aston Martin one seventy seven, there are
Speaker 1: only seventy seven of them ever made. These were a supercars,
Speaker 1: that high end luxury supercars that could have a top
Speaker 1: speed of like two twenty miles per hour. Those went
Speaker 1: for one point eight five million dollars apiece, and now
Speaker 1: there's only seventy six of them. There was a crash
Speaker 1: in Hong Kong, or down to seventy six of those.
Speaker 1: Aston Martin a m dash RB zero zero one price
Speaker 1: tag of three point nine million dollars. That one does
Speaker 1: not go on sale until well this year. So Scott,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've put aside any money. I've
Speaker 1: already got a down payment, right, yeah, I'll have this
Speaker 1: paid off in three thousand years. I have, I have
Speaker 1: a check ready to go. I just have a signed Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. Well, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: as strange as you might think for Aston Martin to
Speaker 1: be involved with something like this. A lot of automakers
Speaker 1: have collaborated with luxury yacht makers to create some incredible
Speaker 1: super yachts, you know that are powered by Lamborghini or
Speaker 1: powered by Bugatti, places like that. Well, Aston Martin has
Speaker 1: done this in the past as well. They have a
Speaker 1: one thousand, forty horsepower power boat that I think it
Speaker 1: starts around one point six million, but it's a spectacular
Speaker 1: looking boat. And it's it's, you know, I guess, a
Speaker 1: break from the usual for them, you know, to do
Speaker 1: something like that. It's not something normally do. But they
Speaker 1: have this new branch at Aston Martin now that I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's a branch a branch is the
Speaker 1: best way to say it, but a new division maybe.
Speaker 1: And it's called Aston Martin Consulting so AMC, which I
Speaker 1: think is a funny name for Aston Martin Salting Big
Speaker 1: given AMC. You know motor saters, Yeah, well theaters. I
Speaker 1: was thinking that's funny. I was thinking American motors. Um. So,
Speaker 1: you know, they have all these side projects and they're
Speaker 1: doing things like, um, they're creating what furniture they're creating
Speaker 1: U their designing. Really it's it's it's they're they're pairing
Speaker 1: up with other businesses that want to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: get some of their expertise on design engineering, you know,
Speaker 1: a structural uh um um stability, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: you know whatever. I'm I'm searching for words here. But
Speaker 1: they're doing a bunch of really crazy things right now.
Speaker 1: For Aston Martin. You wouldn't tink a typical car company
Speaker 1: would do something like this. Um. One thing, well, of course,
Speaker 1: this is one. One thing they've tried. Is this the submarine.
Speaker 1: Another thing is Aston They're they're getting into building residences.
Speaker 1: So Aston Martin has building residences in I believe it's
Speaker 1: in um. I think it's in Miami. Let me take
Speaker 1: a quick period. It's it's uh. The price is something like,
Speaker 1: you know, fifty million dollars. So one of these. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you're gonna find out that everything was made by hand,
Speaker 1: not on like an assembly line or anything like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right. It's a but they're there, it would it
Speaker 1: has less of a an Aston Martin uh touched to it.
Speaker 1: Then you might think, you know, their logo is not everywhere.
Speaker 1: It's just simply that they're helping with the design of
Speaker 1: this this ultra luxury condo or you know, or I
Speaker 1: guess its condos. I guess that would be the way
Speaker 1: to say it, but um, some of these penthouses are
Speaker 1: you know between um, you know, up to nineteen thousand
Speaker 1: square feet. It's one of those types of places really luxury,
Speaker 1: real luxury apartment really if you want to put it
Speaker 1: that way, condo um, which I thought was strange. But
Speaker 1: on the same page they have a link to something
Speaker 1: called the Porsche Tower, so I guess Porsche is also
Speaker 1: getting into this, and they've they've done something where they're
Speaker 1: going to create this building where you're gonna be able
Speaker 1: to ride in your Porsche car or whatever car you have.
Speaker 1: It doesn't they're not gonna you know again, they're just
Speaker 1: designed by the Porsche Design Group. And you ride in
Speaker 1: a this is the strangest thing. You I'd in a
Speaker 1: glass elevator in your car up to your penthouse level suite.
Speaker 1: So you've got the floor that's right, but everyone it's
Speaker 1: not just the penthouse level. It's every level. So your
Speaker 1: garage and home and everything is right there, exactly right,
Speaker 1: and you're overlooking the ocean. It says it's spectacular. It's
Speaker 1: a different world, and it really is, you know, And I, um, again,
Speaker 1: look into those if you want to, But it's aston
Speaker 1: Martin residences, and then there's also the Porsche Design Tower
Speaker 1: if you want to want to check into that. But
Speaker 1: um strange that a car company, traditional car company, if
Speaker 1: you want to call it, that would would be getting
Speaker 1: into designing, you know, furniture and submarines, submarines, And yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right, it's a it's a very strange thought. Well,
Speaker 1: the last thing I want to touch on I mentioned
Speaker 1: it earlier at the very top of the show, the
Speaker 1: idea of concepts. As far as we can tell, there
Speaker 1: are no examples of real world versions of that. There's
Speaker 1: a company called Megalou, and Megalou has everything from super
Speaker 1: yachts to super yacht submersibles, so essentially the super yocht
Speaker 1: version of a submarine to even a semi submerged island
Speaker 1: artificial island that you could have to launch all your
Speaker 1: stuff off of for presumably a truly magnificent amount of money.
Speaker 1: One of the super yachts that they have the M seven,
Speaker 1: which I think is the largest one they're they're super
Speaker 1: yachts range. The designs range from seventy two ms to
Speaker 1: two hundred eighty three meters in links. All right, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna give that feet if you don't mind, sure al right.
Speaker 1: It goes from two hundred and thirty six ft long
Speaker 1: at the smallest up to nine hundred and thirty feet
Speaker 1: long at the long nine hundred thirty feet long. This
Speaker 1: is a submarine design. We're talking about I stressed design
Speaker 1: because there are like lots of c g I renderings
Speaker 1: of this, but as far as I can tell, none
Speaker 1: have ever been built. Uh. The M seven has been
Speaker 1: estimated to costs that around two point three billion dollars
Speaker 1: with a B. And these are the ones that you
Speaker 1: can configure as as a couple of different things, right,
Speaker 1: So the configurations are you can you can configure it
Speaker 1: as a restaurant and bar for between twenty four and
Speaker 1: thirty six guests. You can configure it as a conference
Speaker 1: or a business layout, so you know, if you want
Speaker 1: to hold your your your meetings under the sea, have
Speaker 1: at it. And you can also convert I guess I
Speaker 1: have it have it laid out as a private submersible yacht,
Speaker 1: so you can you can cruise the world in your
Speaker 1: own private submersible yet under the under the surface of
Speaker 1: the ocean. No one the wiser your travel in the world.
Speaker 1: You have your I mean obviously if you're that wealthy,
Speaker 1: you have your own dedicated crew that's operating everything. You
Speaker 1: have to be a big crew to yeah, the The
Speaker 1: various layouts can include things like an onboard gym, a spa,
Speaker 1: a cinema, a gaming room, a library, an elevator because
Speaker 1: this is a big enough vehicle where you actually have
Speaker 1: to use an elevator to go up and down, different decks, um,
Speaker 1: multiple bars, v I P suites, ridiculous designs. Now, as
Speaker 1: we said, there's no images. There are no images anywhere
Speaker 1: of any of these actually being built. These are all
Speaker 1: things like we can do this for you, you just
Speaker 1: have to write us the check. So, uh, it makes
Speaker 1: me wonder how a company like that stays in business
Speaker 1: because obviously if they had ever built one, there'll be
Speaker 1: pictures everywhere. You couldn't get away with not having pictures.
Speaker 1: Check out the site. It's it's Miguelou And if you
Speaker 1: if you want to do just a Google keyword search,
Speaker 1: you'll find that and you can see all these different
Speaker 1: layouts that they have and it's really it's fantastic. It's
Speaker 1: pretty exciting. I first saw it, I thought, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: this ISNA. This is amazing, I've never never seen with
Speaker 1: a hell of hate. And then you realize that, well,
Speaker 1: every single one of these is a rendering. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: migal Lose an Austrian company. Fun fact, Austria is a landlock. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a little tough for for a sub company. So
Speaker 1: just saying grain Assault, I mean, may just be that
Speaker 1: no one's written the check yet, Like I'm not. I
Speaker 1: don't wish to say that the company itself is just
Speaker 1: all smoke and mirrors, right, I'm just saying that I
Speaker 1: can't find any evidence of any product ever coming out
Speaker 1: of it. But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't. How
Speaker 1: does it stay solvent? I have no ideas. Could be underwater,
Speaker 1: paperwear could be so. I mean, there's so much more
Speaker 1: we could talk about. We can all obviously get into
Speaker 1: all the technical details, but that would require another episode.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing to me is that there are people
Speaker 1: who that are interested enough and wealthy enough to actually
Speaker 1: make this a viable industry, because otherwise these companies wouldn't exist.
Speaker 1: Some of them, like Mighelou, obviously seem to exist in
Speaker 1: the in the world of ideas where we haven't seen
Speaker 1: any realization of that, but others like the deep flight
Speaker 1: company Triton. They make these submarines. These are not theoretical,
Speaker 1: they're not hypothetical products. They actually do exist. You can,
Speaker 1: if you have the money, go and purchase them, get
Speaker 1: the training, and operate them yourself. Uh. And it's phenomenal
Speaker 1: to me again that it's a market big enough to
Speaker 1: support these companies, but it works. Yeah. Well, I mentioned those, uh,
Speaker 1: those h and s personal subs earlier. All of those
Speaker 1: come with something that they call comprehensive training, so it
Speaker 1: requires a lot of a lot of effort. But if
Speaker 1: you want to rent a sub you can get one
Speaker 1: from Norway, Norway right now. They'll ship it anywhere in
Speaker 1: the world. The cost you have to rent it for
Speaker 1: about a month, and that's about seventy five thousand euro
Speaker 1: I don't know, I didn't do the conversion. About a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars a month, so it's expensive. But again
Speaker 1: it's a place called you Boat Works w r X
Speaker 1: and they will ship it anywhere in the world. These
Speaker 1: are typically more like um um, you know, discovery submarines
Speaker 1: where they you know, they've got arms for special in
Speaker 1: the samples and things like that. So definitely those yeah, well,
Speaker 1: of course your idea, but but you know it's possible
Speaker 1: that you can rent one. That's that's the takeaway here
Speaker 1: is that you know that the ocean is becoming and
Speaker 1: even the Great Lakes or you know, whatever body water
Speaker 1: you're near is be coming more and more accessible to
Speaker 1: everybody because of these companies. And we know that only
Speaker 1: a very select few can afford to buy one, but
Speaker 1: sure anybody can you know, run one for the day
Speaker 1: or the afternoon or an hour and get that experience.
Speaker 1: And I think that's what you know, all the owners
Speaker 1: of these companies are really excited about. Right They're looking
Speaker 1: at the recreation vendors out there, the ones that again
Speaker 1: cater to like cruise ships and stuff like that, or
Speaker 1: or pleasure centers places where people go to travel to
Speaker 1: have a holiday of vacation. Uh, And I could definitely
Speaker 1: see that being a growing industry as well. It does
Speaker 1: give me some pause because anytime you're talking about increased
Speaker 1: activity around the oceans, you have to worry about the
Speaker 1: impact you're having on the environment. Most of these are
Speaker 1: at least clean vehicles, and that they're using electricity and
Speaker 1: they're not dumping like harmful materials directly into the ocean,
Speaker 1: but there are other you know, obviously, direct interference with
Speaker 1: things like coral reefs and stuff would be disastrous. So
Speaker 1: I'm sure that most companies out they're are doing their
Speaker 1: best to avoid that because that's their bread and butter. Right.
Speaker 1: Without those environments that are so compelling, there's no reason
Speaker 1: for you to go and pay for the experience. So
Speaker 1: it's in their best interest to preserve the environment as
Speaker 1: best they can for their own business. The one I
Speaker 1: just mentioned Norway, they ship out a couple of people
Speaker 1: that come with the sub for the full month. Well,
Speaker 1: so you get, you know, a person that's in the
Speaker 1: sub with you, you know, controlling it there, and then
Speaker 1: there's someone on the surface that they they maintain constant contact.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, Yes, that's that's You've got you know,
Speaker 1: specialized especially trained people there with you at all times.
Speaker 1: It's the only responsible way to do really important Yeah. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I know what to save up for for
Speaker 1: my next birthday. The next birthday better not happen to like.
Speaker 1: But I was gonna give you, I was gonna give
Speaker 1: you a gift card to Chili's. But I guess maybe
Speaker 1: I can't do you know, I could go for a
Speaker 1: good appetizer, I will stick with it, right, all right,
Speaker 1: Scott's right and checks everybody. That's what we've learned from
Speaker 1: this episode towards the bigger goal, you know. Gosh, Scott, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on the show again.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you joining us and and chatting about
Speaker 1: all things submarine and luxury oriented where we can sit
Speaker 1: here and dream of a life that I suspect I
Speaker 1: will never get a direct glimpse into. Well, thanks for
Speaker 1: having me again. I always enjoy our our conversations. And guys,
Speaker 1: if you haven't listened now that the show has sadly
Speaker 1: come to an end after a monumental run, but Car
Speaker 1: Stuff is an amazing podcast and all those episodes are
Speaker 1: still available for you to listen to. You We have
Speaker 1: a huge archive. It's a it's approaching episodes. I didn't
Speaker 1: have an actual actual count, but we were on air
Speaker 1: for just over nine years. Yeah, and that's a that's
Speaker 1: a lot of automotive topics. Yeah, so you should definitely
Speaker 1: check that off. You haven't heard it before because you guys,
Speaker 1: you guys have covered all sorts of things, everything from
Speaker 1: minutia about specific car companies, to general problems that people
Speaker 1: can experience with vehicles and how to work around that. Uh,
Speaker 1: and even just the evolution of the industry itself. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've seen cars go from something where the average person
Speaker 1: with a little bit of hard work and study could
Speaker 1: learn how to work on their own car and tinker
Speaker 1: with it to a world now where cars are becoming
Speaker 1: more and more like a black box, where it's all
Speaker 1: locked away from the consumer, and it's getting increasingly difficult
Speaker 1: to do even the simplest of car maintenance work on
Speaker 1: a vehicle yourself, if you have a brand new one,
Speaker 1: and that I know. Wait, no, I said, I wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna said I wasn't gonna do that to you. Didn't
Speaker 1: I that I wasn't gonna get you with the gutch
Speaker 1: was No, that's not my fault. That's not my fault.
Speaker 1: I want. I want the days where you can just
Speaker 1: get your vehicle and you can learn how to how
Speaker 1: to how to tinker with it yourself. I think those
Speaker 1: are I think there's a value to that. That wasn't
Speaker 1: at your moment, by the way, Okay, I knew that
Speaker 1: was coming. I realized. I realized as I was going
Speaker 1: down that path, I'm like, WHOA dangerously close? So we're
Speaker 1: just gonna wrap it up here. You guys, If you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions, question's comments, you've got a request for
Speaker 1: a specific episode topic, or maybe there's someone you would
Speaker 1: like me to have on the show, get in touch
Speaker 1: with me because that's that's how I find out about
Speaker 1: those sort of things. You can write to me. The
Speaker 1: email address for the show is tech Stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on
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Speaker 1: is doing a killer job over there, so you've gotta
Speaker 1: go over to Instagram find text stuff over there, join
Speaker 1: us in that group. And remember I live stream recordings
Speaker 1: of this episode whenever I'm not interviewing somebody on Wednesdays
Speaker 1: and Fridays, So just go to twitch dot tv slash
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. You'll find the schedule there and I'll talk
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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics because it how staff works dot com.