Samuel Colt's Submarine Battery: The Secret and the Enigma

Abstract

Samuel Colt's sustained efforts to secure the adoption of his Submarine Battery system as a major element in the coastal defenses of the United States have long constituted an obscure yet potentially significant episode in the technological development of undersea warfare. Stimulated not only by apparent threat of renewed British naval assaults on the Eastern seaboard early in the 1840s, but also by notable and well-publicized advances by British military engineers in galvanic underwater demolition techniques, the development of Colt's novel harbor defense system was supported by limited Congressional appropriations during 1841-44, as well as by the encouragement of Samuel F. B. Morse and John William Draper at the University of the City of New York. Colt secured no comparable assistance from the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, of which he was an early member. The New England inventor's dogged secrecy regarding the precise character of his Submarine Battery, which he successfully maintained throughout four public demonstrations at Washington and New York, ultimately alienated cognizant military professionals, whose guidance or active participation Colt deliberately eschewed in refining his distinctive single and dual observer systems for mine firing control. Notwithstanding the apparent success of his climactic demonstration at the Washington Navy Yard in April 1844, the precise details of which yet remain open to conjecture, Colt was unable to secure War or Navy Department support either for the adoption of his galvanic mine system for coastal defense purposes or for Congressional payment of a contingent premium for the secret of his Submarine Battery.