Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 7/The trials of an inventor - Part 1
THE TRIALS OF AN INVENTOR,
WILHELM BAUER, THE GERMAN ENGINEER.
Part I.
The story of Wilhelm Bauer’s life can scarcely be uninteresting to an English reader in these days when everything connected with sea-defences claims even painful attention. There is no wish here to attempt proving his claim to priority of invention, though the originality of his ideas must be acknowledged. The question of priority we must leave to those more conversant with the world’s battle for the development of new forces. How few cases there are, if we look back through the history of discovery, where any one man has held undisputed claim as sole inventor, even when the inventor can at all be identified. The reflection of a wide-felt requirement suggests the same idea to men who have no mutual knowledge but unconsciously by their sympathy with the needs of their age.
As this is only a biographical sketch, we may pass over the dim ages of pre-historic submarine navigation, of which the Edda gives us mysterious hints, telling us of some wondrous contrivance by which “Nordens Guder” penetrated the depths of the sea. Nor shall we be charmed into listening to the wondrous tale how great Kaiser Freidrich travelled beneath the waters searching for treasure.
Coming to modern times, many of us remember Fulton’s vessel which was to have carried away Napoleon from St. Helena, and which succeeded in giving a very uncomfortable breakfast to several worthy citizens of London beneath the level of the Thames. Then came Jansen’s smuggling apparatus, 1834, which was, however, effectually put down by the English Parliament. And so, passing over several other experimenters, we reach the subject of our sketch.
Wilhelm Bauer was born in 1822, at Villengen, in Bavaria. His father was sergeant in the Bavarian Chevaux Légers. The education he received was of the most elementary description—reading, writing, and arithmetic merely. He left school at the legal time, being twelve or thirteen years of age, and was then apprenticed to a turner; left his master, as the law requires, at the end of his time, to commence the “Wanderjahre.” From early childhood he had been addicted to mechanical contrivances—the source of many a lecture from parents and teachers upon the wickedness of idling and litter; but the lectures had been in vain, and now, in the course of his wanderings, arriving at Bremen, the first definite ideas of his future inventions began to form themselves in his mind.
He worked constantly at his trade, devoting every spare hour to study, and all his scanty savings to the purchase of books to aid it. But he grew depressed and disgusted with his lot, returned to Bavaria, and, hoping to secure a little more leisure to work out his thoughts, he enlisted into the ranks of the Light Horse. But his hammering and chips did not at all please his officers, and they were very glad to obtain permission for him to leave that regiment; and he then joined the Artillery, in which he vainly hoped to find perhaps some one who would feel sympathy in his endeavours. The old story again! Those in authority, as their kindest advice, could but counsel him to give up the wild plans, which only caused him loss of time, and attend better to his proper duties as a sergeant, to which rank he had been just promoted.
It was in 1849, when hostilities broke out with Denmark, that Bauer first began to see some hope in the future. He was ordered to the seat of war with his regiment. Many plans for defence and attack of ships and batteries were suggested to him by the events of the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, and especially the loss sustained by the Bavarians and Saxons in the Duppler Works from the Danish vessels turned his thoughts to the possibility of making a diving-machine, in which an enemy’s ship could be approached unseen and blown up. Some further reverses suffered by the Germans on the Schlappe made him still more bent on realising his ideas. Brooding over his plans whilst walking on the Jutland seashore one day, he suddenly found an admirable model for the form of his vessel in a placid-eyed little sea-dog demurely swimming by his side.
Not long afterwards, fortune bestowing on him a fine copper cauldron, he carried the prize in triumph to his tent, and spent the hours he should have slept in attempting to knock it into the shape of his friend the seal. The patrol, passing near, took up the genius to the guard house; he escaped, however, with a reprimand, and emphatic order to look in future to his proper business, of which tinkering certainly formed no part.
At the conclusion of the war, he returned to Bavaria with his regiment; but shortly left the service, finding his hopes and purposes just drifting to a dead-lock again under the blue and white flag.
He carried out successfully some experiments in Munich, and had become convinced that his “Hyponaut” (diver), must be “hermetically closed so that the air within should be free from any pressure of the superincumbent water, and retain the proper density for human lungs;” a want so notorious in the cartesian diving bell, and which subjects those who adventure beyond a certain depth to great inconvenience, or even death. He found, too, that the grenades for offensive operations must be so attached to the outside of his vessel, that they could from within be fixed fast to the enemy’s, and exploded from a safe distance by a galvanic battery and wire.
Seeing no opening for his views in his own country, his small purse, saved out of his pay, almost exhausted, he took his hopes, and the worsted striped collar of a non-commissioned officer into the Holstein army; of course, with the permission of his government.
A Marine Commission at Kiel shortly investigated his plans, declared them practicable, and allowed him thirty thalers, about four guineas, to construct a model one twenty-fourth of the size of his proposed “Hyponaut.” The model was made, and very satisfactorily proved its locomotive power under water.
General Willisen here came to the assistance of our inventor, opened a subscription in the Holstein army, to enable him, with some further help given by the Admiralty at Kiel and the public, to build and launch the wonderful vessel he had so long dreamed of. She was at length completed, but unhappily the gulden fell much short of the required sum; then came the army of intervention, making money still scarcer; and so, with nearly every part inadequate to its necessary resistive, or motive power, Bauer had to entrust her to her fate beneath the water, and would have lost his own life in her, had not his presence of mind been as great as his inventive genius.
Feb. 1st, 1851.—A great crowd was gathered round the harbour at Stafel to witness the submersion of the iron diver. It was, in its general form, not unlike an ordinary yacht, though much narrower. The shape of the seal had suggested the greater strength to be obtained by inclining the line of her head upwards to the centre of her deck. The deck was furnished with several windows of thick glass, and a hatchway to admit to the interior. The motive power for sinking or raising the vessel was secured by a pump admitting the requisite water to carry her down, which being expelled, she would necessarily rise again to the surface. A screw furnished the propelling action. A pair of gutta-percha gloves affixed to the head, enabled the exploding apparatus to be fastened to an antagonist’s vessel. We will not, however, linger over a particular description of the doomed craft.
As soon as Bauer was well under water, he found she was still weaker than he had feared, and though her trial swim was satisfactory to the greatest depth, he then ventured on 32 ft., yet he felt convinced any greater weight of water could scarcely fail to crush her in. So the immediate object with which she had been built, that of blowing up the Danish men of war lying in the harbour, had to be renounced, as she could not approach them from beneath.
Notwithstanding his better judgment, annoyed by the sneers and taunts of those who rejoice when another man’s work gives some realisation to their own ill prophecies on it, he consented to still further test the capability of his vessel, and at nine, a.m., on the 1st of February again she descended with him beneath the water. The boats which had seen him go down, waited and waited, at last with painful impatience, for signs of his return, but in vain. Two gun-boats came to assist, and attempted to discover where the lost explorers were hidden, by casting the lead. At length, faint cries for help were heard piercing the water, and the position of the sunken ark ascertained. Every means was now attempted to raise it, but to no purpose; ron cables were lowered down. Bauer succeeded in making them fast; but the vessel of 70,000 lbs. weight, was too heavy to be so moved; and he and the two courageous fellows, Witt and Petersen, who had volunteered to accompany him, were believed beyond any help on earth.
We will now descend to their prison-house.
Bauer’s former convictions were only too well-founded. He had scarcely sunk thirty feet when the pump began to fail, and it became apparent that it would be completely destroyed, or become leaky, if the vessel went deeper. He did not long wait the realisation of his forebodings, a few minutes and a dull crashing sound was heard,—the strong iron wall bent in a full foot on the right side; another crash, and the left threatened also to open to the waters. The pump could scarcely be worked. The brave captain still bade his companions “not to fear; so long as the iron walls were still true, they could escape, at the worst, by the hatchway.” They tell him they will not think of abandoning the vessel whilst there is still a chance of saving her, and work manfully at the leaking pump, though there is little possibility that, isolated from the upper air, there can remain enough to support life within the vessel till they thus slowly raise her to the surface.
Soon another crash came; this time her bottom had given way: the moments succeeding were the most fearful of the six hours of their imprisonment. Happily, however, the water had found but a very narrow inlet in the hold, and the sides and deck still held good. Any hope of escape, by assistance from above, had been renounced, though the cables and chains, lowered by their friends, gave them terrible anxiety, as they sometimes threatened to break the glass windows, and sometimes seemed likely to effectually hold down the hatch, the only chance now of safety. Petersen and Witt endeavoured to raise it, but 5544 lbs. of water still held it fast. Bauer had told his companions when the hold had given way that “now they could do nothing but wait until the water had risen around them so high that the compressed air should, by its own force, lift up the hatch;” he entreated them not to waste their strength in useless efforts, and wrapped his cloak round him, and taking his seat as high above the slowly rising water as possible, calmly awaited the four or five hours that had still to pass before the air could be sufficiently compressed to open the trap. His companions not knowing how well-founded was his advice, again and again laboured at the hopeless endeavour to pump out the water.
At 2.30 p.m., they were startled by an anchor being lowered upon them, and then another, threatening to break the iron window-frame. Happily this danger passed by. So the three waited and waited, the water still slowly mounting up, and the air becoming more and more dense and exhausted. The water had reached their shoulders, when Bauer directed the stronger of his two men to attempt the hatchway, the weight on which, balanced by the pressure of the compressed atmosphere, he knew to be now reduced to 80 lbs. Witt tried it, and it yielded at once, startling him by letting in a splash of water. He closed it directly, calling on his fellow captives to escape with him. Bauer begged the men “not to hinder or cling to each other, or they would all be lost.” Another moment and Witt was rising safely to terra firma. Bauer clutched at the hatchway by his right hand, trying to support his remaining companion by the left, who had become so exhausted and confused, that he grasped at anything for support, not knowing what he did; and Bauer, fearing he might not be able to get through the hatchway, then endeavoured to secure him by the hair, but the cold water had so benumbed his hand it was impossible to hold fast with it. Happily the sea-water rushing in on them, restored the poor fellow’s senses, and, in a few moments, they followed their companion to the surface, borne without any effort of their own by the rush of escaping air. They were greeted by cheers of rejoicing from the boats, which, for six long hours, had been watching, as they feared, over a grave.
Petersen and Witt had suffered so much from the cold water and compressed air, that they were consigned for some days to hospital. Bauer, supported by the inexhaustible spirit of the inventor, was restored to his usual health in a few hours. But the diving ship lay immovable forty feet under water, and, I believe, is there still.
Bauer wrote shortly after to a friend: “The whole thing was wretchedly built; the most necessary precautions in the construction of the machinery neglected through insufficient funds.” The Marine Commission, however, gave him a most flattering testimonial, in which they praise his “conscientious conduct in the management of the enterprise, and their full conviction he had established the practicability of sub-marine navigation.”
But, perhaps, the last words spoken by Witt, before they abandoned the Hyponaut, were the truest witness to this, founded as they were on no theoretical fancy, but through a very unflattering experience: “If we get up again, and another such ship is built, I’ll go in her. The principle is all right; we can’t help the pumps breaking.”
Much talk then ensued in the papers on Bauer and his achievements and difficulties, with no result to him, however, and he was thrown upon his own resources. He returned to Munich, constructed a model of the lost Hyponaut, again proved its locomotive power, and further, the practicability of supplying fresh air to the interior. The Bavarian government declined the invention; indeed, could not apply it, in the geographical position of the country. Bauer then offered it to Prussia, but unhappily had addressed one of the royal family before applying to the minister, so the latter never deigned to make any reply at all. Austria and the United States were equally incredulous. The Emperor Napoleon treated the idea with no more respect than his great namesake had shown to Fulton’s for building steam-vessels. At length, by the influence of a lady of high rank, the Austrian government were induced to investigate it, and he was summoned to Trieste. His last model had exhausted his remaining gulden, and he was only enabled to leave Munich through the assistance of a friend, a distinguished painter, who furnished the necessary funds.
March, 1852.—The model was submitted to the admiralty; it was declared satisfactory. The Emperor gave imperial sanction to the idea, a committee of scientific men expressed a conviction it was founded on correct physical principles, and then a marine commission advised a new hyponaut should be built at the estimated cost of 50,000 florins, offering 15,000 florins towards it; the Austrian Lloyds promised 10,000 florins, the Trieste Bourse another 10,000, and the Minister of Trade in Vienna was begged to furnish the remaining 15,000 florins. But his Excellency declared he would not consent to a kreutzer being so disposed of, as he considered Bauer’s notions totally opposed to the laws of Nature. This refusal was followed by withdrawal of the first 15,000 florins by the Minister of War, and as Lloyd’s and the Exchange could not undertake the whole expense, this second chance flitted into the limbo of dreams.
Bauer then went to Coburg, and proceeded thence with a letter of introduction to Osborne. He there exhibited his model before the Queen and her late Consort. It had behaved very satisfactorily, swimming and sinking as he directed, when, unhappily at the moment he was raising it to the surface, a vessel passed over the guiding rope, cut it through, and the model sank for ever to the bottom of the Channel. Again the hope vanished at the moment of realisation, but the good Prince gave some comfort to the much-tried inventor, supplying his purse sufficiently to go back to Munich and complete another model, with which he shortly returned to England in 1853, and for nearly three years was in constant correspondence with our Admiralty: made drawings, furnished plans and models, and when all these at last promised a successful issue, he was informed: “The English Government could not adopt submarine navigation whilst her present naval force met every possible requirement (!); could not encourage it for commercial purposes, as it would certainly be used for smuggling, and its value for scientific objects must be secondary to the interests of the state, especially as the invention might be misapplied, while England had no submarine fortification.”
Bauer, recovering this last disillusion, applied once more to the French Government, and was surprised by an invitation to Paris. He was there introduced to a marine commission appointed to consider his plans; they were at once declared essentially original and practical, but the commission demanded that Bauer should explain the secret of the locomotive power discovered by him, which in the hyponaut sunk at Kiel had been for greater economy replaced by treadwheels. To this Bauer would not consent except the Government made a contract with him, “that a diving-ship should be built, and when its success and that of the new motive power were proved, he should be paid a becoming remuneration.” The Minister of Marine would not enter into such an agreement and broke off the negotiation.
At once, Bauer made up his mind to return to Germany, when he suddenly received a letter and five guineas from Prince Albert; the letter begged him to proceed as quickly as possible to England, the Prince believing he had found the means for carrying out the submarine vessel. By the Prince’s influence, Bauer was shortly brought in connection with Messrs. Scott, Russell, & Co.; and for seven months was engaged in their establishment, furnishing plans and drawings, not only for an exploding diver, on the hyponaut plan, but also for an under-water corvette. The months passed by, and no steps were taken to put his plans to the proof, when Lords Palmerston and Panmure, sent 10,000l., to carry them into action. Now, surely, the luckless spider will reach his web, and Bannockburn be won! At last, there are funds sufficient, material of the best, intelligent assistants. But behold, all this, also, was vanity! Messrs. Scott, Russell, & Co. politely informed the inventor they could do without further assistance from him, and he might go. Bauer’s most trusted assistant was installed in his place, the 10,000l. were spent, and the affair ended, as it deserved, in utter failure.