I always pictured submarines as a modern invention, something that showed up around World War I alongside tanks and biplanes. Wrong by about 140 years. The first combat submarine attack in history happened during the American Revolution, piloted by a sergeant hand-cranking a wooden barrel under New York Harbor. And the deeper I went, the stranger it got: a Civil War sub that killed three of its own crews, nuclear boats that could circle the globe for decades but run out of dinner in three months, and an invisible highway in the ocean that carries sound halfway around the planet. Here are five true things about submarines that genuinely sank me.
Did you know the first combat submarine attack happened in 1776?
The world’s first submarine attack wasn’t launched by a superpower navy. It was launched by the brand-new United States, three months after the Declaration of Independence. The Turtle was a one-man wooden vessel shaped like a walnut, built by Yale-educated inventor David Bushnell and powered entirely by hand cranks and a foot pedal. On the night of September 6-7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee pedaled and cranked this contraption through New York Harbor and slipped beneath HMS Eagle, the 64-gun flagship of the British fleet, intending to screw a keg of gunpowder into her hull. The screw wouldn’t bite, Lee was running out of air and daylight, and he had to abort, releasing the charge to explode harmlessly in the harbor. The attack failed, but the point was made: submarines have been an American idea from year one. George Washington himself called it “an effort of genius.”
Did you know the first submarine to sink an enemy ship also sank itself… three times?
The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley may be the unluckiest success story in naval history. During testing in 1863, it sank on a training run and killed five crewmen. It was raised, and sank again weeks later, this time killing all eight aboard, including Horace Hunley himself, the man it was named after. They raised it a second time, found a third volunteer crew (imagine that recruiting pitch), and on February 17, 1864, the Hunley rammed a spar torpedo into the USS Housatonic and became the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship. Then, on the way home, it sank a third time with all hands. The Hunley spent 136 years on the bottom before being raised in 2000, third crew still at their stations. Final scorecard: enemy ships sunk, one. Own crews lost, three.
Did you know a modern nuclear submarine can run for 20+ years without refueling but only 90 days without groceries?
Here’s the beautiful absurdity of nuclear power. The newest American attack submarines, the Virginia class, are built with reactor cores designed to last the entire life of the ship, over 30 years, no refueling stop ever. The boat makes its own oxygen from seawater and its own fresh water too. In terms of propulsion and life support, it could theoretically stay submerged for decades. So what actually forces a submarine to surface? The pantry. A sub can only cram in about 90 days of food, and that’s with cases of cans famously stacked on the deck floors so the crew literally walks on their dinner for the first month. The most advanced war machine ever built, a multi-billion-dollar marvel that harnesses the atom, gets sent home by the same thing that ends every road trip: we’re out of snacks.
Did you know submarines don’t really sink and float… they fly?
We say a submarine “dives,” but what it’s actually doing is closer to flying. A submerged sub trims itself to nearly neutral buoyancy, effectively weightless in the water, and then moves up and down mostly the way an airplane does: with speed and wings. Those fins on the bow and stern are called control planes, and they work exactly like an aircraft’s control surfaces, angling to generate lift up or down as water flows over them. Submariners even use the phrase “angles and dangles” for the steep climbing and diving maneuvers they practice, and helmsmen sit at aircraft-style control yokes. The main difference between a sub and a plane is the fluid, and it’s a big difference: water is about 800 times denser than air. So next time you picture a submarine, don’t imagine a sinking ship. Imagine a 7,000-ton airplane doing slow-motion aerobatics in the dark.
Did you know there’s a layer of the ocean where sound can travel thousands of miles?
About a thousand meters down, the ocean has a secret: a natural sound pipeline called the SOFAR channel. At that depth, temperature and pressure combine to create a zone where sound waves get bent back toward the middle instead of scattering, so a noise can ripple along for absurd distances. How absurd? In a famous 1960 experiment, depth charges detonated off Perth, Australia were picked up by hydrophones near Bermuda, roughly 12,000 miles away, on the other side of the planet. The Navy originally mapped the channel to help rescue downed pilots (SOFAR stands for Sound Fixing and Ranging) and later used it to build the top-secret SOSUS network that tracked Soviet submarines through the Cold War. Scientists believe whales may exploit the same channel, which raises the possibility that whale calls are carrying across entire oceans. The ocean has a telephone line, and it’s been in service for millions of years.
Send this to someone who thinks they’d survive on a submarine… then remind them the fresh vegetables run out in week two.
