Ships Beneath the Sea: A History of Subs and Submersibles - Softcover

Burgess, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595093787 ISBN 13: 9780595093786

Publisher: iUniverse, 2000

Synopsis

Ships Beneath the Sea is the adventureous story of man's determination to build underwater vehicles for exploring the mysteries of the deep.More than just a popular history of submarines and submersibles, it looks closely at the men behind these inventions. From alexander's legendary diving bell in 350 BC today's nuclear submarines, they are all here in dramatic detail-the magnificent men and their diving machines.Burgess enhances this facinating evolution with over 100 historically rare line drawings and photographs of often bizarre underwater vehicles. This book records an exciting chapte of our nautical history with a well-deserved "hurrah" for the men who lived it."An enthralling tale of magnificent men and their marvelous diving machines."Spyglass Publications,

About this title

About the Author

Robert F. Burgess who grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, built his first diving gear from an old WWII gas mask, gas station air hose, and a gasoline-powered air compressor, to dive down to an old shipwreck near Lake Michigan in 1944. An active scuba diver he has spent his life writing about adventure above and below water. With his wife he motor-scootered across Europe and boated halfway to Africa to live on the Mediterranean island of Majorca where he wrote a book about it. His books about sailing, shipwrecks, sharks, treasure diving, cave diving, and underwater archaeology are acclaimed for the author's ability to put the reader in the midst of the action. He met Ernest Hemingway in Pamplona and recently he returned there to back-track Hemingway into the Spanish Pyrenees while researching his latest book titled, Hemingway's Paris and Pamplona, Then and Now. Between trips, Mr. Burgess resides with his wife and a 6-toed cat named Pookie, in north Florida.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"On the afternoon of July 29, 1800, a party of picnickers along the banks of the River Seine near Rouen, France, hardly noticed the small sailboat moving sluggishly downriver on a light breeze. ...two men lowered and folded the sail, then disappeared into the small cabin - nothing in the least unusual. But what...shook the picnickers out of their lethargy was to see the vessel continue upriver with no visible sign of locomotion, then slowly sink from sight. ...seventeen minutes later...the boat surfaced...the men hoisted her peculiar sail and calmly sailed away.

What the picnickers had unknowingly witnessed was the first trial run of a remarkable submarine designed by...a young American...named Robert Fulton. It was twenty-eight years before French novelist and fictional submarine forecaster, Jules Verne, would be born...."

Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0595093787
• ISBN 13: 9780595093786
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 276