Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: back to Park (ID:fanpu2019), by Ma Zhiheng

More than 170 years ago in Spain, a young man began to raise money to build a "robotic fish" that could dive. He hopes that fishermen can use this wooden submersible to safely collect corals. However, like many failed inventions in history, he always worked in a shortage of funds and failed in the end. But his second-generation "robot fish" briefly got rid of the "shackles" of manpower and became the starting point of the air-independent propulsion system (AIP) used in modern submarines.

In the courtyard of the Museu Mar í tim Barcelona in Barcelona is a device made of wood that looks like both a horse noodle fish and a submarine. If you don't look at the sign, you are likely to mistake it for a sculpture of navigational culture or a closed museum commissary. However, more than 160 years ago, there was a submarine that looked like this and swam in the waters of the port of Barcelona. Moreover, it has a "successor" who looks like a barracuda.

If the publication could not be done, the builders of the two submarines were the son of a hoop craftsman in Figueres, Catalonia, named Narcisse Montulio Istario (Narcs Monturiol i Estarriol). Although he majored in law at university, he didn't work in law for a day after he got his degree. Instead, he wanted to be a publisher. In 1846, at the age of 27, he started a publishing company in Barcelona to produce newspapers, magazines and pamphlets promoting feminism and utopian socialism. These very avant-garde ideas at that time also attracted some loyal readers for him.

However, the good times did not last long. In 1848, revolutions against autocratic monarchy took place in many parts of Europe. The Spanish government thought that Montulio's remarks affected social stability and ordered him to stop publishing a magazine promoting utopian socialism. He had to leave Barcelona and run off to France. The next year, he returned to Barcelona, only to find that the government had issued a series of bans on the publishing industry. It was a terrible feeling to dance in chains, and in his opinion, publishing had no future. When the atmosphere in Barcelona became more depressing, he decided to stay out of the limelight in the coastal town of Cadaq é s.

In order to make ends meet, Montulio began to sell landscapes at the seaside, which made him often encounter poor fishermen who dived to collect corals. These people do not have any diving equipment, just take a deep breath and go down to the sea, dig up the corals with their crude tools and sell them on shore. Although the decorated corals will eventually become expensive luxuries, these fishermen at the end of the industrial chain can only get barely enough money to make a living and risk their lives for the job. Shortly after Montulio arrived in Kadakos, he saw with his own eyes a fisherman who had held his breath for too long and finally drowned.

The miserable life of these fishermen made Montulio deeply aware that the world is full of all kinds of exploitation and injustice, and that he should do something to protect the weak. After thinking hard, he found a solution: since printing presses and lead movable type could quickly print thousands of newspapers and books without the hard work of copywriters, he might be able to build a machine. so that people can sit on it to dive safely underwater and dig all kinds of treasures in the sea to get paid. In his view, underwater navigation is even a symbol of equality: while the oceans around the world are being divided, the world below the surface is an unruly new world in which people can navigate freely. This is like the popularity of printing presses and lead movable type, which has greatly reduced the price of books, so that ordinary people have the freedom to read.

But Montulio also knew that his idea was too advanced for Spanish society at that time, and maybe if he said it, he would become the laughingstock of the country. It was not until 1857 that he finally decided to put his idea into practice with the encouragement of his friends. In September of that year, he managed to raise 10,000 pesetas (then Spanish currency) worth 3.2 kilograms of gold and registered the first Spanish business association to study underwater navigation in Barcelona.

The following year, Montulio published a paper entitled "El Ict í neo barco-pez", introducing his idea to people. According to his explanation, the fish's body is most suitable for moving in the water, and this "underwater boat", that is, the submarine, is an omni-directional imitation of the fish. The fish swim by swinging the caudal fin, the other fins are used to keep the body stable or turn in the water, and the swim bladder is responsible for adjusting the depth of the fish in the water. The "underwater boat" he wants to build is propelled by propellers set at the tail, adjusting course with the rudder of the tail; the sledge at the bottom is like the dorsal fin of a fish, but moved to the abdomen to maintain the stability of the hull; the ballast tank in the boat is like a swim bladder, which adjusts the depth of diving by injecting water and draining water. So he combined the Greek words "ikhtys" and "naus" and used the word "fish boat" to describe his submarine.

In his later years, Narcisse Montulio used fish as his teacher to explore the underwater world. By the time the paper was published, construction of the "fish boat" had already begun. But in Spain at that time, the knowledge of ship design was still part of naval engineering and could only be mastered by military engineers, while Montulio had no professional training in this field and only had experience in carpentry as a teenager. Therefore, the work of improving the design and construction of the "fish boat" was done jointly by Montulio and the team of shipbuilding engineers he hired. This way of working makes the "fish boat" an important milestone in the Spanish industrial revolution-because it may be the first time in Spanish history that experienced craftsmen and "trained" engineers have worked together on an engineering project.

Montulio hopes that the fish-shaped boat will eventually be able to dive to a depth of 500 meters, a figure comparable to that of modern military submarines. At that depth, the water pressure is already equivalent to 50 atmospheres, and the most pressure-resistant shape is the sphere. He wanted to build a pressure chamber out of steel and put it in a fish-shaped wooden shell as a safe place for the crew. However, because of the very limited funds, he had to settle for the second best and change the pressure chamber into wooden one.

Montulio, the son of a hoop drummer, made a pressure chamber out of olive wood with a slight modification of the barrel. It is an olive-shaped ellipsoid with a long diameter of 4 meters and a short diameter of 2 meters, reinforced with 2 mm thick copper skin and reinforced with oak hoops. The interior of the cabin has about 7 cubic meters of space and can hold four people; on the outside is a fish-shaped hull that is 7 meters long, 3.5 meters high and 2.5 meters wide. On the side of the hull, the closest position between the pressure chamber and the hull is a pair of main observation windows, and the other observation windows are located at the top and bow. The glass of these observation windows is carefully made into a round table, in the shape of pudding, with a larger diameter on the side close to the water. In this way, when the "fish-shaped boat" submerges underwater, the water pressure will press the observation window firmly on the hull, thus ensuring the safety of the crew.

In the cavity between the pressure chamber and the fish-shaped hull, there are four ballast tanks called "swim bladder" by Montulio, which allows the "fish-shaped boat" to float and dive freely in the water. If they accidentally dive too fast and lose their balance, the crew can also move a huge weight in the fish-shaped hull back and forth to adjust.

To this day, deep-sea submersibles used in undersea scientific expeditions still use this layout, using pressure tanks equipped with observation windows to protect divers and passengers and allowing them to see the seabed directly through the observation windows; they also arrange ballast tanks between the pressure tanks and the hull, as well as various equipment that are not vulnerable to water pressure.

After diving underwater, ensuring the survival of the crew becomes a top priority. After calculation, Montulio found that the oxygen in the pressure chamber could provide for four crew members to breathe for about two hours, but in the last period of time, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the pressure chamber increased significantly, causing the crew to lose their strength due to lack of oxygen. So he installed a ventilator with calcium hydroxide in the pressure chamber so that the air in the cabin kept flowing through it. In the process, carbon dioxide reacts with calcium hydroxide and turns into water and calcium carbonate, allowing the crew to breathe "fresh" air and roughly double the amount of time they spend underwater.

But Montulio is not satisfied with this; he even wants to use potassium permanganate to react with concentrated sulfuric acid to produce oxygen directly under water. But the reaction gave off a lot of heat, and it was too dangerous to store a large amount of concentrated sulfuric acid underwater, so he abandoned the scheme at the last minute and placed a special small candle as a light source in the pressure chamber. Although the burning of the candle will consume some oxygen, but if the oxygen in the pressurized chamber is about to be exhausted, the flame of the candle will turn bright red, and the crew will immediately let the "fish boat" surface.

A replica of the first "fish-shaped boat" collected by the Barcelona Maritime Museum? source: Ma Zhiheng / Photography's first trial voyage on June 28, 1859, Montulio's "fish boat" began its first trial voyage in the port of Barcelona. For the sake of safety, he decided to dive to a depth of only 50 meters for the first time, but this has also exceeded the limit that people who dive directly without equipment can reach.

But even with such care, there was an accident in the trial voyage. At the bottom of the sea, there happened to be some wooden piles left by the port buildings that had been demolished before, but because of the barrier of the sea, they could not be seen on the shore at all. When the "fish boat" dived into the bottom of the sea, it hit the "undersea forest" made up of wooden stakes, lost a ballast tank on the spot, and the fish-shaped shell also broke several holes; the impact also cracked some of the glass of the observation window. fortunately, the unique structure of the observation window made the water pressure become the force of protective glass, and Montulio in the pressure chamber just escaped.

However, at this time, he did not feel lucky for narrowly escaped death. The construction of the "fish boat" has spent all the money he has raised, and if he spends money on repairing the damage caused by the accident, he will really be destitute. But diving with injury was really dangerous, so he decided to do only some of the most necessary emergency repairs and limit the maximum diving depth to 20 meters. His plan is to use the "fish-shaped boat" to verify and demonstrate technology; when people are interested in underwater navigation, there will be no shortage of investment.

Throughout the summer of 1859, Montulio and his crew conducted more than 20 trials in the port of Barcelona. The fish-shaped boat is quite comfortable in the water and is very safe when diving. But the only disadvantage has become its "fatal wound". Like many early submarines, the "fish boat" was driven by manpower, and the crew shook a crankshaft in the pressure chamber to turn the propeller. However, after all, human strength and reaction speed are limited, and even if all the crew work together, the propeller will not rotate too fast, and the resistance that the submarine needs to overcome underwater is much greater than that of the ship on the surface. As a result, the underwater "fish boat" is as slow as a snail, which makes it impossible to complete the task of collecting coral as originally thought, and it can be said to be useless.

But Montulio couldn't think of an improvement for a moment, because both steam and internal combustion engines needed oxygen to support combustion, and the little oxygen in the pressure chamber was simply not enough. He could only keep arranging trials, vainly looking for ways to make the propeller turn faster. Finally, in January 1862, an out-of-control freighter crashed into the dock where the fish-shaped boat docked, smashing the submarine, which had dived about 50 times, to pieces.

Montulio, who rebuilt a "robot fish", lost all the money he had invested in the invention. Fortunately, the port traffic accident drew the attention of the Spanish navy to his work and promised him a research fund to build a new "fish boat".

No one knows what kind of game will take place between the top echelons in Madrid in the following time. The only thing that is certain is that Montulio waited for more than a year, but the money was never put in place. Unwilling to waste any more time, he realized that he had to do something, so he wrote a long open letter to all Spaniards in the same style as he did when he started the magazine. In his letter, he explained the idea of a "fish boat" and highlighted the "selling point" of investment: underwater navigation is the "tuyere" of the future, and the underwater world is virgin land to be reclaimed, and his research will give Spain a head start in this field.

Perhaps the decline of the country is particularly unsatisfactory, and the letter has succeeded in arousing Spanish nostalgia for the maritime hegemony enjoyed centuries ago. In a very short period of time, a total of 300,000 pesetas of investment and donations poured into Barcelona from all over the country and Cuba, then a Spanish colony. With this money, Montulio reorganized the previously registered business community into a company called "undersea voyage" and began to build a new "fish boat II".

Based on the experience of the last fish-shaped boat, Montulio designed it into a slender streamlined shape to make it look like a barracuda or a bullet. Its hull is 14 meters long, 2 meters wide and 3 meters high. it is wrapped in a pressure tank with a volume of 29 cubic meters and four ballast tanks with a volume of 8 cubic meters. "Fish boat 2" is also equipped with calcium hydroxide ventilation device, coupled with the increased volume of the pressure chamber, so it can carry 16 crew members and dive underwater for about 7 hours, which is a big improvement over the last "fish boat".

Apart from the "one round and one long" hull, the biggest difference between the two submarines is that "Fish Boat II" has set up a small cylindrical command tower on the 1.3-meter-wide deck at the top of the hull, which is equipped with three pieces of circular glass with a thickness of 10 cm and a diameter of 20 cm as observation windows. This is because, according to Montulio's vision, "Fish Boat II" is no longer just a tool for collecting corals, but can carry artillery after necessary modifications and become a "secret weapon" to surprise opponents in naval battles, so it is necessary to reserve space for future military forces to command battles. However, due to the increase in the size of the submarine, the money is still not ample, so Montulio once again abandoned the plan to build a pressure chamber out of steel, and still chose a combination of olive wood, oak hoop and copper.

On May 20, 1865, Fish Boat II made its first trial voyage in the port of Barcelona, diving to a depth of 30 meters. With the arrival of summer, Montulio arranged an intensive trial plan for Fish Boat II so that it could be adjusted and perfected as soon as possible to attract investment from the government and the army. When the summer was coming to an end, he even installed a light gun on the Fish Boat II. Most of its gun body is in the pressure chamber, only a small part of the muzzle is exposed, and is roughly level with the deck. The crew can aim the artillery from the pressurized chamber and fire the shell from the submarine when the submarine only shows the command tower. But the accuracy of this gun is actually very poor, so unexpectedly it did not arouse the interest of the military.

This modification and the previous trial voyage consumed a considerable amount of money. Montulio suddenly found that the money he had raised was running out. Just then, news of the American Civil War reached Barcelona: the defeated Confederate military boiler modified a submarine called the Henry and used it to sink the Union frigate Hausatonic, which meant that the submarine had achieved its first success in a real naval battle. Encouraged by his eagerness to get an investment, Montulio immediately wrote to the U.S. Navy suggesting that the Union buy his submarines in order to compete with Confederate submarines. But he did not know that the Civil War was over by this time, and that President Abraham Lincoln, who led the North to victory and put an end to the chaos of division, was assassinated by the remaining parties of the South, which missed slavery. As a result, Montulio and others came to President Lincoln's obituary; his imagined transnational arms purchases naturally came to an end.

A replica of Fish Boat II? source: photography / Flemming Mahler Larsen, Montulio, who is desperate to add power to hit the wall continuously, finally realized the crux of the problem, that is, the human drive makes the submarine too slow. Fish boat II has a hull more suitable for underwater navigation, and a larger number of crew, but the speed is still not satisfactory. If you want to open the market for "fish-shaped boats", you must let it use mechanical power. But it is impossible to use an internal combustion engine underwater because it will quickly consume the very limited oxygen in the pressurized chamber, not only losing power to the submarine, but also killing all the crew. Using a steam engine doesn't seem to work either, but there is a glimmer of hope if you can find a way to boil water without relying on oxygen.

The difficulty of mechanical power, Montulio originally planned to build the third "fish-shaped boat", then started to challenge. On the drawing that is nearing completion, the hull and pressure chamber of the fish-shaped boat will be built of steel, and a custom-made steam engine will be arranged in its own cabin. But the money he has left is far from enough to build a brand new wooden "fish boat", let alone with steel. If you want to follow the path of mechanical power, you have to risk completely destroying the "fish-shaped boat No. 2" and try to fit the steam engine into its cramped pressure chamber.

Monturio decided to put all his eggs in one basket. He borrowed money to buy a steam engine with six cylinders and divided it into two parts himself, which were provided by two different boilers: the steam engine for surface navigation, which uses traditional coal-fired boilers; and the steam engine for navigation under water supply, which is the most technical part of the submarine because its boiler does not need conventional fuel or oxygen in the cabin to boil the water.

This magical ability is due to Montulio's use of peroxides. Since the discovery of barium peroxide by German scientist Alexander von Humboldt in 1799, the European scientific community has known several peroxides in the following decades and made a small number of them in the laboratory for chemical experiments. A handed-down formula shows that Montulio's "fuel" is mainly made up of 53% zinc, 16% manganese dioxide (the peroxides of manganese metal) and 31% potassium chlorate. It is also thought that in addition to these substances, he may also have added a small amount of magnesium and other peroxides. Chemical reactions generate enough heat to boil water and generate oxygen for the crew to breathe.

It can be said that after such a modification of the "fish-shaped boat II", has touched the threshold of AIP (Air-Independent Propulsion, air-independent propulsion) technology. However, since a considerable part of the pressure chamber is occupied by mechanisms and reaction vessels, the crew has been reduced to only two.

Source: the Ministerio de Cultura fell victim to tax avoidance on October 22, 1867, Montulio came to the port of Barcelona again with the modified Fish Boat II. The part of the steam engine used for surface navigation rotates the propeller at full speed, bringing the speed of the submarine to 4.5nautical miles (1 nautical mile = 1.852 km). On December 14, he put all the chemicals in their own place, and then steered the submarine to dive slowly. The heat generated by the chemical reaction really made the part of the steam used for underwater navigation mobile, and the speed of the submarine was significantly higher than when driven by human power. But just a few minutes later, the heat generated by the chemical reaction made the pressure chamber unbearably hot. Monturio had to bring the submarine to the surface, trying to dissipate the heat and dive again. However, by the time the temperature in the pressure chamber returned to normal, the chemical reaction had stopped and the boiler was getting colder and colder, and Fish Boat 2 had to sail back to the wharf.

Unfortunately, the trial voyage, which ended hastily, was the brilliant afterglow before the exit of "Fish-shaped Boat No. 2". Montulio invested more than 500,000 pesetas to develop the "fish boat", which not only used up all the money raised, but also was heavily in debt, but the "fish boat" showed no sign of being practical. People finally lost patience, and Montulio could no longer get new investments or loans. On December 23rd, his undersea navigation company went bankrupt, and the biggest creditor unceremoniously towed away the Fish Boat II to offset the loan that Montulio could not repay.

"Fish Boat II" was soon sold to an exotic collector. Coincidentally, at this time, the government began to levy ship tax. The collector who just bought Fish Boat II received the bill but didn't want to pay taxes on a boat that couldn't sail. So he asked someone to dismantle the submarine overnight, sold part of the steam engine used for surface navigation to a textile mill, and sold the rest of the material to the ship-breaking factory, leaving only part of the command tower to be transformed into bathroom windows. The collector then applied to the government to cancel the bill on the grounds that the ship was lost. The world's first AIP submarine fell victim to tax avoidance.

Fortunately, this is not the end of the legendary resume of "Fish Boat".

The model of "Fish Boat No.2" collected by the Catalan Technology Museum. PS: here is a colored egg. The museum made a mistake. Did you find it? Source: Ma Zhiheng / Photography Generation Legend is remembered in 1939, fascist Francisco Franco (Francisco Franco), with the support of Germany and Italy, won the Spanish Civil War. Knowing that Germany was making great efforts to develop submarine forces, he ordered people to collect technical data on "fish-shaped boats" and send them to Berlin to "donate treasures." Unexpectedly, Montulio's design nearly 100 years ago was admired by Helmuth Hellmuth Walter, a famous German rocket engine expert.

At this time, Germany has a very developed chemical industry, which has been able to mass produce hydrogen peroxide with a concentration of up to 80%. So, based on Montulio's experience in using peroxides, Walter designed a "Walter turbine" that uses hydrogen peroxide to fuel. The Vmur80 submarine equipped with this engine once ran at an astonishing speed of 28 nautical miles per hour underwater, which is equivalent to the level of modern nuclear-powered submarines. But it is dangerous to use high concentrations of hydrogen peroxide underwater, and the range of submarines powered only by Walter turbines is pitifully short, so such submarines have failed to become the mainstream of Germany's "underwater wolves".

The second World War greatly promoted the development of anti-submarine technology. Making submarines have the ability to navigate underwater for a long time, so as to survive on the battlefield, has become the goal pursued by the navies of the great powers. With the progress of chemistry, Monturi's idea of using chemical reactions to achieve AIP has shown its value again. The scheme of "bypassing" oxygen-assisted combustion, or using chemical reactions other than combustion to generate energy, has finally become a reality in Spain today.

In 2007, Spain began building a cutting-edge Smuri 80-class conventional-powered submarine for the navy. It is equipped with Europe's most advanced AIP system, which can extract hydrogen from bioethanol (alcohol), input it into fuel cells with oxygen, and convert it directly into electricity to drive the submarine through chemical reactions. The first three submarines of this class were named after three Spanish submarine pioneers in the 19th century, and the second of them was named the Narcisse Montulio.

The submarine, worth 1 billion euros, is a monument to Montulio's immortal deeds.

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