September 16, 2024 • 46 mins
Catalan inventor Narcís Monturiol fought for ideals like equality, freedom, and progress in the midst of a lot of social and political chaos in 19th-century upheavals in Spain and Catalonia. And then, he built submarines.
Research:
- "Submarines." Gale World History Online Collection, Gale, 2024. Gale In Context: World History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/IBQSYB773138840/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=bf089d4e. Accessed 26 Aug. 2024.
- “Wonderful, If True.” The Perthshire Advertiser. 1/11/1866. https://www.newspapers.com/image/806335027/
- Burgoyne, Alan Hughes. “Submarine Navigation Past and Present.” London, G. Richards; New York, E. P. Dutton & co. 1903. https://archive.org/details/submarinenavigat0001burg/
- Dunn, Rob. “The Writer Who Built the World’s First Engine-Powered Submarine.” Smithsonian. 9/17/2013. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-writer-who-built-the-worlds-first-engine-powered-submarine-8718089/
- Holian, Thomas. “Monturiol: The Forgotten Submariner.” Undersea Warfare. Vol. 7, No.3. Spring 2005.
- Hunter, James W. III. “Reviewed Work(s): The Resurgam Submarine: A ′Project for Annoying the Enemy′ byPeter Holt.” Journal of Maritime Archaeology, Vol. 14, No. 3. December 2019. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45218707
- F. “A Submarine Vessel.” Liverpool Mercury. 3/17/1866. https://www.newspapers.com/image/393326069/
- Lloyd, Nick. “Exploring the Depths: The First Fully-Functional Submarine.” Metropolitan Barcelona. June 2012. https://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/features/exploring-the-depths/
- Milkofsky, Brenda. “David Bushnell and his Revolutionary Submarine.” Connecticut History. https://connecticuthistory.org/david-bushnell-and-his-revolutionary-submarine/
- Puig-Pla, Carles and Antoni Roca-Rosell. “A Spanish Project for Submarine Navigation: Narcis Monturiol and the Struggle for Democracy.” Icon , 2003, Vol. 9 (2003). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23790674
- Puig-Pla, Carles and Antoni Roca-Rosell. “Narcís Monturiol (1819–1885), pioneer of submarine navigation.” Contributions to Science. Vol. 5, No. 2. 2009. DOI: 10.2436/20.7010.01.70.
- Stewart, Matthew. “Monturiol’s Dream: The Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World.” London: Profile. 2004.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Last year, when we took our podcast strip to Barcelona,
during some of our kind of unscheduled time in Barcelona,
my spouse and I walked down to the Maritime Museum
and there were some submarine models there that really caught
my eye. They had been designed by cattleum inventor Narcis Material,
(00:38):
and I found them to just be really beautiful and intriguing.
They looked kind of like a very well made wine barrel,
but if a wine barrel was shaped more like a
torpedo or a fish. And based on the very brief
descriptions on the signs there, it seemed like these submarines
worked a little bit better than a lot of other
(00:58):
submarines of their era. So, like so many other things
that went on the list, Narcis Monturial lived through a
lot of the nineteenth century upheavals in Spain and Catalonia
that we talked about in our episode on Manjuiq Castle
that came out on December sixth of last year. We
don't rerun episodes that recent as Saturday Classics, but I
(01:22):
do feel like it helps kind of contextualize some of
the stuff that was going on in a lot more
detail than we're going to get into today. But that
does mean before we get to the really cool submarines,
we are going to talk about Monturial's time fighting for
ideals like equality and freedom and progress in the middle
of just a ton of social and political chaos.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Narcis Monturial Yestariol was born in September of eighteen nineteen.
Some sources say on the twenty eighth, and others say
on the twenty ninth. He was born in Figettes in
northern Catalonia, northeast of Barcelona. He was one of five children.
Their father was a cooper, so in other words, a
barrel maker. Under the inheritance laws of the day, Narcis's
(02:08):
older brother was the one who would inherit their father's business.
So the plan for Narcis, which was the plan for
a lot of second sons, was that he would join
the priesthood. So to that end, he studied at a
monastery in Figaris and then at the University of Servera.
At the time This was the only university in Catalonia,
(02:29):
and some sources describe the education that he got there
as more comparable to today's high schools than to college.
But he just wasn't all that interested in the subjects
that would have been most relevant to going on to
joining the priesthood, things like philosophy, Latin and Greek. In
terms of academics, he was more interested in things like
(02:49):
science and medicine. Before long, he was also more interested
in revolution than in schoolwork. In eighteen thirty three, either
on his fourteenth or day or the day after, King
Fernando the seventh of Spain died, as we discussed in
the Monjuique episode from last December, Fernando's heir was his daughter,
Isabella the Second, who was only three. But Isabella was
(03:13):
only in line for the throne because of a decree
her father had issued that allowed for a woman to
become the Spanish monarch. Fernando's brother Carlos would have been
next in line without that decree, and Carlos declared himself king.
This led to the First Carlist War, which continued until
eighteen thirty nine. Broadly speaking, Isabella's side was more liberal
(03:37):
and progressive while the Carlists were more conservative, and people
who wanted to go even farther than a more liberal
monarchy also started a movement for democracy in Spain. By
the age of sixteen, Narcis had moved to Barcelona, where
his social circle was filled with revolutionaries and activists. One
of his friends and frequent collaborators was Abdo Tore, who
(04:00):
had been born in Figaris as well. Abdo Taradas was
a socialist who advocated for Spain to become a republic.
The University of Barcelona was re established in eighteen thirty six,
and Narci seems to have enrolled there to study law,
but there are some discrepancies about whether he graduated. He
(04:20):
never described himself as a lawyer or practiced law, and
there were times in his life when he really needed money,
and it seems like if he'd had a law degree
he might have had more opportunities to earn it. At
the same time, the style and quality of his writing
suggests that he had more advanced education than he would
have gotten at the University of Savera, which had been
(04:41):
declining in quality and ultimately closed in eighteen thirty five.
Some sources say he never graduated from the University of
Barcelona because he was so focused on his activism, and
others say it was because he kept giving his tuition
money to support the cause. Kind of two different flas
of the same thing.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah. Yeah, between eighteen thirty five and eighteen fifty five,
So for twenty years, Monturial launched or worked out a
whole series of radical and revolutionary periodicals, and this was
an ongoing cycle. He and some compatriots would start a
newspaper or a journal or a publishing house. Then they
would print a whole bunch of material criticizing the Carlists
(05:24):
or the government or Baldemiro s Bartero, who was Queen
Isabella's regent, or advocating for socialism or democracy or revolution.
Soon the police would show up and shut down the
press and arrest everybody, sometimes also storming their homes or
their businesses. At various points, Monturial was fled or was
(05:46):
sent into exile, first to Girona, then to his hometown
of Figaris, and then to the coastal town of Katakaise.
As soon as he could, he would make his way
back to Barcelona, and he would just do that all
over again. He also published treatises of his own, including
one that advocated against the death penalty in eighteen forty four.
(06:08):
He was also a member of La Melisia Nacionale, or
the National Militia, which fought against the Spanish military during
a number of popular uprisings and other unrest. We talked
about several of these in the Monjuique episode. He was
involved in two different uprisings that authorities dealt with, in
part by bombarding the city of Barcelona from the castle
(06:29):
at Montuique.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
In the middle of all.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
This, Monturial also tried to find ways to make money.
He learned to paint from his friend Ramun Marty Alcina,
who was considered to be one of the most important
painters in Catalan realism, and from time to time he
made some money as a portrait artist. He also invented things,
including a printing machine that could print and cut the
(06:54):
lined paper used for children's notebooks. Another invention was a
cigarette rolling machine which could make forty five cigarettes a
minute and then put them into a box. Monturial also
worked as a tutor, including tutoring his landlord's daughter. Her
name was Emilia, and as has been the case several times,
on the show recently, their relationship gets a yikes when
(07:17):
it's seen through a modern lens. In addition to the
fact that he was her tutor. When Narcis and Emilia
got married, he was twenty six and she was sixteen.
The two of them had very similar social and political views,
and they seem to have had a happy and loving
relationship that lasted for the rest of their lives. With
all of Narcis's various exiles and other travels, they were
(07:40):
sometimes separated for long periods, and their letters to one
another during these times are very loving and devoted, although
there were times, especially later in Narcisa's life, when their
circumstances did seem to cause them some strain. Emilia and
Narcis would go on to have eight children together, although
only three of those children lived to adulthood. The year
(08:03):
they got married, Montoreal started publishing a journal called La
Madre de Familia, which promoted the role of women in
families from kind of a proto feminist perspective. This was
definitely underpinned by the idea that women had a natural
family role, but he also called for equal legal and
political rights and access to education for women, and for
(08:26):
women to have protections against men who could mistreat or
harm them. This journal, like so many of Monturial's periodicals,
was short lived, though it lasted for only eight weeks.
When it closed, he started another one called La Fra Trinidad,
which advocated for the advancement of all of humanity, regardless
(08:46):
of sex. In eighteen forty seven, Monturial was introduced to
the work of French philosopher and writer Ettienn Kabe. Kabe
was a communist who had written a utopian novel called
Voyage to Acarias years before. Cab thought that for most
of history a small wealthy minority had been exploiting everyone else,
(09:08):
with that exploitation taking a series of forms including serfdom, slavery,
and unfair economic structures. He thought communism was the only
way to resolve this, and he wanted to establish a
communist utopia called Akaria, like in his novel In the
real world. We might talk more about this later, as
(09:28):
in during a whole different episode. Yeah, this is not
even It doesn't even scratch the surface of Ettien Caabe
really uh. Montoreal helps translate Cabay's book and published and
periodical for Cabay's followers The Montoreals also contributed some money
to Kabay's efforts to buy land and Texas for his
(09:51):
utopian project. After Kabe and his followers departed for the
US in eighteen forty eight, Monturial continued to promote his
idea in Catalonia. Of course, these writings also once again
caught the attention of authorities, especially as a series of
revolutions swept across parts of Europe in eighteen forty eight,
(10:13):
and Monturial once again went into exile, this time in France.
Montoreal returned to Barcelona in eighteen forty nine, possibly because
an amnesty had been announced at the end of the
Second Carlist War. From here, his activism became slightly more tempered.
While he had previously been part of the militia, his
(10:35):
rhetoric became more pacifist. He still advocated for a revolution,
but not a violent one. That didn't stop authorities from
shutting down his publications, though, including his pro democracy El
Padre de Familia Father of the Family, that was shut
down by judicial order in eighteen fifty. Around this time,
(10:56):
Monturial started spending a bit more time studying science and nature,
but he didn't entirely stop his radical publishing. He founded
a secret publishing circle called El Coorto in eighteen fifty three,
and when he once again fell under suspicion, they disbanded.
After almost two decades of this of just like starting
(11:20):
things and being shut down and being exiled, and starting
and shut down and exiled over and over, he was
starting to get discouraged, and for a while he thought
about joining the Akarians in the United States. Ultimately, though,
he decided to stay in Barcelona. In eighteen fifty four,
Spain embarked on a period of reform called the Biennio
(11:41):
Progressista or the Progressive Biennium. For a very brief moment,
Monturial was able to openly advocate for many of his
ideals without the threat of arrest or exile. He was
a speaker at the first meeting of a newly established
Republican party, where he steered clear of the idea of
communism and focused on topics like freedom, equality, and the
(12:04):
separation of church and state. His speech there was well received,
but the Progressive Biennium was short lived, ending just a
year later when Conservatives retook control. After that, Monturial was
once again exiled. This exile really changed his life, which
we will get to after a sponsor break. After the
(12:35):
end of the Progressive biennium, Narcis Material went into exile
in the seaside town of Kutacase, while his wife, Amelia
and their two daughters went to live with his mother
in Figueris. He tried to make ends meet there by
painting portraits. He also wrote poetry, and he grieved. By
this point, he and his wife had lost two children.
(12:57):
Emilio had died in eighteen forty an at the age
of twelve months, and Filamina in eighteen fifty four at
the age of four years. Abdo Tarraras and Ettien Kabe
also both died in eighteen fifty six. They had each
been enormously influential on Montorial and on his work and ideals,
so with their deaths really pretty close together, he lost
(13:22):
two of his biggest inspirations and collaborators. While in Katacase,
Monturial also spent time watching divers collect Mediterranean red coral.
This coral was used as a gemstone, including polishing and
shaping it to make jewelry, beads and artwork. Of course,
red coral has its own much bigger story. One that
(13:43):
is connected to slavery, globalization, environmentalism, and a range of
spiritual and religious beliefs and practices. But Monturial's focus was
on the divers and the dangers of their work. These
were usually men who worked from boats. In pairs, one
would dive to the seafloor, sometimes as deep as twenty
meters below, and stayed down for as long as they
(14:06):
could hold their breath, cutting and breaking pieces of coral
to then carry back to the boat. Then the other
would dive in and repeat the process. This all carried
obvious risks of injuries or drowning, and sometimes there were
also sharks in the water. During one of his earlier
periods of exile, in Kaida case in eighteen forty five,
(14:29):
Montreal had reportedly saved a diver who had been pulled
out of the water and was not breathing. In the
account of this, Montreal lifted the man up by his
feet so that gravity would force the water out of
his lungs. This can force some water out of a
person's lungs, but this is not what's typically advised in
(14:50):
cases of drowning today because it can cause vomiting and
delay the start of CPR or rescue breathing. So this
experience led Montreal to start thinking about a way to
make a vessel that could go totally underwater, equipped with
arms and a basket so that people could gather coral
from safely inside of it and then now back in Katakis.
(15:13):
A decade later he started actually working on this. This
involved learning everything he could about existing technologies for surviving underwater.
This started with diving bells, which date back to at
least the fourth century BCE. We talked about this more
in our episode on the history of diving technology, which
ran as a Saturday Classic in November of twenty twenty three.
(15:37):
And then from there Monturial learned about the work of
English mathematician William Bourne, who served in the Royal Navy
and wrote on ideas for controlling buoyancy in a completely
submerged boat, something that is critical to the successful operation
of a submarine. He also studied descriptions of a submarine
called the Turtle, developed by David and Ezra Bushnell of Connecticut,
(16:01):
which was used in attempts to attach mines to British
warships during the American Revolution. The Turtle had an air
filled chamber to help control its depth in the water,
and it had a propeller that was driven by treatles
or cranks. This was actually the first known use of
a propeller on a watercraft.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Monturial also knew about the work of Robert Fulton, better
known for inventing the first practical steamship. Fulton built a
submarine called the Nautilus for Napoleon in eighteen hundred, and
then there was Vilhelm Bauer, who built submarine prototypes for
several nations starting in eighteen fifty one. Bowers two primary
(16:42):
prototypes both failed, one after unexpectedly sinking to the seafloor
and starting to leak, and the other after getting stuck
on the seafloor after intentionally coming to rest there. In
both cases, the crews managed to escape, and Monturial knew
about Bower's work as well, which was as useful as
much for his innovations as for picking apart what had
(17:05):
gone wrong and how to prevent those problems. Monturial's plans
for his submarine were ambitious. These names that we just
mentioned were only a very few of the people who
had worked on some kind of submersible vessel, and by
the nineteenth century, there were a lot of people in
a lot of.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Different countries who had at least built some kind of
submarine prototype. Most of these were meant to stay fairly
close to the surface of the water. For example, Robert
Fulton considered the Nautilus to be safe to a depth
of about eight meters or roughly twenty six feet, so
not nearly as far down as those coral divers would
(17:45):
go that we talked about earlier. Montoreal wanted to build
a submarine that could go all the way down to
the bottom of the ocean, which he estimated to be
about eight thousand meters deep. That's much deeper than the
act average ocean depth of three thousand, six hundred and
eighty two meters, but not nearly as deep as the
(18:06):
deepest parts of the ocean, which are more than ten
thousand meters deep. In addition to giving coral divers a
safer way to work, he thought such a vessel could
help fishers, salvage, operators, and other people who worked on
the sea. He also imagined the ocean as a whole
new continent to explore. He thought of this submarine as
(18:26):
something that would bring scientific and social progress a new
way to promote his earlier ideals of social justice and equality.
So many submarine projects up to this point had been
done for military purposes, and he understood that what he
was working on could have a potential military use, but
he thought of his submarine as something that would have
(18:48):
only a defensive role. He was so idealistic about all
of this, and I really kind of love it about him.
Working on the submarine really became his entire focus. While
he still supported progressive political causes and the idea of
democracy for Catalonia and Spain, he was now trying to
(19:09):
do this through science and imagination. He started looking for
people to fund his project, and by eighteen fifty seven
he had twenty backers. He made his way back to Barcelona.
He reunited with his family and they found a place
to live near the shipyard. In eighteen fifty eight, he
presented his research on what he called submarine navigation to
(19:31):
his backers. This synthesized everything into a plan for a
vessel that would include navigational systems, propulsion, and a renewable
air supply. Monturial knew that the strongest material in shape
for his submarine would be a sphere made of metal,
but a sphere wasn't practical for the size of vessel
(19:51):
he wanted to build, and he just didn't have enough
money for something that was made entirely of metal, so
he designed his submarine to have a double hull, the
first known submarine to be built this way, and this
combination of an outer hydrodynamic hull and an inner pressure
hull is still used in a lot of submarines today.
(20:12):
The inner hull of Monturial's submarine was an ellipsoid shape,
not quite as strong as a sphere, but still pretty close.
It was made of olive wood staves with oak supports,
covered in copper two millimeters thick so that it would
be water tight. The outer hull was also made of wood,
about seven meters long and roughly resembling a fish with
(20:33):
a propeller and the tail. The crew turned this propeller
using a screw. On the inside of the vessel. There
were also fins to steer and portholes for visibility. The
space between these two hulls would be flooded with sea
water when the vessel submerged, so only the inner hull
had to be able to withstand the pressure of the ocean.
(20:55):
The water filled space in between the two hulls was
also home to the ballast tanks and what Montreal described
as flotation bladders. These air bladders used the interplay between
water pressure and air pressure to adjust the vessel's buoyancy.
There was a movable weight inside the vessel that could
adjust its center of gravity, and weights mounted to the
(21:17):
outside that could be released so that the submarine could
still surface again if something went wrong with those flotation bladders.
Montreal thought this vessel could safely withstand the ocean's pressure
down to a depth of about five hundred meters, but
for the sake of safety, he approved it only to
fifty meters. Montreal also wanted to find a way to
(21:41):
provide oxygen and fresh air to his submarine while submerged.
He studied fish physiology to see if he could figure
out a way to extract oxygen from the surrounding sea water.
He did not find a way to do that, and
the method he found to produce oxygen on board involved
a chemical reaction that involves furic acid that was unsafe,
(22:03):
so he limited his dives to the amount of time
that his crew of five or six people would have
enough oxygen, supplemented with bottled oxygen for longer dives. The
interior of the submarine was also lit by a candle,
which also used up some of the oxygen, but the
size and color of the flame also gave a visual
(22:23):
indication of when that oxygen was about to run out.
While he had to set aside his method for oxygen production,
he did develop a way to scrub the exhaled carbon
dioxide from the air inside a submarine. The air inside
the sub was pumped through a container of calcium hydroxide
and that would cause the carbon dioxide to precipitate out
(22:46):
of it as calcium carbonate. To be clear, while these
were Monturial's ideas and designs, he did not build.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
This ship all by himself. He had a lot of
support from people who were affiliated with the Barcelona Industrial School.
Joseph Missey Castels acted as master boat builder, and naval
architect Juan Mounuo worked on the design, basically turning Montoreal's
ideas into plans the builders could follow to make us
functioning submarine. Montreal called this submarine Actineo John from Greek
(23:19):
words meaning fish vessel. He launched it for the first
time in Barcelona on June twenty eighth, eighteen fifty nine,
and he had an immediate setback. Almost as soon as
the submarine hit the water, it ran into hidden pilings
that were under the water's surface, and it had to
be repaired. He really didn't have the time or money
(23:41):
or materials to do all of the repairs that he
thought were necessary, so he did what he could, and
then he limited the Actineos dives to twenty meters depth
rather than fifty. Montreal took the Actineo through more than
twenty test dives in the summer of eighteen fifty fifty nine.
Many of these dives lasted more than two hours, and
(24:04):
one lasted more than four with the crew provided with
bottled oxygen, and people in Barcelona got really excited about
this vessel. A public demonstration on September twenty third was
carried out before huge, cheering crowds.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Montreal still had a lot of really idealistic thoughts about
the humanitarian possibilities of his submarine, and he was getting
a lot of popular enthusiasm and support, including what were
basically fan organizations that formed to try to raise money
for him. But he recognized that to get the kind
(24:40):
of funding he would need to build a ship that
could really get all the way to the bottom of
the ocean. He would need the backing of the governments
or the Spanish Navy. He was envisioning something truly massive,
with hundreds or even more than one thousand people on
the crew. He started requesting govern funds by the end
(25:01):
of eighteen fifty nine. Publicly he was still talking about
the possibilities for exploration and research and scientific progress, but
he tried to get the navy interested with the idea
of a submarine as a defensive tool. If Spain had
a vessel that could approach and destroy British ships completely undetected,
(25:21):
then Britain might just stay away from Spain. By eighteen
sixty one, Montreal and his ship were international news. English
language newspapers in multiple countries carried a report that said
quote a Spaniard named Signor Montreal is declared to have
discovered the means of constructing a vessel by means of
(25:43):
which he and a crew can live at the bottom
of the sea. That same year, the Spanish government announced
that it would fund the building of a new Octenneo.
Montreal had some concerns about this announcement. He had been
trying to get government funding, but he just wasn't confident
that the government would actually follow through, and the announcement
(26:05):
also put an end to all of those public fundraising efforts.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Then the Actineo was destroyed in eighteen sixty two when
a freighter accidentally ran into it while it was docked
in Barcelona Harbor. So Montorial built a second submarine, and
we're going to talk about that after we pause for
another sponsor break. When the Actennio was destroyed in Barcelona
(26:38):
Harbor in eighteen sixty two, Narcis Montorial started working on
a replacement, and he did so without that government backing
that had been announced the year before. How many never
actually materialized. Some of the generals who had been connected
to all this were transferred to Havana, and that meant
there was increasing interest in submarine technology in Cuba that
(27:02):
did not actually help Montreal though he was still in Barcelona.
The Acdenneo two was seventeen meters long, so ten meters
longer than his earlier submarine. Aspects of the Acdennio two
were similar to the Actennio one. It was once again
a submarine with an inner and outer hull and a
fish like shape. He also worked with Wan Manno and
(27:25):
Joseph Mise again on getting this second one built.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Since the new submarine had a bigger interior volume, there
was more air available, so even with a crew of
about sixteen rather than five or six, it could potentially
stay submerged for a lot longer. But that longer time
underwater increased the need to remove excess carbon dioxide from
the air, as well as removing odors and microorganisms, so
(27:54):
Montreal created a more sophisticated system to circulate and purify
their including a different way he figured out to produce
oxygen that was from a chemical reaction involving manganese dioxide
and potassium chlorate. Monturial launched the Actineo two for the
first time on October second, eighteen sixty four, and he
(28:17):
continued to refine the design until May of the following year.
From there, he took longer test dives, going to depths
of about thirty meters for as long as seven hours.
During one of these trials, on June sixteenth, the Actineo
two developed a leak back on the surface. Monturial realized
the iron screws holding the inner hulls copper sheathing together
(28:40):
had rusted, and one of them had dislodged, something that
had not been an issue on the Actinea Ie. At
Shallower Depths, Montreal replaced all of the screws with ones
made from copper or bronze. In December of eighteen sixty five,
still hoping to get governments or military support, Montoreal mount
to a cannon on the outside of the ACTINEO two
(29:03):
and he tested it in the waters off of Barcelona,
so the submarine would approach the surface, fire the cannon,
and immediately dive again, kind of replicating what might happen
during a stealth mission at sea. He apparently didn't really
tell anybody he was going to do this or get
permission for doing it, so officials did not find this intriguing.
(29:26):
They found it pretty alarming. It did not bring in
the funding that he was hoping for.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Then, in eighteen sixty six, even though he hadn't been
writing revolutionary newspapers or fighting in a populist militia for
more than a decade, he was arrested under suspicion of
being involved in a plot against the Queen. He was
eventually released, but this interrupted his work and his efforts
to get funding.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
These efforts included writing to Gideon Wells, the US Secretary
of the Navy, Monterrea was offering his services in the
US Civil War. Montreal did not know until receiving Wells's
reply that the war had actually already ended by that point.
Montreal also patented his earlier invention of a cigarette machine,
(30:17):
hoping that he could use this as a source of income.
In eighteen sixty seven, he tried to establish a company
to produce and distribute these machines, but he wasn't able
to get the interest of cigarette manufacturers. Also, while Montreal
had imagined this as a labor saving device that would
help the people who rolled cigarettes by hand, to the
(30:40):
workers who did those jobs, it was a machine that
was going to replace them. By eighteen seventy two, he
had one working machine that was destroyed in a factory riot.
He was eventually compensated for its loss, but that took years.
He later made a smaller tabletop version of this machine
that did actually bring him a little bit of income.
(31:02):
News was also continuing to spread about Monturial's work outside
of Spain. In eighteen sixty six, this snippet was picked
up in newspapers around the world. Quote a Madrid letter
in the Paris Tempt states that M. Monturial, a Spaniard,
has solved the problem of submarine steam navigation by the
invention of a vessel which can remain for hours at
(31:25):
a considerable depth, can discharge cannons from below, and even
act as a ram for piercing ironclad ships. The Prise
Sure Advertiser ran this with the heading wonderful if true.
That seems like something that somebody would put on social media,
with the screenshot of the news story big if true.
(31:46):
The Liverpool Mercury also printed a letter from a JF
asking if anyone had heard of a submarine demonstration a
couple of years back. He described this public demonstration as
something quote told by an eyewitness to him. This letter
ended by saying the author did not recall seeing any
(32:06):
mentioned of this in English newspapers and being very curious
about it because such a thing seemed to violate the
known laws of physics. This letter writer wrote, quote, and
if what I have heard stated is practicable, might not
the power obtained be applied to something useful In the
search for the lost Atlantic cable for example, or the
(32:28):
laying of a new one. If this lost Atlantic cable
sounds intriguing, we have an episode on that which we
ran as a Saturday Classic in May of twenty twenty three.
Like that other piece, this letter from JF was picked
up in a lot of other English language newspapers.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Back in Barcelona, Monturial was trying to figure out how
to give his submarine an engine, because, like the original Icdinio,
it was very, very slow, and it required crew members
to continually exert themselves. He had proposed the idea of
a submarine with an electric motor years before, but at
the time electric motors really weren't powerful enough for this purpose.
(33:09):
The batteries needed to keep one running underwater also probably
would have filled the entire vessel, so he tried to
find a way to use a steam engine instead.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Steam engines had become a primary source of power in
the nineteenth century, and Robert Fulton's North River steamboat, which
we alluded to earlier, that had been launched way back
in eighteen oh seven. But you could not just burn
a whole bunch of coal in an enclosed, air tight
vessel underwater. Montreal did outfit the Actineo II with a
(33:41):
coal powered boiler, but that was only used when the
submarine was traveling on the surface of the water and
it was possible to move fresh air into the submarine
and coal exhaust out of it. For underwater purposes, he
used a chemical reaction instead. He experimented with thousands of
(34:01):
combinations before arriving at proportions of zinc, manganese dioxide, and
chlorate that produced both oxygen and heat, So that was
going to give more oxygen to the interior of the
submarine as well as the heat to run the boiler,
and then it also produced zinc oxide, which could be
collected and sold. He made these rod like fuel containers
(34:25):
to deliver the chemicals into the boiler in very precise amounts.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
The engine that ran off this reaction was designed by
Joseph Pasquali dop, who was also the first formally trained
engineer to work on one of Montreal's projects. He also
incidentally later married Monturial's oldest daughter. Getting this engine into
the interior of the Actineo two was difficult. They had
to take it apart and move it piece by piece
(34:52):
through a hatch that was only about a foot and
a half wide.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
As Montreal was working on this, in August of eighteen
sixty seven, he heard that police were coming to arrest
him and he had to flee. This was again because
his earlier political activities had made him a suspect in
something recent that he wasn't actually involved with. He was
able to return, but this was another disruption at a
(35:18):
pretty critical time as he was trying to finish his
work on the submarine.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Work was finished on the coal burner for surface travel
in October of eighteen sixty seven, and the underwater engine
was finished that December, and both the chemical reaction and
the engine powered by it worked, but it also made
the inside of that submarine incredibly hot. While earlier dives
had lasted up to eight hours with the underwater engine running,
(35:46):
crews could only stay submerged for about twenty minutes. By
that point, the temperature inside had climbed to about fifty
degrees celsius or one hundred and twenty two degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
What Montoreal really wanted to do was to create a
whole new submarine, one that was purpose built to work
with this specific engine and fuel source. But he had
already spent about four times as much money on the
Octennao two as he had on the Octennio one. So
he worked on plans for a cooling system with copper
(36:20):
pipes that would be cooled by the ocean water that
could be added to this existing submarine.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
But he didn't get a chance to carry out this modification.
He and the company he'd established to do this work
were deeply in debt, and other economic issues were playing
out throughout Barcelona. A shipyard that had been the project's
major financial backer demanded the debt be paid off, and
there was nothing to pay it with. Montreal had to
(36:47):
fire all of his employees. Near the end of December
eighteen sixty seven, a court ordered his assets to be seized.
The following February, the Octenny O two was sold for
scrap and it's underwater engine was sent to a wheat
processing plant where it was repurposed.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Montreal was devastated. He really thought he would have gotten
a submarine that could stay underwater indefinitely if only he
had gotten enough money to cool the engine system. And
the public was still really fascinated by the idea of
underwater travel and exploration. Jules Vern's twenty thousand leagues under
(37:26):
the Sea came out as a serial starting in early
eighteen sixty nine, and Montreal's submarines are cited as one
of the inspirations for Jules Verne's Nautilus. Monturial wrote a
book about his efforts, titled Essay on the Art of
Navigating Underwater. He finished that work in eighteen seventy, and
while the writing process seems to have helped him recover
(37:49):
emotionally from the end of his submarine project, at least somewhat,
he couldn't find a publisher for it. Then, in late
eighteen seventy one and early eighteen seventy two, two of
his children died of tuberculosis, seventeen year old Adelaida and
thirteen year old Delfina. Queen Isabella the Second was driven
(38:09):
into exile in eighteen sixty eight and abdicated in eighteen seventy.
She was succeeded by Italian Prince Amadeo the First, who
was then overthrown in eighteen seventy three, and then after
that Spain was briefly a republic. Montreal served as a
deputy in the first Republican Parliament. He moved to Madrid,
(38:31):
where he was made a director at the National Factory
of Stamps. In that role, he worked out a faster
drying glue so that the factory could get enough stamps
into production to meet a government ordered deadline involving a
new tax.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
The Spanish monarchy was restored in eighteen seventy four, which
was during the Third Carlist War. During this war, Montoreal
designed a couple of cannons, one of which was destroyed
in the process of testing it. The Third Carlist War
ended in eighteen seventy six with a new constitution that
established Spain as a constitutional monarchy. Two years later, apparently
(39:10):
just desperate for work, Montreal took an administrative job at
a monarchist newspaper called La Corona. Within a year, he
had left and started working as a clerk at a brokerage.
He developed emphysema, and then he died on September sixth,
eighteen eighty five, at the age of sixty five. He
(39:31):
was buried alongside the five children whom he had survived.
His book on his submarines remained unpublished until eighteen ninety one.
Monturial left behind all kinds of notes and plans for
his inventions and experiments. In addition to the ones that
we've discussed. There were chemistry experiments involving winemaking techniques, a
(39:54):
formula for wood glue, and a method for chemically preserving meat.
He also worked on designing a sewing machine based on
work that he'd heard was being done in the US.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
A nineteen oh three book on the history of submarines
summed up Montreal's submarines this way, quote, such an invention
should indeed have altered the world's history. Yet, strange as
it may seem, el Ectineo, with all its perfection, affected
nothing and was presently forgotten, as had been all its predecessors.
(40:27):
This was also true of Montreal's immediate successor in Spain,
Isaac Perl E Cabarierro, who designed the first submarine to
be officially commissioned by the Spanish Navy in eighteen eighty eight.
This submarine was also the first electrically powered submarine in
the world. After a change in leadership, the Spanish Navy
(40:49):
seemingly just lost interest and shelved this project. As all
of this was happening, various people mentioned Montreal in their
articles about the pedal submarine, or they wrote remembrances of him.
Both of these men, though, were largely forgotten, just kind
of a gap in people caring about submarines until shortly
(41:10):
before World War One. Today, there are a couple of
monuments to Narcis Montreal. One is in Barcelona, shaped like
one of his submarines in kind of an irregular pillar.
There's also a monument in his hometown of Figettas, and
various streets and schools are named after him, including in
places he lived or spent time in exile. If you
(41:32):
want to know more about this, I know of one
book written in English, and it is Montreal's Dream, The
Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World, by Matthew Stuart.
It was one of the many sources used in this episode,
and I think it's very good. It also has just
a ton more detail about what was happening in Barcelona
and more broadly in Spain during all this. It also
(41:55):
has more detail about Ettienkabe and the Akarians, which, again,
the more I learned about that in the brief amount
of focus that I spent learning about that, the more
I was like, Okay, I'm reshuffling what's happening next on
my calendar because we need to talk about another failed
utopian experiment. It's been a while. Do you, in the
(42:20):
meantime have English language listener mail? I do have English
language listener mail. This is from Kelly, and Kelly wrote
an email that is titled Jean Stratton Porter and My
Family Legacy, and Kelly wrote, Hello Holly and Tracy. I
want to first thank you for the countless hours of
(42:41):
entertainment and learning you've gifted me. Facts I've learned from
your podcast, have contributed answers to our trivia team numerous times,
and we have a pretty winning team attached. You'll find
a photo of my Gene Stratton Porter collection. It was
passed from my great grandma to my Grams, then on
to me with these and unless other books. They also
(43:01):
passed to me a great love of reading. My grandparents
read to me from infancy and turned me into a
very early reader. Though my Grams was the busiest man
I've ever known. You never saw him without a book
in his hand. He read so intently and quickly, it
was hard for him to keep reading material at hand,
so he read anything and everything, even harlequins. In my
(43:23):
adult years, we traded stacks of books at a time
and loved to discuss them. My thirty year old daughter
is the same kind of voracious reader. She happened to
come in as I was snapping the photo of the
books and exclaimed, oh, the Harvester, that is such a
great book. She's read them all repeatedly. Also from a
young age. I had to confiscate my Stephen King from
(43:44):
that girl when she was too young for them. Anyway,
that was my roundabout way of saying the Gene Stratton
Porter episode brought back many memories of my grandpa and
our reading adventures. I was also charmed by most of
her story and find her so intriguing. Also is my
pet tax Rebel. Rebel the pink nose Kitty is the
oldest sister, followed by Scout, the very sweet torty. Their
(44:07):
brothers are Andy, the Golden Retriever mix and Pilot the
Australian cattle dog. I had to include an extra pick
of Andy, who frisbeeed so hard he crass stained his head.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Oh no, we may.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Be empty nesters, but we have a very lively household
with much gratitude. Kelly, Thank you so much, Kelly. So
this picture of the Stratton Porter collection. We've got at
the Foot of the Rainbow, Laddie, the Keeper of the Bees,
a Girl of the Limberlost the Harvester, and Freckles. One
of the things about getting older is it becomes less
(44:40):
possible to really remember whether you're remembering something because you
remember it, or whether you're remembering something just because you
have been exposed to it so many times. And I
could not for sure tell you whether Laddie is one
of the books that was on the bookshelf at my
grandmother's house when I was a kid, or if I
(45:01):
just saw so many photos of Laddie while I was
working on that episode that it seems familiar to me. Yeah,
don't really know, so anyway, Yeah, these are, you know,
just a collection of like the lovely old hardcover books
with the you know, the the weathered covers. And then,
(45:22):
oh my goodness, just some adorable, adorable cats and adorable dogs,
all of them making like the interested big eye, let
me look at your face, and so picture number last,
as referenced with frisbeeing too hard. We have a little
puppy dog with just like one little blatch of grass
(45:43):
stain right in.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
The middle of forehead.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Love extremely cute, Thank you so much Kelly for this
email and for sending all of these great pictures. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast or a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff
(46:12):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Last year, when we took our podcast strip to Barcelona,
during some of our kind of unscheduled time in Barcelona,
my spouse and I walked down to the Maritime Museum
and there were some submarine models there that really caught
my eye. They had been designed by cattleum inventor Narcis Material,
(00:38):
and I found them to just be really beautiful and intriguing.
They looked kind of like a very well made wine barrel,
but if a wine barrel was shaped more like a
torpedo or a fish. And based on the very brief
descriptions on the signs there, it seemed like these submarines
worked a little bit better than a lot of other
(00:58):
submarines of their era. So, like so many other things
that went on the list, Narcis Monturial lived through a
lot of the nineteenth century upheavals in Spain and Catalonia
that we talked about in our episode on Manjuiq Castle
that came out on December sixth of last year. We
don't rerun episodes that recent as Saturday Classics, but I
(01:22):
do feel like it helps kind of contextualize some of
the stuff that was going on in a lot more
detail than we're going to get into today. But that
does mean before we get to the really cool submarines,
we are going to talk about Monturial's time fighting for
ideals like equality and freedom and progress in the middle
of just a ton of social and political chaos.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Narcis Monturial Yestariol was born in September of eighteen nineteen.
Some sources say on the twenty eighth, and others say
on the twenty ninth. He was born in Figettes in
northern Catalonia, northeast of Barcelona. He was one of five children.
Their father was a cooper, so in other words, a
barrel maker. Under the inheritance laws of the day, Narcis's
(02:08):
older brother was the one who would inherit their father's business.
So the plan for Narcis, which was the plan for
a lot of second sons, was that he would join
the priesthood. So to that end, he studied at a
monastery in Figaris and then at the University of Servera.
At the time This was the only university in Catalonia,
(02:29):
and some sources describe the education that he got there
as more comparable to today's high schools than to college.
But he just wasn't all that interested in the subjects
that would have been most relevant to going on to
joining the priesthood, things like philosophy, Latin and Greek. In
terms of academics, he was more interested in things like
(02:49):
science and medicine. Before long, he was also more interested
in revolution than in schoolwork. In eighteen thirty three, either
on his fourteenth or day or the day after, King
Fernando the seventh of Spain died, as we discussed in
the Monjuique episode from last December, Fernando's heir was his daughter,
Isabella the Second, who was only three. But Isabella was
(03:13):
only in line for the throne because of a decree
her father had issued that allowed for a woman to
become the Spanish monarch. Fernando's brother Carlos would have been
next in line without that decree, and Carlos declared himself king.
This led to the First Carlist War, which continued until
eighteen thirty nine. Broadly speaking, Isabella's side was more liberal
(03:37):
and progressive while the Carlists were more conservative, and people
who wanted to go even farther than a more liberal
monarchy also started a movement for democracy in Spain. By
the age of sixteen, Narcis had moved to Barcelona, where
his social circle was filled with revolutionaries and activists. One
of his friends and frequent collaborators was Abdo Tore, who
(04:00):
had been born in Figaris as well. Abdo Taradas was
a socialist who advocated for Spain to become a republic.
The University of Barcelona was re established in eighteen thirty six,
and Narci seems to have enrolled there to study law,
but there are some discrepancies about whether he graduated. He
(04:20):
never described himself as a lawyer or practiced law, and
there were times in his life when he really needed money,
and it seems like if he'd had a law degree
he might have had more opportunities to earn it. At
the same time, the style and quality of his writing
suggests that he had more advanced education than he would
have gotten at the University of Savera, which had been
(04:41):
declining in quality and ultimately closed in eighteen thirty five.
Some sources say he never graduated from the University of
Barcelona because he was so focused on his activism, and
others say it was because he kept giving his tuition
money to support the cause. Kind of two different flas
of the same thing.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Yeah. Yeah, between eighteen thirty five and eighteen fifty five,
So for twenty years, Monturial launched or worked out a
whole series of radical and revolutionary periodicals, and this was
an ongoing cycle. He and some compatriots would start a
newspaper or a journal or a publishing house. Then they
would print a whole bunch of material criticizing the Carlists
(05:24):
or the government or Baldemiro s Bartero, who was Queen
Isabella's regent, or advocating for socialism or democracy or revolution.
Soon the police would show up and shut down the
press and arrest everybody, sometimes also storming their homes or
their businesses. At various points, Monturial was fled or was
(05:46):
sent into exile, first to Girona, then to his hometown
of Figaris, and then to the coastal town of Katakaise.
As soon as he could, he would make his way
back to Barcelona, and he would just do that all
over again. He also published treatises of his own, including
one that advocated against the death penalty in eighteen forty four.
(06:08):
He was also a member of La Melisia Nacionale, or
the National Militia, which fought against the Spanish military during
a number of popular uprisings and other unrest. We talked
about several of these in the Monjuique episode. He was
involved in two different uprisings that authorities dealt with, in
part by bombarding the city of Barcelona from the castle
(06:29):
at Montuique.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
In the middle of all.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
This, Monturial also tried to find ways to make money.
He learned to paint from his friend Ramun Marty Alcina,
who was considered to be one of the most important
painters in Catalan realism, and from time to time he
made some money as a portrait artist. He also invented things,
including a printing machine that could print and cut the
(06:54):
lined paper used for children's notebooks. Another invention was a
cigarette rolling machine which could make forty five cigarettes a
minute and then put them into a box. Monturial also
worked as a tutor, including tutoring his landlord's daughter. Her
name was Emilia, and as has been the case several times,
on the show recently, their relationship gets a yikes when
(07:17):
it's seen through a modern lens. In addition to the
fact that he was her tutor. When Narcis and Emilia
got married, he was twenty six and she was sixteen.
The two of them had very similar social and political views,
and they seem to have had a happy and loving
relationship that lasted for the rest of their lives. With
all of Narcis's various exiles and other travels, they were
(07:40):
sometimes separated for long periods, and their letters to one
another during these times are very loving and devoted, although
there were times, especially later in Narcisa's life, when their
circumstances did seem to cause them some strain. Emilia and
Narcis would go on to have eight children together, although
only three of those children lived to adulthood. The year
(08:03):
they got married, Montoreal started publishing a journal called La
Madre de Familia, which promoted the role of women in
families from kind of a proto feminist perspective. This was
definitely underpinned by the idea that women had a natural
family role, but he also called for equal legal and
political rights and access to education for women, and for
(08:26):
women to have protections against men who could mistreat or
harm them. This journal, like so many of Monturial's periodicals,
was short lived, though it lasted for only eight weeks.
When it closed, he started another one called La Fra Trinidad,
which advocated for the advancement of all of humanity, regardless
(08:46):
of sex. In eighteen forty seven, Monturial was introduced to
the work of French philosopher and writer Ettienn Kabe. Kabe
was a communist who had written a utopian novel called
Voyage to Acarias years before. Cab thought that for most
of history a small wealthy minority had been exploiting everyone else,
(09:08):
with that exploitation taking a series of forms including serfdom, slavery,
and unfair economic structures. He thought communism was the only
way to resolve this, and he wanted to establish a
communist utopia called Akaria, like in his novel In the
real world. We might talk more about this later, as
(09:28):
in during a whole different episode. Yeah, this is not
even It doesn't even scratch the surface of Ettien Caabe
really uh. Montoreal helps translate Cabay's book and published and
periodical for Cabay's followers The Montoreals also contributed some money
to Kabay's efforts to buy land and Texas for his
(09:51):
utopian project. After Kabe and his followers departed for the
US in eighteen forty eight, Monturial continued to promote his
idea in Catalonia. Of course, these writings also once again
caught the attention of authorities, especially as a series of
revolutions swept across parts of Europe in eighteen forty eight,
(10:13):
and Monturial once again went into exile, this time in France.
Montoreal returned to Barcelona in eighteen forty nine, possibly because
an amnesty had been announced at the end of the
Second Carlist War. From here, his activism became slightly more tempered.
While he had previously been part of the militia, his
(10:35):
rhetoric became more pacifist. He still advocated for a revolution,
but not a violent one. That didn't stop authorities from
shutting down his publications, though, including his pro democracy El
Padre de Familia Father of the Family, that was shut
down by judicial order in eighteen fifty. Around this time,
(10:56):
Monturial started spending a bit more time studying science and nature,
but he didn't entirely stop his radical publishing. He founded
a secret publishing circle called El Coorto in eighteen fifty three,
and when he once again fell under suspicion, they disbanded.
After almost two decades of this of just like starting
(11:20):
things and being shut down and being exiled, and starting
and shut down and exiled over and over, he was
starting to get discouraged, and for a while he thought
about joining the Akarians in the United States. Ultimately, though,
he decided to stay in Barcelona. In eighteen fifty four,
Spain embarked on a period of reform called the Biennio
(11:41):
Progressista or the Progressive Biennium. For a very brief moment,
Monturial was able to openly advocate for many of his
ideals without the threat of arrest or exile. He was
a speaker at the first meeting of a newly established
Republican party, where he steered clear of the idea of
communism and focused on topics like freedom, equality, and the
(12:04):
separation of church and state. His speech there was well received,
but the Progressive Biennium was short lived, ending just a
year later when Conservatives retook control. After that, Monturial was
once again exiled. This exile really changed his life, which
we will get to after a sponsor break. After the
(12:35):
end of the Progressive biennium, Narcis Material went into exile
in the seaside town of Kutacase, while his wife, Amelia
and their two daughters went to live with his mother
in Figueris. He tried to make ends meet there by
painting portraits. He also wrote poetry, and he grieved. By
this point, he and his wife had lost two children.
(12:57):
Emilio had died in eighteen forty an at the age
of twelve months, and Filamina in eighteen fifty four at
the age of four years. Abdo Tarraras and Ettien Kabe
also both died in eighteen fifty six. They had each
been enormously influential on Montorial and on his work and ideals,
so with their deaths really pretty close together, he lost
(13:22):
two of his biggest inspirations and collaborators. While in Katacase,
Monturial also spent time watching divers collect Mediterranean red coral.
This coral was used as a gemstone, including polishing and
shaping it to make jewelry, beads and artwork. Of course,
red coral has its own much bigger story. One that
(13:43):
is connected to slavery, globalization, environmentalism, and a range of
spiritual and religious beliefs and practices. But Monturial's focus was
on the divers and the dangers of their work. These
were usually men who worked from boats. In pairs, one
would dive to the seafloor, sometimes as deep as twenty
meters below, and stayed down for as long as they
(14:06):
could hold their breath, cutting and breaking pieces of coral
to then carry back to the boat. Then the other
would dive in and repeat the process. This all carried
obvious risks of injuries or drowning, and sometimes there were
also sharks in the water. During one of his earlier
periods of exile, in Kaida case in eighteen forty five,
(14:29):
Montreal had reportedly saved a diver who had been pulled
out of the water and was not breathing. In the
account of this, Montreal lifted the man up by his
feet so that gravity would force the water out of
his lungs. This can force some water out of a
person's lungs, but this is not what's typically advised in
(14:50):
cases of drowning today because it can cause vomiting and
delay the start of CPR or rescue breathing. So this
experience led Montreal to start thinking about a way to
make a vessel that could go totally underwater, equipped with
arms and a basket so that people could gather coral
from safely inside of it and then now back in Katakis.
(15:13):
A decade later he started actually working on this. This
involved learning everything he could about existing technologies for surviving underwater.
This started with diving bells, which date back to at
least the fourth century BCE. We talked about this more
in our episode on the history of diving technology, which
ran as a Saturday Classic in November of twenty twenty three.
(15:37):
And then from there Monturial learned about the work of
English mathematician William Bourne, who served in the Royal Navy
and wrote on ideas for controlling buoyancy in a completely
submerged boat, something that is critical to the successful operation
of a submarine. He also studied descriptions of a submarine
called the Turtle, developed by David and Ezra Bushnell of Connecticut,
(16:01):
which was used in attempts to attach mines to British
warships during the American Revolution. The Turtle had an air
filled chamber to help control its depth in the water,
and it had a propeller that was driven by treatles
or cranks. This was actually the first known use of
a propeller on a watercraft.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Monturial also knew about the work of Robert Fulton, better
known for inventing the first practical steamship. Fulton built a
submarine called the Nautilus for Napoleon in eighteen hundred, and
then there was Vilhelm Bauer, who built submarine prototypes for
several nations starting in eighteen fifty one. Bowers two primary
(16:42):
prototypes both failed, one after unexpectedly sinking to the seafloor
and starting to leak, and the other after getting stuck
on the seafloor after intentionally coming to rest there. In
both cases, the crews managed to escape, and Monturial knew
about Bower's work as well, which was as useful as
much for his innovations as for picking apart what had
(17:05):
gone wrong and how to prevent those problems. Monturial's plans
for his submarine were ambitious. These names that we just
mentioned were only a very few of the people who
had worked on some kind of submersible vessel, and by
the nineteenth century, there were a lot of people in
a lot of.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Different countries who had at least built some kind of
submarine prototype. Most of these were meant to stay fairly
close to the surface of the water. For example, Robert
Fulton considered the Nautilus to be safe to a depth
of about eight meters or roughly twenty six feet, so
not nearly as far down as those coral divers would
(17:45):
go that we talked about earlier. Montoreal wanted to build
a submarine that could go all the way down to
the bottom of the ocean, which he estimated to be
about eight thousand meters deep. That's much deeper than the
act average ocean depth of three thousand, six hundred and
eighty two meters, but not nearly as deep as the
(18:06):
deepest parts of the ocean, which are more than ten
thousand meters deep. In addition to giving coral divers a
safer way to work, he thought such a vessel could
help fishers, salvage, operators, and other people who worked on
the sea. He also imagined the ocean as a whole
new continent to explore. He thought of this submarine as
(18:26):
something that would bring scientific and social progress a new
way to promote his earlier ideals of social justice and equality.
So many submarine projects up to this point had been
done for military purposes, and he understood that what he
was working on could have a potential military use, but
he thought of his submarine as something that would have
(18:48):
only a defensive role. He was so idealistic about all
of this, and I really kind of love it about him.
Working on the submarine really became his entire focus. While
he still supported progressive political causes and the idea of
democracy for Catalonia and Spain, he was now trying to
(19:09):
do this through science and imagination. He started looking for
people to fund his project, and by eighteen fifty seven
he had twenty backers. He made his way back to Barcelona.
He reunited with his family and they found a place
to live near the shipyard. In eighteen fifty eight, he
presented his research on what he called submarine navigation to
(19:31):
his backers. This synthesized everything into a plan for a
vessel that would include navigational systems, propulsion, and a renewable
air supply. Monturial knew that the strongest material in shape
for his submarine would be a sphere made of metal,
but a sphere wasn't practical for the size of vessel
(19:51):
he wanted to build, and he just didn't have enough
money for something that was made entirely of metal, so
he designed his submarine to have a double hull, the
first known submarine to be built this way, and this
combination of an outer hydrodynamic hull and an inner pressure
hull is still used in a lot of submarines today.
(20:12):
The inner hull of Monturial's submarine was an ellipsoid shape,
not quite as strong as a sphere, but still pretty close.
It was made of olive wood staves with oak supports,
covered in copper two millimeters thick so that it would
be water tight. The outer hull was also made of wood,
about seven meters long and roughly resembling a fish with
(20:33):
a propeller and the tail. The crew turned this propeller
using a screw. On the inside of the vessel. There
were also fins to steer and portholes for visibility. The
space between these two hulls would be flooded with sea
water when the vessel submerged, so only the inner hull
had to be able to withstand the pressure of the ocean.
(20:55):
The water filled space in between the two hulls was
also home to the ballast tanks and what Montreal described
as flotation bladders. These air bladders used the interplay between
water pressure and air pressure to adjust the vessel's buoyancy.
There was a movable weight inside the vessel that could
adjust its center of gravity, and weights mounted to the
(21:17):
outside that could be released so that the submarine could
still surface again if something went wrong with those flotation bladders.
Montreal thought this vessel could safely withstand the ocean's pressure
down to a depth of about five hundred meters, but
for the sake of safety, he approved it only to
fifty meters. Montreal also wanted to find a way to
(21:41):
provide oxygen and fresh air to his submarine while submerged.
He studied fish physiology to see if he could figure
out a way to extract oxygen from the surrounding sea water.
He did not find a way to do that, and
the method he found to produce oxygen on board involved
a chemical reaction that involves furic acid that was unsafe,
(22:03):
so he limited his dives to the amount of time
that his crew of five or six people would have
enough oxygen, supplemented with bottled oxygen for longer dives. The
interior of the submarine was also lit by a candle,
which also used up some of the oxygen, but the
size and color of the flame also gave a visual
(22:23):
indication of when that oxygen was about to run out.
While he had to set aside his method for oxygen production,
he did develop a way to scrub the exhaled carbon
dioxide from the air inside a submarine. The air inside
the sub was pumped through a container of calcium hydroxide
and that would cause the carbon dioxide to precipitate out
(22:46):
of it as calcium carbonate. To be clear, while these
were Monturial's ideas and designs, he did not build.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
This ship all by himself. He had a lot of
support from people who were affiliated with the Barcelona Industrial School.
Joseph Missey Castels acted as master boat builder, and naval
architect Juan Mounuo worked on the design, basically turning Montoreal's
ideas into plans the builders could follow to make us
functioning submarine. Montreal called this submarine Actineo John from Greek
(23:19):
words meaning fish vessel. He launched it for the first
time in Barcelona on June twenty eighth, eighteen fifty nine,
and he had an immediate setback. Almost as soon as
the submarine hit the water, it ran into hidden pilings
that were under the water's surface, and it had to
be repaired. He really didn't have the time or money
(23:41):
or materials to do all of the repairs that he
thought were necessary, so he did what he could, and
then he limited the Actineos dives to twenty meters depth
rather than fifty. Montreal took the Actineo through more than
twenty test dives in the summer of eighteen fifty fifty nine.
Many of these dives lasted more than two hours, and
(24:04):
one lasted more than four with the crew provided with
bottled oxygen, and people in Barcelona got really excited about
this vessel. A public demonstration on September twenty third was
carried out before huge, cheering crowds.
Speaker 2 (24:19):
Montreal still had a lot of really idealistic thoughts about
the humanitarian possibilities of his submarine, and he was getting
a lot of popular enthusiasm and support, including what were
basically fan organizations that formed to try to raise money
for him. But he recognized that to get the kind
(24:40):
of funding he would need to build a ship that
could really get all the way to the bottom of
the ocean. He would need the backing of the governments
or the Spanish Navy. He was envisioning something truly massive,
with hundreds or even more than one thousand people on
the crew. He started requesting govern funds by the end
(25:01):
of eighteen fifty nine. Publicly he was still talking about
the possibilities for exploration and research and scientific progress, but
he tried to get the navy interested with the idea
of a submarine as a defensive tool. If Spain had
a vessel that could approach and destroy British ships completely undetected,
(25:21):
then Britain might just stay away from Spain. By eighteen
sixty one, Montreal and his ship were international news. English
language newspapers in multiple countries carried a report that said
quote a Spaniard named Signor Montreal is declared to have
discovered the means of constructing a vessel by means of
(25:43):
which he and a crew can live at the bottom
of the sea. That same year, the Spanish government announced
that it would fund the building of a new Octenneo.
Montreal had some concerns about this announcement. He had been
trying to get government funding, but he just wasn't confident
that the government would actually follow through, and the announcement
(26:05):
also put an end to all of those public fundraising efforts.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Then the Actineo was destroyed in eighteen sixty two when
a freighter accidentally ran into it while it was docked
in Barcelona Harbor. So Montorial built a second submarine, and
we're going to talk about that after we pause for
another sponsor break. When the Actennio was destroyed in Barcelona
(26:38):
Harbor in eighteen sixty two, Narcis Montorial started working on
a replacement, and he did so without that government backing
that had been announced the year before. How many never
actually materialized. Some of the generals who had been connected
to all this were transferred to Havana, and that meant
there was increasing interest in submarine technology in Cuba that
(27:02):
did not actually help Montreal though he was still in Barcelona.
The Acdenneo two was seventeen meters long, so ten meters
longer than his earlier submarine. Aspects of the Acdennio two
were similar to the Actennio one. It was once again
a submarine with an inner and outer hull and a
fish like shape. He also worked with Wan Manno and
(27:25):
Joseph Mise again on getting this second one built.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Since the new submarine had a bigger interior volume, there
was more air available, so even with a crew of
about sixteen rather than five or six, it could potentially
stay submerged for a lot longer. But that longer time
underwater increased the need to remove excess carbon dioxide from
the air, as well as removing odors and microorganisms, so
(27:54):
Montreal created a more sophisticated system to circulate and purify
their including a different way he figured out to produce
oxygen that was from a chemical reaction involving manganese dioxide
and potassium chlorate. Monturial launched the Actineo two for the
first time on October second, eighteen sixty four, and he
(28:17):
continued to refine the design until May of the following year.
From there, he took longer test dives, going to depths
of about thirty meters for as long as seven hours.
During one of these trials, on June sixteenth, the Actineo
two developed a leak back on the surface. Monturial realized
the iron screws holding the inner hulls copper sheathing together
(28:40):
had rusted, and one of them had dislodged, something that
had not been an issue on the Actinea Ie. At
Shallower Depths, Montreal replaced all of the screws with ones
made from copper or bronze. In December of eighteen sixty five,
still hoping to get governments or military support, Montoreal mount
to a cannon on the outside of the ACTINEO two
(29:03):
and he tested it in the waters off of Barcelona,
so the submarine would approach the surface, fire the cannon,
and immediately dive again, kind of replicating what might happen
during a stealth mission at sea. He apparently didn't really
tell anybody he was going to do this or get
permission for doing it, so officials did not find this intriguing.
(29:26):
They found it pretty alarming. It did not bring in
the funding that he was hoping for.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
Then, in eighteen sixty six, even though he hadn't been
writing revolutionary newspapers or fighting in a populist militia for
more than a decade, he was arrested under suspicion of
being involved in a plot against the Queen. He was
eventually released, but this interrupted his work and his efforts
to get funding.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
These efforts included writing to Gideon Wells, the US Secretary
of the Navy, Monterrea was offering his services in the
US Civil War. Montreal did not know until receiving Wells's
reply that the war had actually already ended by that point.
Montreal also patented his earlier invention of a cigarette machine,
(30:17):
hoping that he could use this as a source of income.
In eighteen sixty seven, he tried to establish a company
to produce and distribute these machines, but he wasn't able
to get the interest of cigarette manufacturers. Also, while Montreal
had imagined this as a labor saving device that would
help the people who rolled cigarettes by hand, to the
(30:40):
workers who did those jobs, it was a machine that
was going to replace them. By eighteen seventy two, he
had one working machine that was destroyed in a factory riot.
He was eventually compensated for its loss, but that took years.
He later made a smaller tabletop version of this machine
that did actually bring him a little bit of income.
(31:02):
News was also continuing to spread about Monturial's work outside
of Spain. In eighteen sixty six, this snippet was picked
up in newspapers around the world. Quote a Madrid letter
in the Paris Tempt states that M. Monturial, a Spaniard,
has solved the problem of submarine steam navigation by the
invention of a vessel which can remain for hours at
(31:25):
a considerable depth, can discharge cannons from below, and even
act as a ram for piercing ironclad ships. The Prise
Sure Advertiser ran this with the heading wonderful if true.
That seems like something that somebody would put on social media,
with the screenshot of the news story big if true.
(31:46):
The Liverpool Mercury also printed a letter from a JF
asking if anyone had heard of a submarine demonstration a
couple of years back. He described this public demonstration as
something quote told by an eyewitness to him. This letter
ended by saying the author did not recall seeing any
(32:06):
mentioned of this in English newspapers and being very curious
about it because such a thing seemed to violate the
known laws of physics. This letter writer wrote, quote, and
if what I have heard stated is practicable, might not
the power obtained be applied to something useful In the
search for the lost Atlantic cable for example, or the
(32:28):
laying of a new one. If this lost Atlantic cable
sounds intriguing, we have an episode on that which we
ran as a Saturday Classic in May of twenty twenty three.
Like that other piece, this letter from JF was picked
up in a lot of other English language newspapers.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
Back in Barcelona, Monturial was trying to figure out how
to give his submarine an engine, because, like the original Icdinio,
it was very, very slow, and it required crew members
to continually exert themselves. He had proposed the idea of
a submarine with an electric motor years before, but at
the time electric motors really weren't powerful enough for this purpose.
(33:09):
The batteries needed to keep one running underwater also probably
would have filled the entire vessel, so he tried to
find a way to use a steam engine instead.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
Steam engines had become a primary source of power in
the nineteenth century, and Robert Fulton's North River steamboat, which
we alluded to earlier, that had been launched way back
in eighteen oh seven. But you could not just burn
a whole bunch of coal in an enclosed, air tight
vessel underwater. Montreal did outfit the Actineo II with a
(33:41):
coal powered boiler, but that was only used when the
submarine was traveling on the surface of the water and
it was possible to move fresh air into the submarine
and coal exhaust out of it. For underwater purposes, he
used a chemical reaction instead. He experimented with thousands of
(34:01):
combinations before arriving at proportions of zinc, manganese dioxide, and
chlorate that produced both oxygen and heat, So that was
going to give more oxygen to the interior of the
submarine as well as the heat to run the boiler,
and then it also produced zinc oxide, which could be
collected and sold. He made these rod like fuel containers
(34:25):
to deliver the chemicals into the boiler in very precise amounts.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
The engine that ran off this reaction was designed by
Joseph Pasquali dop, who was also the first formally trained
engineer to work on one of Montreal's projects. He also
incidentally later married Monturial's oldest daughter. Getting this engine into
the interior of the Actineo two was difficult. They had
to take it apart and move it piece by piece
(34:52):
through a hatch that was only about a foot and
a half wide.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
As Montreal was working on this, in August of eighteen
sixty seven, he heard that police were coming to arrest
him and he had to flee. This was again because
his earlier political activities had made him a suspect in
something recent that he wasn't actually involved with. He was
able to return, but this was another disruption at a
(35:18):
pretty critical time as he was trying to finish his
work on the submarine.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
Work was finished on the coal burner for surface travel
in October of eighteen sixty seven, and the underwater engine
was finished that December, and both the chemical reaction and
the engine powered by it worked, but it also made
the inside of that submarine incredibly hot. While earlier dives
had lasted up to eight hours with the underwater engine running,
(35:46):
crews could only stay submerged for about twenty minutes. By
that point, the temperature inside had climbed to about fifty
degrees celsius or one hundred and twenty two degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
What Montoreal really wanted to do was to create a
whole new submarine, one that was purpose built to work
with this specific engine and fuel source. But he had
already spent about four times as much money on the
Octennao two as he had on the Octennio one. So
he worked on plans for a cooling system with copper
(36:20):
pipes that would be cooled by the ocean water that
could be added to this existing submarine.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
But he didn't get a chance to carry out this modification.
He and the company he'd established to do this work
were deeply in debt, and other economic issues were playing
out throughout Barcelona. A shipyard that had been the project's
major financial backer demanded the debt be paid off, and
there was nothing to pay it with. Montreal had to
(36:47):
fire all of his employees. Near the end of December
eighteen sixty seven, a court ordered his assets to be seized.
The following February, the Octenny O two was sold for
scrap and it's underwater engine was sent to a wheat
processing plant where it was repurposed.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Montreal was devastated. He really thought he would have gotten
a submarine that could stay underwater indefinitely if only he
had gotten enough money to cool the engine system. And
the public was still really fascinated by the idea of
underwater travel and exploration. Jules Vern's twenty thousand leagues under
(37:26):
the Sea came out as a serial starting in early
eighteen sixty nine, and Montreal's submarines are cited as one
of the inspirations for Jules Verne's Nautilus. Monturial wrote a
book about his efforts, titled Essay on the Art of
Navigating Underwater. He finished that work in eighteen seventy, and
while the writing process seems to have helped him recover
(37:49):
emotionally from the end of his submarine project, at least somewhat,
he couldn't find a publisher for it. Then, in late
eighteen seventy one and early eighteen seventy two, two of
his children died of tuberculosis, seventeen year old Adelaida and
thirteen year old Delfina. Queen Isabella the Second was driven
(38:09):
into exile in eighteen sixty eight and abdicated in eighteen seventy.
She was succeeded by Italian Prince Amadeo the First, who
was then overthrown in eighteen seventy three, and then after
that Spain was briefly a republic. Montreal served as a
deputy in the first Republican Parliament. He moved to Madrid,
(38:31):
where he was made a director at the National Factory
of Stamps. In that role, he worked out a faster
drying glue so that the factory could get enough stamps
into production to meet a government ordered deadline involving a
new tax.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
The Spanish monarchy was restored in eighteen seventy four, which
was during the Third Carlist War. During this war, Montoreal
designed a couple of cannons, one of which was destroyed
in the process of testing it. The Third Carlist War
ended in eighteen seventy six with a new constitution that
established Spain as a constitutional monarchy. Two years later, apparently
(39:10):
just desperate for work, Montreal took an administrative job at
a monarchist newspaper called La Corona. Within a year, he
had left and started working as a clerk at a brokerage.
He developed emphysema, and then he died on September sixth,
eighteen eighty five, at the age of sixty five. He
(39:31):
was buried alongside the five children whom he had survived.
His book on his submarines remained unpublished until eighteen ninety one.
Monturial left behind all kinds of notes and plans for
his inventions and experiments. In addition to the ones that
we've discussed. There were chemistry experiments involving winemaking techniques, a
(39:54):
formula for wood glue, and a method for chemically preserving meat.
He also worked on designing a sewing machine based on
work that he'd heard was being done in the US.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
A nineteen oh three book on the history of submarines
summed up Montreal's submarines this way, quote, such an invention
should indeed have altered the world's history. Yet, strange as
it may seem, el Ectineo, with all its perfection, affected
nothing and was presently forgotten, as had been all its predecessors.
(40:27):
This was also true of Montreal's immediate successor in Spain,
Isaac Perl E Cabarierro, who designed the first submarine to
be officially commissioned by the Spanish Navy in eighteen eighty eight.
This submarine was also the first electrically powered submarine in
the world. After a change in leadership, the Spanish Navy
(40:49):
seemingly just lost interest and shelved this project. As all
of this was happening, various people mentioned Montreal in their
articles about the pedal submarine, or they wrote remembrances of him.
Both of these men, though, were largely forgotten, just kind
of a gap in people caring about submarines until shortly
(41:10):
before World War One. Today, there are a couple of
monuments to Narcis Montreal. One is in Barcelona, shaped like
one of his submarines in kind of an irregular pillar.
There's also a monument in his hometown of Figettas, and
various streets and schools are named after him, including in
places he lived or spent time in exile. If you
(41:32):
want to know more about this, I know of one
book written in English, and it is Montreal's Dream, The
Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World, by Matthew Stuart.
It was one of the many sources used in this episode,
and I think it's very good. It also has just
a ton more detail about what was happening in Barcelona
and more broadly in Spain during all this. It also
(41:55):
has more detail about Ettienkabe and the Akarians, which, again,
the more I learned about that in the brief amount
of focus that I spent learning about that, the more
I was like, Okay, I'm reshuffling what's happening next on
my calendar because we need to talk about another failed
utopian experiment. It's been a while. Do you, in the
(42:20):
meantime have English language listener mail? I do have English
language listener mail. This is from Kelly, and Kelly wrote
an email that is titled Jean Stratton Porter and My
Family Legacy, and Kelly wrote, Hello Holly and Tracy. I
want to first thank you for the countless hours of
(42:41):
entertainment and learning you've gifted me. Facts I've learned from
your podcast, have contributed answers to our trivia team numerous times,
and we have a pretty winning team attached. You'll find
a photo of my Gene Stratton Porter collection. It was
passed from my great grandma to my Grams, then on
to me with these and unless other books. They also
(43:01):
passed to me a great love of reading. My grandparents
read to me from infancy and turned me into a
very early reader. Though my Grams was the busiest man
I've ever known. You never saw him without a book
in his hand. He read so intently and quickly, it
was hard for him to keep reading material at hand,
so he read anything and everything, even harlequins. In my
(43:23):
adult years, we traded stacks of books at a time
and loved to discuss them. My thirty year old daughter
is the same kind of voracious reader. She happened to
come in as I was snapping the photo of the
books and exclaimed, oh, the Harvester, that is such a
great book. She's read them all repeatedly. Also from a
young age. I had to confiscate my Stephen King from
(43:44):
that girl when she was too young for them. Anyway,
that was my roundabout way of saying the Gene Stratton
Porter episode brought back many memories of my grandpa and
our reading adventures. I was also charmed by most of
her story and find her so intriguing. Also is my
pet tax Rebel. Rebel the pink nose Kitty is the
oldest sister, followed by Scout, the very sweet torty. Their
(44:07):
brothers are Andy, the Golden Retriever mix and Pilot the
Australian cattle dog. I had to include an extra pick
of Andy, who frisbeeed so hard he crass stained his head.
Speaker 1 (44:18):
Oh no, we may.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Be empty nesters, but we have a very lively household
with much gratitude. Kelly, Thank you so much, Kelly. So
this picture of the Stratton Porter collection. We've got at
the Foot of the Rainbow, Laddie, the Keeper of the Bees,
a Girl of the Limberlost the Harvester, and Freckles. One
of the things about getting older is it becomes less
(44:40):
possible to really remember whether you're remembering something because you
remember it, or whether you're remembering something just because you
have been exposed to it so many times. And I
could not for sure tell you whether Laddie is one
of the books that was on the bookshelf at my
grandmother's house when I was a kid, or if I
(45:01):
just saw so many photos of Laddie while I was
working on that episode that it seems familiar to me. Yeah,
don't really know, so anyway, Yeah, these are, you know,
just a collection of like the lovely old hardcover books
with the you know, the the weathered covers. And then,
(45:22):
oh my goodness, just some adorable, adorable cats and adorable dogs,
all of them making like the interested big eye, let
me look at your face, and so picture number last,
as referenced with frisbeeing too hard. We have a little
puppy dog with just like one little blatch of grass
(45:43):
stain right in.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
The middle of forehead.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Love extremely cute, Thank you so much Kelly for this
email and for sending all of these great pictures. If
you would like to write to us about this or
any other podcast or a history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Stuff
(46:12):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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