TechStuff Takes a Ride in a Personal Submarine

to be here. And Scott, I always like to ask you in so that whenever I'm doing a show that has to do with like vehicles, because of course everyone knows you as like the the incredibly insightful wise expert in all things vehicular, or at least you've got enough of a basis to get the rest of us all buzzing because our heads are just totally stuffed with nonsense. You know what, you do it better than anyone else I know. So I'm I had to have you on the show. Thank you. I promise I am not going

to break your heart in this episode. I know it's a change. I was just talking about that with Ramseyr, producer. That's I'm waiting for that gotcha moment. Yeah, I'm not doing that this time. I People who have been listening to Tech Stuff you know that in past episodes I have found ways to have little moments where I I can actually sit across the table and watch Scott's heartbreak right in front of my eyes. It's all in good fun.

And you know what I was, I was waiting for it, but I figured, you know, like, well, what's he really going to break my heart about? With this topic. I mean, I'm kind of I would say, I'm I'm not indifferent to this, but um, I really don't have a whole lot of personal experience with with this type of vehicle. I'd say that this, this, this whole world is a little outside of our tax bracket. Yeah, I would say

far outside of our text. We're talking about personal submarines today now before we jump into the world of personal submarines, which is pretty fascinating and also head scratching. I mean, we're gonna be talking about not just stuff that you could, in theory go out and buy if you had let's call it a metric crap ton of money, but also some stuff that, as far as we can tell, has yet to actually exist in any real form. Right. I

actually mentioned on Twitter earlier today. The day we're recording this is on on January nine, two thousand and eighteen, and I had mentioned that one of the things that's perplexing and frustrating covering this kind of technology is that when you start covering tech at a certain luxury level, you frequently will encounter examples where you see lots of concept art, but you don't see any evidence of anyone actually making anything. Yeah, and we've got a good example

of that that we're gonna share with you today. Yeah. So before we go into that, I wanted to give you guys a bit of the history of the development of the submarine, because it's a fascinating one and it's centuries old, and I mostly wanted to do this so that Scott, you and I can have a little discussions about this too. I can tell you some facts. If you have any questions or anything that I happen to

know the answer to, we can chat about that. But just also just hearing about the ingenuity and in some cases, uh uh, insanity of the people who decided to go and try and make stuff that would go under water and let them live their definite insanity. I don't know a whole lot about the history of submarines, I'll have to admit. Yeah, so you're gonna be teaching me some new things, and I'm sure I'll have some questions along the way. Sure, So where would you like to start, Well,

we're gonna start in the sixteenth century. Yeah, this would be around the time that Shakespeare is writing stuff. Actually this is technically before, because we're gonna go all the way back to fifteen seventy eight when William Bourne, who was an English innkeeper in a little bit of an eccentric dreamer, decided to put some of his ideas together

in book format. He published a book titled Inventions and Devices and include all sorts of ideas, including a boat that he imagined that would be able to go under the water, thus a submarine. Now he knew, as did plenty of people before him, that solid matter will displace a volume of water equal to that solid objects weight, right you, it's something in a body of water. It's going to displace the water by a volume that's equal

to the weight of the object. Everyone had known that for millennia, but born maybe millennia is exaggerating, but for hundreds of years. Borne went further. He said, boats float because of that property, and if the boat were to take on water, it would technically be displacing less water than what it weighed, because it's actually bringing water into the form of the boat itself, and that's what would

cause a boat to sink. So boats sink because they end up displacing less water than what they weigh and then because of that ratio, they plummet to the bottom of the ocean or rivers or lakes. Is that you're in the boat. Yeah, that turns out that of sailors hate it when this happens. They're not big fans of it.

But he said, if you could control this in some way and keep the water separate from you know, the people in the boat, then you could possibly go under the water, and that there could be all sorts of potential applications for that, particularly as would turn out to be the case, military applications. And so he came up with this idea, uh that he didn't he never built as far as we know, but he came up with an idea that he proposed could work, which involved having

a a boat made out of wood that is completely covered. Right, you then cover the wood with special treated leather to waterproof the boat so it's water tights and water is not gonna come in. Fantastic technology at the time. Yes, And the leather itself would be attached to the boat with a device where you could loosen the leather or tighten it against the boat and thus allow water to seep in between the leather and the exterior of the boat. Yeah,

so you can start to displace less water. You're taking water on almost this ballast, liked, Yes, exactly, And then that would allow you to sink under the water and then you would be able to tighten it again to expel water and regain buoyancy come back up. Uh. He said that this he thought would probably work pretty well. He even thought about air because he said, well, you know, uh,

that's gonna be an issue. He said, what would the boat would also have a mast in the center that would extend up and go through the surface of the water at the top, so you would have sort of like a snorkele poking out all the time. You would never submerge to the point where the mast itself would go under the surface of the water. So it's hollow, and it's got a whole board in the middle. And he actually wrote a very helpful sentence to explain his rationality.

Said for the whole that goeth through. The mask must give you air, as men cannot live without it. True words were never spoken, so Borne was really smart, I guess now. Sometime later there was a drawing that surface that some would ascribe to his his actual description, but they may have also just been drawn by someone else with a similar idea. Uh, this one is one if

you ever see it. It looks like a boat that has two segments on the side that are on screws, and if you turn the screws one way, it pulls them inward to the boat, allowing water to come into certain chambers that are sealed off from the rest of the boat. And if you turn the screws the other way, it pushes the panels back to be flushed with the boat.

But according to all the resources I was looking at, they said that that was a different enough design from what Born had been describing in his book that it's quite possible it was drawn by someone else, but dates who around the same time. You know what's funny, if if you had asked me this question, you know, without telling me who it was that that created the first submarine, Yeah,

I would have credited this to Leonardo da Vinci. Sure, I think most people would think that that was the mind that created something like this, because I mean, he has so many other just incredible spectacular adventures that that later were built and functional. Well, I mean he proposed the air screw, which was essentially a predecessor to the hellic, right, So I mean submarine is not that far of a stress. No, I would I would have definitely thought this would appear

in somewhere in his sketch books. It's possible that there are other inventors who came before born who proposed something similar. Borns is the earliest one that we have on records. In sixty five, you have Cornelius Drebble. By the way, the names I came across while researching this, I love Cornelius Drebble is a great name. Not many people named their kids Cornelius. But my wife does work with the Cornelius right now. Though that's a great name. Strange. Cornelius

is a great name. Also, Uh, fantastic character in the show Hello Dolly must be a family name, must be. Uh. This Cornelius was the court inventor for James the first of England, which I did not know that was a position. Interesting, Yeah, I assume he invented stuff, not courts that would have just been weird tennis courts, yeah, exactly, racketball courts. Yeah,

it's just yeah, food courts. So he created what many considered to be the first working submarine, and supposedly it traveled down and under the Thames River at a depth of fifteen feet or so when it got to its deepest. Yeah, especially when you consider how it did this. It was propelled by twelve oarsmen. So the oars extended out the side of this weatherproof boat that also had a leather

you know, like a weather a waterproofed leather covering. The oars protruded through the covering obviously, and then metal clamps were used to clamp the leather covering tight against the oars to maintain that water tight seal. Yeah. They were incredible for the time, you know, and they used a design that's very similar to what a lot of personal subs use, and that the thing that allowed the boat to go under the water was it's it's a hydrodynamic design.

So the deck of this boat, the upper deck slope down toward the water's surface, so it's almost like a ramp on the front. The forward momentum of the oarsmen would cause the boat's uh bow to go under the surface of the water. So the harder you row, the further down you would go. So you row faster, it dives deeper, and you have to keep that forward momentum because as soon as you stop, the buoyancy pushes the boat back up to the surface of the water, as

you would want with the submarine. Yes, so, I mean you get your your oarsmen get tired, you might want to get up to the air pretty soon. Yeah, I would think so, and you know, your pass out or whatever they do. Yeah, which would happen right. You breathe in enough carbon dioxide, you pass out, the boat comes up to the top, hopefully someone's cognizant enough to open

a hatch and you can breathe again. I've seen early drawings of submarines and they're typically very, very cramp they're not the monster ships that we think of now, very small, so it wouldn't take long to extinguish all the air that you have available to I mean, if you just look at World War two era submarines and that that's late in the game for submarines, uh, you feel like, well, I'd be comfortable moving through this if I were about five ft four, but then he tolder than that, and

I've got to be real cognizant of where my head is. And there's other people in there. Yeah, and I'm not just the only person here. I need to know. Six foot bill has really taken up a lot of space. So, uh, there are no illustrations or anything of this particular boat, but there were a lot of reports about it actually working with people along the Thames were really impressed by it.

James the First was impressed by it. There's some stories that say that he even took a ride on it, but most people dismissed that because James the First was uh known to be risk averse. Yeah, he was not someone who would put his body in direct peril. Well, I was thinking that maybe there were some people that advised him maybe not to try. Probably Ben Johnson, the famous writer, actually referred to it as an invisible eel. That's what he called the boat. So that was kind

of a cool design. Moving on to sixteen thirty four, that's when a French priest named Marin Mersen worked out that a submarine should probably may be made up of some pretty strong stuff to withstand water pressure, which we're gonna learn later was very important that some people did

not pick up on. That's a horrible, terrible spoiler. So they're they're talking about going deeper than fifteen feet obviously, And he said that, you know, if you wanted to actually have a submarine that could go to sufficient depths, you probably want to make it up of something like copper. Use, you know, a nice strong frame and coated with copper, counting not the strongest metal, no, but stronger than would.

He also thought that both ends should taper to a point, and the reason for that was that you could then reverse just as easily as you could go forward. And otherwise, if you have one end that comes to a point and the other end doesn't, you have to make a really wide turn to go back the way you came. Also makes it a little harder for the whale to swallow you. Yes, anything that makes it, uh, you know, whales swallowing the whole thing more difficult. Definitely, Sailors are

in favor of that. On the outside, you know, don't don't use the easy to swallow gel covering on your copper submarine, and don't try and try not to look like a fish and distressed while you're out. There also also words to live by. Uh. There was a guy named that we only know as Di san d E s o N, a Frenchman in sixteen fifty four who designed what he claimed would be a ni unstoppable warship that was semi submerged, so not a full submersible the

way we consider submarines. It was essentially a floating battering ram and it was designed to sink enemy ships. So the battering ram itself was under the surface of the water. Only a little bit of the boat would protrude, so that you know, enemy ships wouldn't necessarily notice you when you're coming up on them. Very difficult to detect, especially at night. Yes, his design was seventy two ft long.

It is called the Rotterdam boat because he built it in Rotterdam, and he claimed that the clockwork propulsion system that he had installed in it would allow him to go from Rotterdam to London and back within the span of a day, which is remarkable in sixteen fifty four. Only problem is he miscalculated how much work it would take to move a boat through the water, and it didn't move him at all. The clockwork failed and so

the boat was never used. But we could have had underwater battering rams as early as the mid seventeenth century had it not been for that. Yeah, he did try. Another Frenchman named Denise pop In, a mathematician in six said hey, what have we used an air pump in order to change the buoyancy of a ship? He was actually thinking along lines of let's not try and take

on water, let's change the air pressure inside the ship. Uh. There are no records of any of his designs, but the story says that he built a working submarine and was starting to build a second one and funding fell through and he scrapped the project, which I think a lot of people can identify with because that happens all the time and all sorts of technologies. It never gets

past prototype a lot of times. Yeah, and a lot of these prototypes end up being things where people say that's a great idea, thank you for the idea, never doing anything with it, or they they adapted to their own needs and or or change it in some way that and then take advantage of them unfortunately, be like, hey, that's a great idea, I'm changing two things about it. Now, it's my idea. It's right trademark. Yeah t M. You didn't think about it, buddy, uh nine, and I'm skipping

over by the way. There are tons of examples of different early submarines, many of which did not end well. In seventeen nine, there was a guy named Nathaniel Simmons or Simon's s y M O. N. S. He was a carpenter in England. He built a submarine that consisted of two wooden sections front and the back, joined in

the middle by a panel of pleaded leather. So think of like an accordion or a concertina, right, So it can it can scrunch in and get make the whole ship shorter, or it can extend and make the whole ship longer. And this is how you would either sink it or float it based upon the amount of displacement that he was creating. Uh. It had no means of propulsion, however, so we could go down into the water and it could come back up from the bottom of the river

that he was using it. And what his plan was was to make such a spectacle that people would be overcome with amazement that a man could go down to the bottom of a river and live there for more than an hour and then come back up none the worse for wear, and then they throw money at him. This is like a water elevator, Yeah, except it didn't go anywhere. It was more like like think of like a magician, a busker who's trying to or like just someone just playing a song, just trying to hope for tips.

They got their little guitar case out there, excep. In this case, he's got an enormous boat. It sinks into a river and occasionally comes back up again. Uh. People did not leave a lot of tips in his tip jar. Yeah. They probably left when he submerged himself, thinking well that guy's gone. Yeah, they see you later, loser. Uh. Turns out it did not pay for itself, so it ended up being just a curiosity. And of course, like I said, there's no propulsion system and there was no practical application

for it. A strange bit of history, Yes, I thought so too. I should make a note of that for Ridiculous History. By the way, if you weren't subscribed to Ridiculous History, you should totally subscribe to Ridiculous History. It's a fun show. SEO. John Day, an English shipbuilder created a fairly small water tight chamber that was weighed down by stones, So again not really a submarine. It's something that would allow you to sink to the bottom of

a body of water. Uh. The chamber had these stones attached to it, like strung along the outside of it, and on the inside of the chamber were bolts that if you pulled the bolt, it would release a stone. So that was how you could release stones and allow yourself to pop back up to the surface. And the whole point of this was very similar to what Simons was trying to do. It was an idea of like, I can make money by convincing people. Hey, like I'm gonna do this crazy stunt. Pay me. So he goes

out and he finds another guy named Christopher Blake. Christopher Blake was a bit of a gambler, a risk taker, and he said to Blake, here's my idea. We build a bigger one of these, and we make a claim saying that I'm going to go down to the bottom of Plymouth Harbor and I'm going to stay there for twenty four hours, and after twenty four hours, I'm gonna come back up and if I can do it. We win the bet, and I just need you to back me. Because you have money, you can back my part of

the bet. And Blake says this is interesting. Well, we'll see if anyone will take us up on the bet, and if we win, you get ten percent of the winnings. And so Day says, let's do it. So they did. They got lots and lots of people to bet on it, so tons of money going into this. The day comes and John Day gets into his larger watertight container using the exact same premise. Now before he had been practicing in a river, not in a harbor. You might see where this is going. Rivers are not as deep as

harbors are. He had not tested this in uh water that was as deep, which was a hundred feet deep, and as a wooden structure yep, turned out to be too much ah, the structure collapsed. Day did not survive, He did not win his bet. Blake did not get to collect lots of money from people, and people who were perhaps a little more sensible, made a little money that day in a very sad way, no kidding. So he jumped into the harbor essentially with a bunch of rocks tied to him, and that was it sunk to

the san too, about hundred feet. The pressure caused the structure to fail, and yeah, he drowned. Yeah. Not not a good way to go. Um. Not a great element of the submarine story, but one that I thought was really interesting because a century earlier you had a French priests say, you know, if you want to go deep, you should probably use something sturdier than would so people have been talking about for a hundred years, but we didn't. You know, this guy wasn't really taking it to heart,

and it turned out that that was his fatal undoing. Now, seventeen seventy six is a great musical. It's also an important year in American history. It's a musical, Yes it is. Sit down, John, It's it's a very important year in American history. And in fact it features the first time that someone was attempting to use a submarine in actual wartime during the Revolutionary War here in what is now America, but at the time was a British colony, and colonist

David Bushnell built the submarine. It's called the Turtle. You may have heard of this. It was kind of egg shaped. Uh, it's the first submarine ever to actually attack an enemy ship,

not successfully, but we'll get into it. Bushnell supposedly talked with another luminary of the time, a certain Benjamin Franklin, a smarty pants, who kind of advised him on his plan, and they built this egg shaped submarine that had two propellers, so sort of screw shaped propellers, one facing directly in front of the person, so rotating a hand crank one direction would cause you it to pull the submarine along,

so you would go forward. The second propeller was in a vertical alignment, so it allow you to sink lower or surface again. Um And the whole purpose of this was to allow someone to very secretly and sneakily get up to enemy ships. So British Navy ships surface, drill a hole into the enemy shop, attach a mine that has a clockwork mechanism to allow it to detonate. I didn't get the heck out of dodge before things go

what's a simple plan, simple plan? What could go wrong could possibly happen in that time for a minute, would cause some kind of disasters. Now now, fortunately spoiler alert for people who get really anxious about this kind of stuff. No disaster occurred, but it was unsuccessful. So it was unsuccessful but not tragic for Bushnell, or to that matter, for Ezra Lee, who was the sergeant who actually piloted the turtle. Uh. Bushnell said, here's the thing. I built,

the darn thing. I'm not strong enough. We're skilled enough to actually pilot it. Like there's a foot pedal that would allow you to control the bladders that would that would bring on water or remove water. There were the two hand cranks for navigation. Uh, it was very hot work. It's extremely physical. Yeah, you know, to to propel this thing through the water, I get it. Yeah, yeah, And this was not hydrodynamically designed. Really, and so as really

did it. He managed to get up to a British ship called the Eagle, but he was unable to penetrate the eagles hull with a drill. And there's some conjecture about why this is. Some people think that perhaps he was even suffering from carbon dioxide poisoning, that he had been breathing so heavily and breathing his own air for so long that that that made it exacerbated things, made him weaker than he otherwise would have been. Sure and I think that's the case in all of these we

talked about so far. When you're under the surface, you're you're physically powering the ship, and you're you're you're exercising, you're breathing more than you would at rest. Sure, so that becomes a factor in all of these. I doubt that any people earlier than this and even considered that possibility, right. And you know, some of the earlier submarines had things like air tubes that would extend up above the surface. But obviously if you want something that's going to be sneaky,

you can't do that. You know, hard it would be to breathe through a snorkele that it would be let's say, even even ten ft long, be very difficult. So I don't I doubt the effectiveness of that long for a crew of men, right, And so yeah, until you get to the point where you have things like carbon dioxide scrubbers, which is much much much later, it's just it's it's it's a you can just imagine it being a miserable

experience to the inside one of these. Sure, so they think he may have when he exited the ship, he might have been a little bit delirious. Sure, Okay. Now he realized that he wasn't gonna be able to complete his mission, so the best thing he could do is try and escape. So he gets back into the turtle and starts to move away, and the British see that there's something flowing in the water, and like, what the heck is that, Let's send some roboats out there to

check it out. So some British sailors get into rowboats and you know, they've got guns and stuff. Turtles not really gonna be able to withstand too much punishment. So what Lee does is he's pretty smart. He he lets loose the mind so that it's a distraction. It doesn't blow up, but it does create another thing for everyone to go check out. While he continues to try and scaaddle. He manages to get a safe distance away and escapes. He does not know the turtle does not collapse. He

managed to get away. It does not mark a successful attempt to attack an enemy ship, but it is the first time in recorded history where we have someone using a submarine to try to attack annoy. Yes. Now, in the sevent nineties, a guy comes up with his own idea for submarines and things that would be a great weapon in war. This guy would later on become incredibly famous for a related technology. And that guy is Robert Fulton.

And if the name sounds familiar, it's because you probably are like a fan of things like like Mark Twain, because Fulton was the guy who made the steamship really famous. So late seventeen hundreds, you know, it's almost the almost the turn of the century. He comes up with this idea for submarines and he at the time not real crazy about the British Navy, not a big fan. He goes over to France, meets a meets a guy named Bony.

Nappy Bony Napoleon Bonaparte is friends. That's funny, so Nappy Bony he says to him, Hey, buddy, uh short stuff, just kidding. It really wasn't. But he said, hey, buddy, I got this idea. This if you if you make this this underwater boat, not only will you be incredibly effective against enemy ships, but ultimately you'll be so effective that no one will ever dare use their navy against you, because you'll just decimate that name. In fact, we'll eventually

get to a point. And I can't believe that Robert Fulton was arguing this, but it's so funny that history repeats itself. We'll get to a point where everyone will build these underwater ships, and then no one will ever declare war on anyone else, because if you were, you would be reigning down destruction on yourself. He was arguing about mutually assured destruction via submarine battle. Yeah, and then flash forward a couple hundred years and you've got the

whole basis of the Cold War. Right, was really talking up the submarine capabilities here well, and he really believed it. I mean, he was sure that he could do this, and in fact, he created some pretty innovative features in his design. He created some fins, some stabilization fins that also would allow for controlled diving so that you'd be able to steer while diving, which was brand new before it either would start sinking or would start surfacing. And

that was it. But his design got a little more sophisticated in that. So are we talking like a nuclear warheads? You know, like like nuclear tipped ballistic missiles and things like that. Now we're talking still like clockwork mine. I guess I jumped ahead a little bit. Yeah, still a little he did have. He did add a periscope. He's the first guy to add a periscope to a submarine. Well that's pretty cool. Yeah. Now, periscopes have been around for a while, but they have been used on land.

They had not been used on submersibles. So if you happen to, let's say I want to attend the town parade, but perhaps you are on the shorter side, you could get a periscope and see over the crowd. Right. It's just a series of mirrors and lenses, is all. It is perfect use of one. Yeah, And so he came up with the idea of actually incorporating that in the design of submarines, so that you could peek up above the surface of the water without completely coming up right

giving it away. Yeah, I mean, the whole point of this was to try and create a secret stealth vehicle. He gave his prototype. He actually built one of these, and he gave his prototype an awesome name that would be used for other summary, the nautilus. Oh yeah, a great name for a submarine. But the French looked at it and they said, here's the problem. Because at this point it's still manpowered. It's too slow it's too cumbersome.

It's not a good vehicle for war because by the time we actually deploy one and get toward a ship, you're moving so slowly that if you are detected, there's really nothing else you can You can't really take a base of maneuvers. You're not gonna be able to outrun anybody. Um It to us is too much expense, not enough reward for that expense. So Fulton's heartbroken. He's tried to push this on the French because of his hatred of the British Navy. So then he does the only thing

and he smart businessman does. He goes to England and he says to the English government, Hey, you know, the French we're thinking about this submersible thing. But I've got the idea, I got the plans right here, buddy. I can give it to you today for half true capitalist right there, right. So he comes up to them and uh, Prime Minister William Pitt looks in and says, this is really interesting, but I would much prefer to hire you to create what we're called torpedoes. But they were not

the kind of torpedoes we think of today. They were still essentially clockwork mines. His idea was to create a raft that would have a mine mounted on the underside of the raft. You would have a sailor paddle a raft that has a lower profile than most boats out to a ship attached the mind to an enemy ship, paddle away and then eventually the timer would go off and the mind would explode. Uh. And that he got paid for, but no one want the nautilus. Eventually it

would get junked. And then he would come back to the United States and get into steamships in a big way. So his story ended. Uh. You know, he didn't end in defeat. He did plenty well for himself and until he Uh. In a semi related view, we talked about steamboats, like paddle boat steamboats. Yeah in Mississippi. Yeah, yeah, you know what, there's still there's still examples of those around. People still jump on those for riverboat cruises down the

down the Mississippi and things like that. It's a it's a fun time. People tried using steam engines to power submarines. Can you imagine a couple of problems with that? You can imagine lots of problems with it. Yes, So one is that you have to have fire yes, which which would take up quite a bit of oxygen, and oxygen is at a premium when you're underwater. As it turns out, that was the biggest issue. Heat also another one, but oxygen being very important, that was that was one. Another

big problem actually is that steamships use boilers. Right, You've got a container filled with water, right, So it turns out you've got a container of water inside a vessel that itself is in a body of water. Whenever that vessel would change in attitude right, starting to point down or point up or left or right, the water slashes around.

This causes more internal momentum, which changes the motion of the overall vessel, which meant that for those particular early submarines, when you were diving, you were diving at a real steep descent, and same thing when you were coming up, you were ascending at a very steep angle. So imagine those old episodes of Star Trek where the entire crew is being is like throwing themselves left and right on the bridge, except that's really happening and going forward and

backward every single time. Oh my gosh, there's no there's no walking between um and parts of the vessel. When it's ascending or decent. It's more like rolling between the You're you're just hanging on and hoping that you don't fall to the bottom if you're lucky. Maybe maybe you're strapped into something if you're really fortunate. But yes, there was a real problem, and that was a problem for submarines really leading all the way up to the electrical age.

There are a couple of other really cool historical ones. Well that and well one last thing on the steam powered ones. Boilers had a propensity to explode sometimes. Yep, that was also an issue. Weren't well put together. They were also sometimes converted into submarines. One of the ones during the Civil War was there are actually a few submarines that were built and submersible semi submersibles that were

built during the Civil War. Here in the United States, the Union had one called the Alligator, which is kind of cool. There was a human powered submarine used by the Union forces and a sealable hatchway that allowed a diver to leave the boat while it was underwater for the purposes of attaching a mind to an enemy ship. Now that's a cool idea, and it was the first

time anyone had managed to make one of those. By the way, Alligator is a great name for one of those because it looks like an alligator on the surface. It does. Uh, that particular design was just looking at it's pretty terrifying. But yeah, this idea of having essentially like an airlock style a diver's lock was really innovative and allowed them to do stuff that other ships could not do. They'd have to surface in order for someone to get out, right, they couldn't just let them out

in the underwater. But on the Confederate side of the war, you had one of these boilers that got converted into a submarine. That was done by a guy named H. L. Huntley, and the Confederates were really determined to use this submarine. You can tell because on the first two test runs, not actual deployments of the Hunley, but the first two test runs it sank both times. The first time it killed five crew members. The second time it killed everyone aboard,

including Hunley himself. Yeah, so all the crew perished. They still used it. The Confederates deployed it um and it even was used to sink a ship. It actually sank the USS who Satonic in a successful attack. But the Hunley also sank. Uh. Some people think that maybe it suffered damage because it it's weapon was essentially a long spear tipped with an explosive, so he had to actually

ram into the side of the enemy show. So the inventor then didn't get to see the success of his own invention, right, he had already drowned in a trial, and then as the Hunley was sailing away from the housatanic Uh, it sank, either because it suffered damage from that explosion, or there's also the possibility that a nearby ship that was rushing to the aid of the Union vessel that was struck the wake that it was creating was enough to slash over and open hatch on the

Hunley and thus flooded. You know what, I just hearing the story, it seems like the explosive on a stick might be the might be the problem. Probably probably problem number one you're gonna get I mean, you don't have a whole lot of control, you know, the longer that stick gets, really so, so I'm assuming that it was a fairly short stick, and probably they did sustain some damage.

I'm sure, yeah, I mean, and like I said, it was the fact that they had already lost a crew plus five crew all but five crew members two in trials. We're talking like two essentially two full cruise really man. Yeah, and yet they were determined to try and get this to Yeah. I guess so. The first and then none of those, by the way, we're mechanical. Those were all

human powered submarines. The first mechanical submarine didn't launch until eighteen sixty three in France, called Le plongeur y because it takes the plant. Yeah, and it used compressed air. It also had that same problem I was talking about with the stability issues with with the steam powered ones, and that it would do those very steep dives and ascensions back up to the surface, to the point where

no one thought of it as practical. It was just two It was too unwieldy, too uncontrollable, whenever you wanted to dive or surface. Man, that's something I don't want to hear when I get into a submarine, is it's it's uncontrollable. Yeah, not not the best adjective. It doesn't. It doesn't give you a whole lot of confidence as they're stealing that hatch. That's like, that's like hearing it's

almost water tight, and most of them were almost water sure. Yeah, so we're getting up to the end of my my history lesson here. In the eighteen eighties, that's when the battery technology was starting to get to the point where you were beginning to see people put in electric motors and experiment with that for submarines, which turned out to be fantastic because you no longer needed manpower to move

the parts. You didn't have to worry about steam, you didn't have to worry about a fire, you didn't have to worry about that slashing that was creating stability issues. And that's really where the technology for submarines began to take off, and people began to refine things like the design of the submarine, the various instrumentation you would need on a submarine to be able to navigate effectively underwater, particularly once you start getting to depths where you can

no longer have any sort of transparent window. You have to You're you're sailing by instrumentation alone. So clearly you have to have extremely precise maps and extremely precise instruments. And we're talking, Yeah, it's not exactly as precise as it is today. No, No, It wouldn't be until after like World War two era that we started getting really really accurate underwater maps. Terrifying after World War Two, and you know how extensively they were used in you know

World War two. Sure, yeah, the U boats, I mean that was the Germany was infamous for their U boats. They were they were really inspired terror on the seat, so they were feared by all. Yeah, yeah, and so you know, but it was not it still wasn't an era where you really knew everything that you were going

to encounter. And of course you can't see anything down there, so you're you're lying completely upon the records that have been generated over time and you know, keeping an eye on a watch to make sure, you know, okay, well, in five seconds, we need to have a twenty degree turned to port. Oh my gosh, I think think of what a what a map of the ocean floor might look like in eighteen sixty. I mean you're going by that here they're be squid essentially. Yeah, So that gives

us our our background. And now it's finally time for us to talk about personal submarines. We're gonna skip ahead over all the different you know, the different evolutions of the battery powered and the diesel power the nuclear powered submarines, we're gonna go straight to pleasure craft, essentially, is what it comes down to. And in my research, I essentially came to the conclusion that that these personal submarines are

meant for one of three potential markets. Market Number one is for perhaps organizations dedicated to studying the ocean, and they have a massed enough money to get some of these smaller submarines to allow for more maneuverability to study specific biomes under the sea. But a lot of them tend to be a little more um luxury bay faced them what you would typically think of for a research

instat sure. Number two tourism, so to our companies, like you might go around on a cruise and you see on the excursions take a submarine ride on such and such. I can see that happening too, especially for some of the higher end ones, where you're going to a company that has invested money into buying one of these and then they make it back by selling admission to take rides on a vacation location which is going to have

crystal clear waters and lots of wildlife. Th A're going to like st Thomas or something, and you want to be able to see the ocean. Third is fill these stink and rich billionaires who just want the adventure all about adventure. Yeah, I have a feeling that's and if you're looking at the marketing for most of these that seems to be who they're targeting, which you imagine has got to be a fairly small market. But it's a market.

And you know what, they sell plenty of cars that are these ultra high luxury you know, extremely um expensive toys for the very wealthy, and they sell a lot of them every year. So there's there is a market out there. Yeah, it amazes me that. Well it's because again we're not in that tax bracket and so it's hard for me to imagine a life where I could uh one, where I could even afford one, and to where not only could I afford one, but I could

buy it. And still you know, eat um because right now we're talking about vehicles that if I were to save up over the course of twenty years, I might be able to buy one. But that's if I didn't spend money on anything else, right, So saving every single penny make and nothing else right, right, Like just I've become an air terry and I'm just a breath area. That's when I'm just breathing air and taking them all my nutrients, which doesn't work. But it's very very expensive

to get into this game, isn't it. Yeah? And I was looking around. I came across an organization called p subs p subs dot org, and they actually have some interesting information. First of all, uh, here is a definition for personal submarines that I pulled from the sites. Personal submarines are those submarines which are owned by some person as a personal property and not owned by a government or any public organization. They're usually used for recreational underwater

experience exploration, or sometimes for scientific research. They're usually small size and sometimes are called many submarines. Their capacity ranges from one person to twenty five or more persons. At that point, I don't think I can call it really small. Uh. Usually five to nine seater submarines are used for research purpose, and submarines with higher capacity are used for tourism purposes.

In nineteen the Personal Submersibles Organization or peace UBS was founded. Now, this started as a group of enthusiasts who were talking about boats on a list server, the old list servers of the real pre web days or early web days. So they would go to a list server called wreck dot Boats dot Building r EC, wreck like Recreation, so this people who build boats for fun, you know, things

that they're building pleasure craft. Well, there were about four or five people on that list who wanted to talk about the possibility of a personal submarine, but that really didn't fit with the overall conversation that was going on in the group, so they took it offline. Well, they kept it online, but they took it off the list and they just started chatting through email. They just kind of had a group email going where they were talking

about their interests. Eventually they decided to create their own list server. In they created an archive of it, and by October they secured the domain peace subs dot org. And uh, as it stands, if you go to that today p subs dot org, you can find tons of information about personal submarines and they're deep discussions about things and they have very important points to make about things

like safety and reliability and how useful is that? How user friendly are some of these because as you can imagine Scott piloting one of these things underwater is not necessarily the most intuitive thing, especially when you get into more complicated environments like you're talking about reefs and things of that nature. And um, uh, I'm sure you could imagine that these are not vehicles that necessarily say stop

on a dime. Yeah, yeah, it's not. It's not as intuitive as it would be to drive a car or something in that same Uh. You know, you're not driving up to the edge of a cliff and stopping. You're also having to deal with with with currents, Yeah, exactly right, and uh, and just a host of other things that you're not even thinking about that you know, up down motion versus just you know, left right back forward. You've also got you know, another access to com you know,

to be concerned with. And and not all of these, not all of them we're gonna talk about have those really really simple controls. But they're getting there. Some of the newer ones are very user friendly, and their goal

is to make them easy enough for anybody to drive. Yeah, to make it so intuitive that just with a simple training session you can get to a point where you're comfortable enough piloting around uh an open ocean environment, for example, or a lake environment in some cases, but it hasn't always been that way. No, No, And and you know it took a lot of work from a lot of people to get up to that point. Um. I'm sure when you were looking through all this you came across

the name Graham Hawks. Yes, so Graham Hawks was He is a marine engineer who was born in London nineteen and uh. He was famous for lots of stuff. I mean, he's built pretty much in the nine ninies, all of the small submersibles were based off of his designs. And he set a world record in two thousand seven for the deepest solo dive. That was when he went down around almost three thousand feet UM in a solo submarine. And he held that record for a long time until

a certain Hollywood director smashed it. Yeah, but he was in the deep rover. And as it turns out, like a lot of the personal submarines that are out there now are are still they're they're his designs. Like if you see any of the deep flight stuff, most of the deep flight stuff comes directly from his design. Now, that's what I'm familiar with him and is in the deep flight in particular, in the is it. What's it called the Dragon? I think it's the one two person submersible.

Looks an awful lot like, as he describes it, like a Formula one car does that goes underwater? Yeah, very cool. And he describes it as as almost like a quad copter that you're flying underwater, if you want to put

it that way. Yeah. It's got two vertically aligned rotors that are on either side of the chassis where you would be sitting, and those allow you to have that hovering ability at a certain depth, right, Like you could actually set how deep you want to go up to, up to the vehicle's limit, Like you don't have unlimited diving. It can only go so far. It goes down to

about just shy a four hundred feet. You know what's funny is, as we're talking about this now and you just mentioned that somebody had shattered his record, I hadn't been familiar with his record up and up until this point, but something that he said in one of the videos that I watched in preparation for today, it's telling. I guess he said, you know, it used to be all

about we wanted to go deeper, deeper, deeper. That was one of the things he said, you know, that was the point ahead of time, and he said, now now we've we've kind of shifted to a different mindset. It's now that we want to make the ocean more accessible to everybody we wanted to be. Um is something that is a little more include that. You know, anybody can spend just a few bucks to rent a sub and go out and enjoy what we've been enjoying all along.

But it has cost us millions of dollars. You can you can now just spend a few dollars and go out and you know, kind of get that experience, even if it's for one day. But we're not talking about as you just mentioned, and I'm getting us a little bit off track. I'm sorry, but the depth things, the depth thing really got to me. But you were saying that, you know, most of them are kind of limited to

just ballparkable. We'll guess it's like feet. Yeah, that's that's the majority of the personal subs that I looked up. Is that's your maximum death if you if you're looking at like the super expensive ones, the ones that are a couple of million dollars. Uh, some of the ones that U s submarines slash Titan do are tritting, I'm sorry. Triton do are are rated to go much deeper, but those are the ones that are incredibly expensive. Did you

ever see the Abyss, the movie The Abyss? Yes, you know those those sort of orb shaped submersible as they use. Almost all of the Triton ones look like and there are several of those that are rated to go U really really deep. Um, but they you know, they don't look they're not sexy like the deep Flight ones. The deep flight ones. You look at that and you're like, oh,

that looks like it looks like a sports vehicle. Well, there's a good reason for all this too, and that's because the people that are going to be buying something like this, I mean, it's all about seeing what's down there, right, And when you get to a certain depth in anybody of water, there's going to be a point where sunlight

doesn't penetrate anymore. It's it's black. So if let's say, for instance, you know the one video that I watched from Deep Flight was shot in Lake Tahoe, and Lake Tahoe very crystal clear blue water, right, but about four feet down, it's pointless to go any deeper than that in a submarine. That's meant just for observation. If you're going down to you know, take samples, that's something different. You know, you don't need to be able to see in order to do that. You have external lights and

you can you can check out what's there. But if you're going down there just simply for the beauty of the lake and to really experience it into you know, at the wow factor, I guess it's pointless to go below about four feet in that lake with a passenger who's just more of a sightseer. And and that's what this type of craft is really for, so you know,

they they've built it. That's a that's a test depth, I guess is that the depth there's you know, kind of mentioned something right now too what we're talking about this. There are three types of depth that will come up when you talk about submersibles, and the first one is test depth, or if you're reading about them, you'll you'll come across these. Test depth is the maximum depth that

that a sub can go in normal operation. That's what that you know that they're saying like, probably shouldn't take a blow about three and thirty feet you want to stay ap of that, of course. Uh, there's design depth, and designed depth is a little bit different, but that's the depth of design engineers think that the sub can go and still be able to return to the surface safely, you know, without any kind of crushing, without any collapse of any of the structure of the of the sub

because of the pressure. Uh. And then there is crushed depth. Now, crushed depth, that's something that you want to stay away from, of course. Unfortunately, that's the depth that happened that a lot of subs achieve when they they're out of control and they just simply dropped to the bottom. Now there's a there's a crush depth. Then what happens is that there's a rupture or a tear in the body. It's it's crushed by the pressure, the immense pressure on the outside.

It just collapses it like a can. And what happens is that the pressure from the outside becomes instantly the same pressure on the inside and just rips everything apart. So implosure. Yeah. So if you hear of a sub that has dropped to the bottom of the ocean, there's a good chance that it has achieved crushed depth. And if it has. There's there's really no saving that crew or sub or you know, any of that. But there's a chance, there's a chance, there's a slight chance that

you can come back from crush depth. You can get to a point where a sub will have exterior damage. You know that it does begin to collapse, and if it's recovered quickly enough, they can they can make it back to the surface. So you can get to what they do call crushed depth and then and still make it. But it's uh actually they say that, you know, it's it's probably more common that you might think, because they realize something's wrong. You know, the spring a leak, there's

there's some collapsing going on. You hear you hear groaning in the submarine that is beyond what you normally hear. Yeah, you know, I heard a tail and this is just something that bread somewhere. I don't have a you know, a source for this because I just didn't write it down, but a couple of sailors that were in a submarine said that they would tie you know, the the ribs. I guess to go around the outside of the shub.

And this is an older, primitive sub I think there were marine sub um sorry, not a marine sub, a naval sub and they tie they what they would do is they tie a string between the walls I guess, at the sub if you want to call it, at the rounded walls of the sub on a couple of these these these um just hooks that they had up there, and they would tie it tight and as the sub would descend, it would It was because the interiors being

pushed in exactly right. So they knew if they were going deeper and deeper, there would be more and more slack in that line, and as they went and they started to rise to the surface that it would become tight again. They gets to a point where you're saying, captain, we might need to you know, we just just let's just go up a couple of feet. So what you might not want to do, though, is is is secure something like that. Let let's say if it was it was it was a wire wire instead of a rope.

That's something that doesn't have any give. You definitely don't want to attach that while you're at depth ascend. It just tears. It's going to rip the walls apart. Yeah, So that was a clever way, you know, for them just kind of wherever in the sub to kind of have a semi accurate measure of how deep they are.

I like that idea. Uh. Fortunately, with the pleasure subs we're talking about, that would not really be a factor for most of them, because most of them, again are like one or two person ones for the for the real pleasure. So there's something that are like five or seven people. But that then it's like a pilot sitting in the front and then a group of people saying kind of behind or to the side of the pilot and you can kind of look through like an observation

window an underwater bus. Yeah, yeah, with a big bubble front. And you know that's the thing is that all of these that we found, uh, sight seeing I guess, or just being able to see everything around you is keyed in this. It's not it's not like a military subwhere you know, again it's instruments and you're down in the depths where it's dark. This is all about being able to connect with the water, the you know, the the um, the aquali, the aquatic life. I guess it's a struggling

for words. Yeah, it's all about being able to see, you know, animals like like dolphins and whales and all the varieties of fish. So you definitely want nice large

viewable like ports that you can look out. You want and you want a a vehicle that you can operate by sight like you can you can navigate by sight, I mean, you would still have instrumentation to keep you aware of where your relative position is compared to say, let's be honest, you're super yacht, because chances are that's how you got out to wherever you are anyway, So you've gotta be able, you know, you need to know

where you're super yacht is. The most of these have operating uh, like you small operating hours that range between like four and eight hours somewhere around there. Some of them are less than that. So obviously you don't want to go too far away because if you do, then that's gonna be a lot of rowing for you to get back to your super yacht. Almost all our electric operation as well, Yeah, yeah, they all all the ones I came across where lithium battery powered. Uh. A lot

of them have a specific type of of buoyancy. It's fixed positive buoyancy is what's called yes. That means that when everything is turned off, it is naturally bullyant, so it'll it'll float to the top. So for example, the Dragon one you were mentioning earlier, it has those two rotors that are like almost like a drone rotors right that that are vertically aligned. Well, those are what allow you to stay under the water. Along with forward momentum.

It's got some of that same design that I mentioned from centuries ago, where moving forward helps drive the nose of your vehicle down a little bit, so it keeps you submerged. But the two rotors definitely maintain that and allow you to have a nice level attitude while you're going down there. Uh, all that turns off, then it's just gonna rise up to the top of the water because it's positively bulliant. Yeah, and control of that is

very simple. I mean I said, they're trying to make it as easy as possible for everybody now to use these and uh, you know, the the left hand I believe operates the up down attitude of the of the you know, of the ship, and the the other hand, your right hand would operate a joystick, which would allow you a little further movement left, right, you know, forward, backward,

that type of thing. So it's very very simple. And these these particular ones we're talking about, like the Dragon, are design kind of like a fighter jet where you've got the the pilot and passenger. It's front and back type of seating arrangement, seated side by side, which actually kind of think is kind of cool. That's a real cool design. Yeah. They also have one called the super Falcon, which is it looks more like a jet than the Dragon. The Dragon looks kind of like a car, and the

super Falcon looks kind of like a jet. It's a little or needle shaped. Um it's it's almost twenty ft long. So they still say it's one of the smaller personal submersibles that can fit on your typical super yacht. And I'm thinking all of these words don't make sense to me. Smaller personal submarine and typical super yacht. All of that is like so antithetical to my experience that I'm having

difficulty imagining it. By the way, if you're a listener of tech stuff and you have a super yacht and you would like to show me what a super yacht's all about, I'll take you up on it. Um, Because I've never been on one. I've been on cruise ships. That's as close as I've managed to get personally own cruise ships. No, I know, the cruise ships I was on were owned by enormous corporations, including one that has

a couple of really popular theme parks around the world. Um. But yeah, these are these are your basic kind of personal submarine craft. They use electric motors. Uh, they use electric propellers. Um. And you're showing me some more of the designs over here. Well, you know, here's the thing. I when we were talking about personal watercraft, I was thinking, where have I seen some good examples of this? And I remember, you know, flying many years ago, and I

fly all the time. But now they don't. Now they don't have that Skymall magazine thumb through anymore. But when they did have sky Mall, there was a company by the name of and I hope I don't botch this, but it's it's Hammocker Schlimmler, Hamaker, Schlimmer Schlimmer. That's that's

a Hammerker Schlimmer. I was called Hsan. Yeah. I decided to check out their website because I knew the company was still around, so I did I did that searched for the word submarine or personal submarine or something like that. They make lots of toys for people who have way more money. Yes, it's a it's a very expensive toy store for adults. Right. And this is a uh, this is a list of the six personal submarine vehicles that they have for sale right now today. Yeah. They range

as I'm looking at here from. Uh the low end is nine dollars, yeah, that's right now. The top end, the top end is a shocking two point seven million dollars. But you can fit five people, and well, that is a five person submarine, you're right, I mean that's a that's a big one that you were talking about before, with more like a mini bus. I so things you know, like you're you're you're shuttling a group of people. And the one that's ninety dollars is that one that I

believe most people have probably seen this already. It's the one that looks like a whale, looks like an orca um. So this one, I've I've watched this one in action. It's got a it's got a gasoline motor. It's like a supercharged engine that you know, you you have to use fuel for and it can only go underwater briefly because gasolene motors also need absolutely right. And there's a maximum depth of somewhere I'm gonna ballpark this. I think it's around five feet because there's a snorkel on top

that's disguised as a dorsal fin on this thing. And it does do you know, the the surface breaching where you know you can jump through the water, but and you can go under water. The problem is when you go under water, you have to be going so fast. You have to because you have to you know, have enough drive to push yourself under the water and it's

pop back out again exactly that forward momentum. And I'm not saying this isn't really cool, but this isn't one of the subs like we're talking about where you can go under and kind of really get a look around and it's very peaceful and everything. This is more like a jet ski that can take you underwater. Absolutely, but you're you're underwater and you're going twenty five miles per hour when you're submerged, and on the surface you go

as fast as fifty miles per hour. So it's fast and and it's it's clever looking, and I agree, it's really it really is cool and it'd be fun to be able to do that jumping motion. But it's not actually one of these, you know, I guess a sight seeing sub like some of the other ones we're talking about. And there's some weird designs here too, and if you if you look, I mean there's the of course, I think most people are familiar with this one. You've we've

seen this one recently in the news. A lot um maybe not a lot but the submarine sports cars what they call it. It's two million dollars. It looks like a lotus a lease. And the problem with this one though, is that it's it's all open to the to the water. You're not inside in our krylic you know, sphere or anything like that. Like the rest of them. You have to wear scuba gear. Yeah, this one relies on Scooba gear.

It's it's what is called a wet submarine. They have wet submarines and dry submarines, and wet submarine is any submersible. It's really people some people get really picky, they say

you should call this submersible, not a submarine. It's a submersible that the cockpit is open, it is exposed to the environment, which means that obviously, if you're gonna be underwater for any extended a period of time rains, you've got to be wearing scuba gear, so you have to have your own personal oxygen supply and probably a mask of some sort, unless you really are comfortable with your

eyes stinging like crazy, I guess so. Yeah. But the cool thing about this one, though, I mean, for that two million dollars, you can also just drive that one right out of the lake or the the ocean right

and go right on the street. It has a maximum speed on land of seventy five miles per hour, so you can use it as a real car, an electric car, so it's like a super fast one of those super fast amphibious ducks, you know they take people on tours, except this one actually goes under one seventy five land, but underwater you're you're limited to about two knots when you're submerged, so it's not very quick underwater knots a nautical miles, And it's an electric car that only has

an eighty mile range when you're on land, so it's it's fairly limited in that. And that's well for an eight you know, I'm sorry, a two million dollar cars. So you're essentially putting it into the trailer of a truck and then you're hauling it to the somewhere near the east side. What I do is I drive it near the beach and then just for the show, you know, you drive it right right onto the boat launch and

right in the wall. Think and if you're a real character, you might be like, oh no, I've lost control and you just slowly drive right into the lake or ocean or whatever. Folks, well, who wouldn't do that at least once? Right, It might be a little hard to understand you because you'll probably have some some like the you know, the rebreather, the scuba rebreather and your own. But the effect will

be there, Yeah, the effect would be there. And there's another one that's maybe the most unusual looking one really, and that's this one they call the Amphibious Subsurface Watercraft. Oh yeah, and this is the one that I probably remember seeing in this magazine for years. It seems like an older design. Uh. This one has two parts to it and it doesn't really go as deep as you might expect either. It's it's the well, the top part floats like and you can you know, have your head

up in the upper area there. It's also enclosed and it flows. It floats with that almost like a raft above above the water below. It is kind of this, I guess it would hang down below the water surface, and it's a it's a sphere, another arcroic sphere where two people can sit and observe whatever is below you.

So it's kind of like a glass bottom boat, except that it actually has a secondary almost like a secondary vehicle position below the primary one, and that one is under the water, yes, and that has tracks as well. So this is another one you can drive into the water and you know, right onto a trailer if you want. Now it's it's not roadworthy. It's not something that you can take on you know, the streets and drive you know, to the ocean or whatever you have to. You have

to get this one to the water. But you know, within the case with the other ones, you would have to find a dock or you'd have to find a crane something like that, or launch it from your super Yet, as you said, right, so they're even more you know, difficult, more complex to launch than than would be one of these two that you can drive in to the water. But a man, I mean that Okay, that one we just talked about, that that subsurface warcraft. That's that's three

hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, so you're still talking a pretty high entry price for something like this. So you know that Richard Branson he famously purchased a deep flight Merlin submersible, so same company that does the deep Flight Challenger, which was the one that James Cameron took down to the Marianna Trench the deepest dive. He he did two of those two deepest dives. Um he uh. He got that one down there and was uh, you know that that got all the news. But Richard Branson went out had

and bought a deep flight Merlin. Slightly different is a wet sub so it's open cockpit um exposed to the ocean. That one only six hundred thousand dollars, so only twice as much as the one you were looking at their um and it was called the Necker Nymph. Yeah. I don't I don't ask questions and just read this the information. Uh. I want to talk about a couple of others before we sign off, because we've we've got there's so many that we can chat about that are ridiculous. There there

are two things that we've got to talk about. Thing number one. We started off this conversation early on you talked about how there's a market for this because as as evidence, there's a market for high end, handmade luxury cars. We've talked about those in the past, like things like

Bentley's and stuff. Aston Martin made a big announcement last year about how the company was partnering with the personal submarine company Triton to create a new high end luxury personal sub and so all we know is the barement oum that Aston Martin has gotten involved in the design stage. We've seen a picture of the concept, although it's a computer generated image. It's not an actual prototype. Um not yet, not yet. It is more of that floating orb style

of submarine. It's less of like the sports car looking type thing. Uh, it's still in the concept stage. We have no idea how much it's gonna cost, but if it's by Aston Martin, I would suspect pretty penny would be in the range. Well, I've seen numbers around, like you know, four million, dollars. That that to me is not at all surprising because you look at just Aston Martin sports cars. Depending on the ones you're looking at, like the the Aston Martin one seventy seven, there are

only seventy seven of them ever made. These were a supercars, that high end luxury supercars that could have a top speed of like two twenty miles per hour. Those went for one point eight five million dollars apiece, and now there's only seventy six of them. There was a crash in Hong Kong, or down to seventy six of those. Aston Martin a m dash RB zero zero one price tag of three point nine million dollars. That one does not go on sale until well this year. So Scott,

I don't know if you've put aside any money. I've already got a down payment, right, yeah, I'll have this paid off in three thousand years. I have, I have a check ready to go. I just have a signed Yeah. That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. Well, you know, it's not as strange as you might think for Aston Martin to be involved with something like this. A lot of automakers have collaborated with luxury yacht makers to create some incredible super yachts, you know that are powered by Lamborghini or

powered by Bugatti, places like that. Well, Aston Martin has done this in the past as well. They have a one thousand, forty horsepower power boat that I think it starts around one point six million, but it's a spectacular looking boat. And it's it's, you know, I guess, a break from the usual for them, you know, to do

something like that. It's not something normally do. But they have this new branch at Aston Martin now that I don't know if it's a branch a branch is the best way to say it, but a new division maybe. And it's called Aston Martin Consulting so AMC, which I think is a funny name for Aston Martin Salting Big given AMC. You know motor saters, Yeah, well theaters. I

was thinking that's funny. I was thinking American motors. Um. So, you know, they have all these side projects and they're doing things like, um, they're creating what furniture they're creating U their designing. Really it's it's it's they're they're pairing up with other businesses that want to uh, you know, get some of their expertise on design engineering, you know, a structural uh um um stability, that kind of thing,

you know whatever. I'm I'm searching for words here. But they're doing a bunch of really crazy things right now. For Aston Martin. You wouldn't tink a typical car company would do something like this. Um. One thing, well, of course, this is one. One thing they've tried. Is this the submarine. Another thing is Aston They're they're getting into building residences. So Aston Martin has building residences in I believe it's in um. I think it's in Miami. Let me take

a quick period. It's it's uh. The price is something like, you know, fifty million dollars. So one of these. Yeah, because you're gonna find out that everything was made by hand, not on like an assembly line or anything like that. Yeah, exactly right. It's a but they're there, it would it has less of a an Aston Martin uh touched to it. Then you might think, you know, their logo is not everywhere.

It's just simply that they're helping with the design of this this ultra luxury condo or you know, or I guess its condos. I guess that would be the way to say it, but um, some of these penthouses are you know between um, you know, up to nineteen thousand square feet. It's one of those types of places really luxury, real luxury apartment really if you want to put it

that way, condo um, which I thought was strange. But on the same page they have a link to something called the Porsche Tower, so I guess Porsche is also getting into this, and they've they've done something where they're going to create this building where you're gonna be able to ride in your Porsche car or whatever car you have. It doesn't they're not gonna you know again, they're just designed by the Porsche Design Group. And you ride in

a this is the strangest thing. You I'd in a glass elevator in your car up to your penthouse level suite. So you've got the floor that's right, but everyone it's not just the penthouse level. It's every level. So your garage and home and everything is right there, exactly right,

and you're overlooking the ocean. It says it's spectacular. It's a different world, and it really is, you know, And I, um, again, look into those if you want to, But it's aston Martin residences, and then there's also the Porsche Design Tower if you want to want to check into that. But um strange that a car company, traditional car company, if you want to call it, that would would be getting into designing, you know, furniture and submarines, submarines, And yeah,

exactly right, it's a it's a very strange thought. Well, the last thing I want to touch on I mentioned it earlier at the very top of the show, the idea of concepts. As far as we can tell, there

are no examples of real world versions of that. There's a company called Megalou, and Megalou has everything from super yachts to super yacht submersibles, so essentially the super yocht version of a submarine to even a semi submerged island artificial island that you could have to launch all your stuff off of for presumably a truly magnificent amount of money. One of the super yachts that they have the M seven, which I think is the largest one they're they're super

yachts range. The designs range from seventy two ms to two hundred eighty three meters in links. All right, I'm gonna give that feet if you don't mind, sure al right. It goes from two hundred and thirty six ft long at the smallest up to nine hundred and thirty feet long at the long nine hundred thirty feet long. This is a submarine design. We're talking about I stressed design because there are like lots of c g I renderings of this, but as far as I can tell, none

have ever been built. Uh. The M seven has been estimated to costs that around two point three billion dollars with a B. And these are the ones that you can configure as as a couple of different things, right, So the configurations are you can you can configure it as a restaurant and bar for between twenty four and thirty six guests. You can configure it as a conference or a business layout, so you know, if you want to hold your your your meetings under the sea, have

at it. And you can also convert I guess I have it have it laid out as a private submersible yacht, so you can you can cruise the world in your own private submersible yet under the under the surface of the ocean. No one the wiser your travel in the world. You have your I mean obviously if you're that wealthy,

you have your own dedicated crew that's operating everything. You have to be a big crew to yeah, the The various layouts can include things like an onboard gym, a spa, a cinema, a gaming room, a library, an elevator because this is a big enough vehicle where you actually have to use an elevator to go up and down, different decks, um, multiple bars, v I P suites, ridiculous designs. Now, as we said, there's no images. There are no images anywhere

of any of these actually being built. These are all things like we can do this for you, you just have to write us the check. So, uh, it makes me wonder how a company like that stays in business because obviously if they had ever built one, there'll be pictures everywhere. You couldn't get away with not having pictures. Check out the site. It's it's Miguelou And if you if you want to do just a Google keyword search, you'll find that and you can see all these different

layouts that they have and it's really it's fantastic. It's pretty exciting. I first saw it, I thought, oh my gosh, this ISNA. This is amazing, I've never never seen with a hell of hate. And then you realize that, well, every single one of these is a rendering. Yeah, uh, migal Lose an Austrian company. Fun fact, Austria is a landlock. Yeah, that's a little tough for for a sub company. So just saying grain Assault, I mean, may just be that

no one's written the check yet, Like I'm not. I don't wish to say that the company itself is just all smoke and mirrors, right, I'm just saying that I can't find any evidence of any product ever coming out of it. But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't. How does it stay solvent? I have no ideas. Could be underwater, paperwear could be so. I mean, there's so much more we could talk about. We can all obviously get into all the technical details, but that would require another episode.

The interesting thing to me is that there are people who that are interested enough and wealthy enough to actually make this a viable industry, because otherwise these companies wouldn't exist. Some of them, like Mighelou, obviously seem to exist in the in the world of ideas where we haven't seen any realization of that, but others like the deep flight company Triton. They make these submarines. These are not theoretical,

they're not hypothetical products. They actually do exist. You can, if you have the money, go and purchase them, get the training, and operate them yourself. Uh. And it's phenomenal to me again that it's a market big enough to support these companies, but it works. Yeah. Well, I mentioned those, uh, those h and s personal subs earlier. All of those come with something that they call comprehensive training, so it requires a lot of a lot of effort. But if you want to rent a sub you can get one

from Norway, Norway right now. They'll ship it anywhere in the world. The cost you have to rent it for about a month, and that's about seventy five thousand euro I don't know, I didn't do the conversion. About a hundred thousand dollars a month, so it's expensive. But again it's a place called you Boat Works w r X and they will ship it anywhere in the world. These are typically more like um um, you know, discovery submarines where they you know, they've got arms for special in

the samples and things like that. So definitely those yeah, well, of course your idea, but but you know it's possible that you can rent one. That's that's the takeaway here is that you know that the ocean is becoming and even the Great Lakes or you know, whatever body water you're near is be coming more and more accessible to

everybody because of these companies. And we know that only a very select few can afford to buy one, but sure anybody can you know, run one for the day or the afternoon or an hour and get that experience. And I think that's what you know, all the owners of these companies are really excited about. Right They're looking at the recreation vendors out there, the ones that again cater to like cruise ships and stuff like that, or or pleasure centers places where people go to travel to

have a holiday of vacation. Uh, And I could definitely see that being a growing industry as well. It does give me some pause because anytime you're talking about increased activity around the oceans, you have to worry about the impact you're having on the environment. Most of these are at least clean vehicles, and that they're using electricity and they're not dumping like harmful materials directly into the ocean, but there are other you know, obviously, direct interference with

things like coral reefs and stuff would be disastrous. So I'm sure that most companies out they're are doing their best to avoid that because that's their bread and butter. Right. Without those environments that are so compelling, there's no reason for you to go and pay for the experience. So it's in their best interest to preserve the environment as best they can for their own business. The one I just mentioned Norway, they ship out a couple of people

that come with the sub for the full month. Well, so you get, you know, a person that's in the sub with you, you know, controlling it there, and then there's someone on the surface that they they maintain constant contact. That makes sense, Yes, that's that's You've got you know, specialized especially trained people there with you at all times. It's the only responsible way to do really important Yeah. So, uh, you know, I know what to save up for for

my next birthday. The next birthday better not happen to like. But I was gonna give you, I was gonna give you a gift card to Chili's. But I guess maybe I can't do you know, I could go for a good appetizer, I will stick with it, right, all right, Scott's right and checks everybody. That's what we've learned from this episode towards the bigger goal, you know. Gosh, Scott, Well, thank you so much for coming on the show again.

I really appreciate you joining us and and chatting about all things submarine and luxury oriented where we can sit here and dream of a life that I suspect I will never get a direct glimpse into. Well, thanks for having me again. I always enjoy our our conversations. And guys, if you haven't listened now that the show has sadly come to an end after a monumental run, but Car Stuff is an amazing podcast and all those episodes are still available for you to listen to. You We have

a huge archive. It's a it's approaching episodes. I didn't have an actual actual count, but we were on air for just over nine years. Yeah, and that's a that's a lot of automotive topics. Yeah, so you should definitely check that off. You haven't heard it before because you guys, you guys have covered all sorts of things, everything from minutia about specific car companies, to general problems that people can experience with vehicles and how to work around that. Uh,

and even just the evolution of the industry itself. I mean, we've seen cars go from something where the average person with a little bit of hard work and study could learn how to work on their own car and tinker with it to a world now where cars are becoming more and more like a black box, where it's all locked away from the consumer, and it's getting increasingly difficult to do even the simplest of car maintenance work on a vehicle yourself, if you have a brand new one,

and that I know. Wait, no, I said, I wasn't gonna said I wasn't gonna do that to you. Didn't I that I wasn't gonna get you with the gutch was No, that's not my fault. That's not my fault. I want. I want the days where you can just get your vehicle and you can learn how to how to how to tinker with it yourself. I think those are I think there's a value to that. That wasn't at your moment, by the way, Okay, I knew that was coming. I realized. I realized as I was going

down that path, I'm like, WHOA dangerously close? So we're just gonna wrap it up here. You guys, If you have any suggestions, question's comments, you've got a request for a specific episode topic, or maybe there's someone you would like me to have on the show, get in touch with me because that's that's how I find out about those sort of things. You can write to me. The email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on

Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech stuff hs W. We're on Instagram now and Crystal is doing a killer job over there, so you've gotta go over to Instagram find text stuff over there, join us in that group. And remember I live stream recordings of this episode whenever I'm not interviewing somebody on Wednesdays and Fridays, So just go to twitch dot tv slash

tech Stuff. You'll find the schedule there and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because it how staff works dot com.