The headline kind of reminds me of this old ad.

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“Come with Me on My Jeepmarine”

Submarine holidays are made possible by a peacetime adaptation of the British “torpedo built for two”

By WALTER NUNN O’BONDIE
Lieutenant, R.N.V.R.

EVERYBODY seems to be thinking of flying for fun after the war. Many Americans apparently hope to swap their flivvers for helicopters and spend their spare time dangling from the sky, munching hot dogs bought at a convenient blimp filling station. But not for me! My wife and I are going to spend our week ends touring the bottom of the sea on our jeepmarine. We plan to explore caves and grottoes on the ocean floor. We’ll park our tandem underwater motorbike on the barnacled deck of some ancient wreck, and search for doubloons and pieces of eight. When time permits, we’ll ship our jeepmarine to tropic seas and go riding through coral groves, dismounting occasionally to look for pearls. At least, we’ll be sure to return with a handsome bath sponge of our own plucking.
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Underwater Scenes Filmed from Odd Boat

Suspended like twin keels from the hull of a specially designed boat, cylindrical steel chambers fitted with thick glass windows enable motion-picture photographers at Silver Springs, Fla., to make a series of underwater movies. When a scene is to be taken, a cameraman descends from the boat deck into the submerged photographing chamber. Swimmers then dive from the deck to perform their feats in full view of the lens, as depicted above. The electrically propelled craft can be moved about during a scene to permit close-ups and various camera angles.

Neal Stephenson wrote a huge travelogue for Wired in 1995 where he followed the progress of a new world girding fiber optic network being constructed. Along the way explores every aspect of the process and history behind laying communications cables underwater. It is a wonderfully interesting read and I highly recommend it.

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Thrills in Laying Deep-Sea Cable Across the Atlantic

WHILE, 57 years ago the world noted the fact that the steamship “Great Eastern” had completed its memorable work of connecting America with Europe by the first successful Atlantic telegraphic cable, the recent landing on the south shore of Long Island of a new line of communication attracted little attention.

Nevertheless, this latest undertaking marked the closer binding together of the New World and the Old, for, despite the advent of the wireless and the establish-ment of powerful radio stations, which are capable of spanning vast terrestrial distances, the fact remains that this newer method of electrical intercourse has not scrapped the older order of long-range telegraphy.

Traffic over the submarine cables linking North America with Europe has increased fourfold in the last decade, and yet, until recently, nothing has been done within that period to add to these undersea nerves of communication. The cost of the new cable, representing the present height of scientific knowledge concerning such things, has been put at $15,000,000; and to get it properly in place on the sea bed has required the service of specially constructed craft manned largely by a crew trained for that hazardous and extremely exacting work.
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I can’t imagine why these didn’t take off. That monorail train looks utterly stable to me! Not to mention the plane stabilized by a pendulum.

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Vehicle Oddities

Boynton Bicycle Locomotive built in 1889 was tested in Gravesend, Brooklyn, on one overhead and one ground rail. Arrangement was supposed to reduce weight, friction and save power on curves.

Bicycle Airship designed to fly in any direction was the fantastic brainchild of Herman Rieckert in 1889. Bicycle apparatus in pilothouse flapped side and center wings, providing motive power.
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$100 SUBMARINE
ADMIRAL Ray Bass achieved his rank in – the Texas Navy the hard way. He built his own submarine to explore the 20-ft. depths of the town lake of Corsicana when the city fathers forbade skin diving. The $100 sub took three months to build with volunteer help. A six-volt motor and six-volt car battery power Turtle II for 45 minutes running time submerged. A 7-1/2 hp outboard motor is used on the surface.

The conning tower is a scrounged 20-in. section of steel pipe; the $17.60 hull is a 750-gallon Army surplus hot water tank; portholes are sealed by old inner tubes.

This one-man navy runs on sheer nerve!

JETS OF WATER, HURLED OUT BY MOTOR, DRIVE THIS BOAT

Jets of water, spurting backward from nozzles at each side, drive an unusual craft that has just met its first tests successfully on the Vltava River near Prague, Czechoslovakia. Instead of turning a propeller, the motor at the rear of the odd craft operates a pump that sucks up water and discharges it through the nozzles. As the water is forcibly hurled backward, the recoil propels the boat forward, much as a big gun recoils when a shell is fired. Since the jets are constantly in action, however, the driving force is continuous. Having no propeller protruding from the botton, the boat can navigate in water so shallow that there is barely enough to float the hull. Tests showed the boat was. economical and fast.

I wonder what kind of “comfort and entertainment” the provided to “seaman strangers”…

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“THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SEA”

By LAWRENCE Wm. PEDROSE

FOR the purpose of making more comfortable and pleasant the hours spent in their home ports by the masters, mates, and pilots of the Pacific, and developing radio broadcasting to their ships while at sea, wives, daughters, and sweethearts of manners living at Seattle have formed an organization called the “Daughters of the Sea.”

The Daughters of the Sea plan to bring the home closer to the ship, and the radio will be their chief means toward that end. The club has undertaken the fitting up of quarters on the top floor of one of the city’s tall buildings, and is furnishing them with a library, comfortable chairs, smoking accessories, and marine glasses, so that seafarers may watch from the windows the ships making and leaving port.
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UNDER-SEA TRACTOR-SPHERE ROAMS OCEAN FLOOR

NEWEST of mechanical monsters intended for under-sea exploration is the tractor-sphere being designed by Otis Barton, builder of the bathysphere used by Dr. William Beebe in setting a new world’s diving record of 3028 feet.

The new invention, intended to be driven into the sea from the beach level under its own power, might be classed as a bathysphere mounted on caterpillar treads. Powerful electric motors operating from sealed-in storage batteries would move this undersea tractor over the rocky slopes and pinnacles of the ocean floor.
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It does not sound like this trip was very fun.

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The Real Truth About the Wilkins Polar Sub

The real story of the submarine Nautilus, which set out on a fantastic Jules Verne expedition to travel under ice to the North Pole, and which now lies abandoned in a European harbor after an amazing succession of catastrophes, is here told you for the first time by a member of the expedition. Fascinating, thrilling— an “inside” story—scientific adventure in the raw!

by ALFRED ALBELLI who interviewed Arthur O. Blumburg, Chief Electrician’s Mate of the Nautilus

ARTHUR O. BLUMBURG Mr. Blumburg has been for 15 years in the United States Navy submarine service, and was granted a leave of absence to lend his expert services to the Wilkins Polar Submarine Expedition. That Mr. Blumburg was one of the most valued members of the crew, is testified to by the following sentences taken from a letter written to the Secretary of the Navy by Commander Sloan Danenhower of the Nautilus: “Arthur O. Blumburg had charge of recommissioning the electrical department, the installation of the storage batteries and special gyro compass, the automatic pilot, and other electrical equipment. He accomplished this work with great dispatch and efficiency, and has been a faithful, zealous, and efficient head of the electrical department throughout the entire voyage.”

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Huge Truck FOR LAND OR WATER CARRIES SHIPLOAD OF CARGO

IMAGINE a motor truck so large that it dwarfs the biggest locomotive in the world —a veritable ship of the land, rolling on pneumatic tires as high as a bungalow. Fit this juggernaut, in your mind’s eye, with a boat-like hull, a Diesel motor, and an electric drive; add a propeller and rudder so that it can navigate in the water as well as on dry ground; fill its capacious hold with hundreds of tons of cargo, and send it roaring across the continent or through a wilderness to its destination. Then you will have a mental image of the 1,500-ton, amphibian super-truck that Eric R. Lyon, associate professor of physics at the Kansas State Agricultural College, predicts will be the freight-carrying vehicle of the future. To prove it feasible, he himself has worked out the engineering design of such a machine, which he calls the “navitruck,” and which our artist illustrates here and on the cover of this issue.
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SHIP’S PASSENGERS ARE LANDED WITH DERRICK
Scenes like that in the photograph below, suggesting a thrilling sea rescue, take place when visitors land on the jagged coast of Hamakua, Hawaii. There small boats bring passengers within range of a derrick-like landing gear that has been erected en a cliff. One by one, the passengers are hoisted ashore.

Running at highest speed, they necessitated a generating plant capable of producing more electricity than the combined generating capacity of the 154 power stations in the entire states of North Dakota, Mississippi, Wyoming, Nevada, and Delaware.

Something tells me Nevada probably has increased it’s power generating capability since 1933. How many kilowatts do you think the Bellagio or Luxor consume?

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LATEST TRIUMPHS IN Electric Ships

Revolutionary Method of Propulsion Used in Gigantic Normandie May Herald Sweeping Change in Transatlantic Travel

By Kenneth M. Swezey

WHEN the 75,000-ton French liner Normandie starts next spring on her first voyage westward, electrical power equivalent to the combined steam powers of the Leviathan, the Majestic, and the Ile de France, will whirl her giant propellers. Electrical machinery will haul her ropes, raise her anchors, guide her helm. A thousand electric servants will watch over every item of comfort and safety of her 3,500 passengers and crew.

Not only will the Normandie be the most completely electrified ship in the world, but she will be the first electrically-driven ship to pit her might against the directly steam-driven ship in the race for transatlantic supremacy.

From the earliest days of the steamship, until about 1907, this race was waged with the help of the constantly developing reciprocating engine. Edged on by the demand for larger and faster vessels, the simple steam engine of a few hundred horsepower grew into a double-and triple-expansion engine of thousands of horsepower, until the maximum was reached in the 40,000-horsepower engines that drove the Kaiser Wilhelm II.
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