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Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World

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Narcís Monturiol dreamed of bringing peace and democracy to the whole world. He did not just dream, but he acted. He was an inventor, and he meant for his great invention to become the revolutionary spark to bring humankind into the rosy and egalitarian future. His invention: the most advanced and only reliable submarine of his time, the mid-nineteenth century. In _Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World_ (Pantheon), Matthew Stewart has written an entertaining biography of the forgotten submariner, whose name is absent even from many histories of the submarine. There are many contingencies that conspired to keep him an unknown, and many tiny events that could have gone differently so that his invention would have descendants and we would know him as "The Father of the Modern Submarine." As it turned out, he was one of those inventors that didn't get the recognition he deserved, and his life only seems successful in retrospect. Nonetheless, he was a fabulous dreamer, thinker, and tinkerer, and deserves the rescue from oblivion provided by this volume.

Monturiol, born in 1819, was a surprise entry into the submarine inventing game. By 1856, he was "pretty much your typical utopian socialist revolutionary." He was not an engineer. He had much to learn, teaching himself the chemistry by which he could produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the air. He developed thick glass for portholes, and once he realized how dark it was down there, he developed an external lighting system that worked just fine. He was the first to insist on double hulling for a sub; the external one protected the craft and gave it a hydrodynamic shape (these were good-looking, streamlined vessels that resembled giant fish), while the inner one had the safety sealing to protect the crew. It could dive to 20 meters, although with his perfectionism for safety, he made the craft far more pressure-resistant than that. It was steerable, and was propelled by its crew of sixteen cranking a shaft connected to a propeller. The propulsion system was not up to Monturiol's standards, as it could not reach what he thought was an acceptable minimum speed of three knots. When he realized this, he looked for another way of powering the ship; electrical motors (which would be used on the first military subs of the twentieth century) were not yet feasible, and steam had the hazard of fire within the confines of the vessel. Monturiol performed thousands of experiments to find a heat-producing chemical reaction that would generate steam and also produce oxygen as a useful waste product.

It was a brilliant solution that never got a good try. Monturiol, never a good business planner, eventually had no funds for further prototypes. He had spent years of trying, and had sacrificed parts of his utopian dream to bring his machine into reality: a pacifist, he had tried to get military support; a communist, he had tried for capitalistic backing; an internationalist, he had tried to mine local Catalan enthusiasm. It did no good in the end, as eventually _Ictineo II_ went for scrap, breaking the inventor's heart. He scraped by for himself and his family by taking hack writing jobs and then a job in a brokerage house, eventually working his way up to being a cashier. He continued to invent; one of his later inventions, a method of preserving meat for export, ought to have made him millions, but it only made millions for the man who stole it from him. When submarines became practical in the next century, engineers had to re-learn many of the ideas Monturiol had pioneered, so his actual influence was slight. Nonetheless, after a century of neglect, Barcelona has a street sculpture of his sub, and a life-size mock-up to show just what the graceful craft looked like, and a street named after the inventor. Now with this admiring and well-illustrated biography, Monturiol further takes his belated but rightful place within the ranks of those who developed the submarine.

I'm Irish and live for some years now in Berlin. On a recent trip to Ireland, I came upon this book in a bookshop. I enjoyed reading it so much, I ordered a copy of it through Amazon to be sent to my eldest son who lives in the USA - I wanted him to read it, but I didn't want to give away my copy.
This is a great story. I always enjoy a well written history book, particularly because a good one can take a potentially boring subject (history!) and bring it to life. Monturiol is the Don Quixote of submarines, and I really felt for him and his band of dreamers as he followed the call of his quest.
Next step for me is a plan to some day go to Barcelona and see the remains and replica of his submarine.
There is a quote I heard somewhere; 'A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for'. So is it with Monturiol. But in writing this book, Matthew Stewart never fails his reader.
Read the book and enjoy.

I came across this book in a store and discovered a virtual unknown, who appears to have received essentially no credit for invented a modern submarine. It is a fascinating story both from a romantic and technical viewpoint. Highly recommend!

I read this book before taking a trip to Barcelona a few years ago and it was really a very, very good book.

There's a lot of science/technology in the book (how he dealt with various issues which had to be addressed to produce an operational submarine) as well as quite a bit about socialism (he was a socialist), catalonian nationalism and barcelona itself.