Monturiol’s Dream by Matthew Stewart, Profile, £15.99, ISBN 1861974701 Reviewed by Jon Copley
BARCELONA’S waterfront boasts an object whose stylish lines look right at home with the city’s sculptures. But it is a piece of history, not art, and engineering history at that: a replica of the world’s first proper submarine, the Ictineo II.
And the story gets stranger. Its inventor, Narcis Monturiol, was a utopian communist who believed submarines could be tools for social change. While others worked on submarines’ military potential, Monturiol wanted to lay transatlantic telegraph lines, convey passengers safely beneath the tempests, prospect the deeps – and improve the working conditions and life expectancy of those who dive for coral.
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Monturiol’s Dream opens with an engaging sketch of the intricate twists of Catalan politics and the development of the young Monturiol’s aspirations as a socialist and non-violent revolutionary. Only then do we get to the more expected overview of submarine technology, from Alexander the Great’s diving bell over two millennia ago to the CSS Hunley, which saw service during the American Civil War.
Monturiol’s creation, however, was not a bell dangling on a line, nor a submersible boat skulking just below the surface, but a free-swimming vehicle. In its voyages between 1865 and 1867, the Ictineo II demonstrated the capabilities of a true submarine. By achieving neutral buoyancy, it could cruise effortlessly at depths of up to 30 metres. Unlike its predecessors, it was propelled by a steam power plant rather than crew muscle. And that crew could be sustained for several hours under water by an innovative air purification system.
Monturiol engineered his way around these challenges with determination, despite a lack of formal scientific education and a late start at the age of 37. But his technical achievements and the potential of his invention went largely unnoticed.
Faced with dwindling finances, he unsuccessfully courted the government with a demonstration of submarine artillery in Barcelona’s harbour. So, eventually, the search for research funding had transformed the utopian idealist into a potential arms merchant – but this fascinating thread of Monturiol’s story is barely mentioned in passing.
History, of course, has its own sense of irony. Monturiol’s remarkable submarine was the direct ancestor of the boats that kept communism penned behind the Iron Curtain, deployed as platforms for nuclear deterrence. Even the sole non-military application of Monturiol’s work – deep ocean exploration – was originally catalysed by the needs of the cold war. Utopia, meanwhile, remains elusive.