We All Live on a Yellow Submarine

The concept of an underwater boat has roots deep in antiquity. Although there are images of men using hollow sticks to breathe underwater for hunting at the temples at Thebes, the first known military use is of divers being used to clear obstructions during the siege of Syracuse (about 413 BC), according to the History of the Peloponnesian War. At the siege of Tyre in 332 BC divers were again used by Alexander the Great, according to Aristotle. Later legends from Alexandria, Egypt, in the 12th century AD suggested that he had used a primitive submersible for reconnaissance missions. This seems to have been a form of diving bell, and was depicted in a 16th-century Islamic painting.


                                          

A 16th-century Islamic painting depicting Alexander the Great being lowered in a glass submersible.


The first version of a submarine came from the mind of William Bourne, an English manager for an inn and magnificent scientist. He was an English mathematician, innkeeper and former Royal Navy gunner who invented the first navigable submarine and wrote important navigational manuals. He is often called William Bourne of Gravesend. His design, detailed in his book Inventions and Devises published in 1578, was one of the first recorded plan for an underwater navigation vehicle. He designed an enclosed craft capable of submerging by decreasing the overall volume (rather than flooding chambers as in modern submarines), and being rowed underwater. Bourne described a ship with a wooden frame covered in waterproofed leather, but the description was a general principle rather than a detailed plan. However, Bourne's concept of an underwater rowing boat was put into action by the Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel in 1620, and Nathaniel Symons demonstrated a 'sinking boat' in 1729 using the expanding and contracting volume of the boat to submerge. The submarine was the subject of a modern-day recreation on season 3 of "The Re-Inventors" TV show, episode "Bourne Submarine". The recreation had limited functionality before it sank when water pressure ruptured some membranes on a test descent.


                                       
Some years later, this drawing purported to be Bourne's scheme: leather-wrapped pads which can be screwed in toward the centerline to create a flooded chamber, and screwed out to expel the water and seal the opening.

However, Bourne wrote of expanding and contracting structures, not flooding chambers – and submarines built in England in 1729 and France in 1863 conformed with his idea exactly.

You may not know, but in the time of William Bourne, the song Yellow Submarine was written. It was not an original by the Beatles. Here's the original excerpt of William Bourne's poem.
In the town where Willy was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea, (The poet was actually talking about William Bourne here)
And he told us of his life,
In the land of submarines,
So he made some blue prints
Near the sea with submarines,

He made the first model out of steel
then used the color on the leaves
cause he was color blind
and saw the sea green,

So after his first model sank
he lived beneath the waves,
In his green submarine.