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 – From Mesopotamian Origins to Colonel Drake

The discovery of crude oil and bitumen can be traced back to the Neandertals but more widespread use started in Mesopotamia around 8000BC. Ziggurats were made secure by bitumen oil mortar and Nebuchadnezzar allegedly waterproofed his hanging gardens with bitumen.

Unlikely medicinal uses were found and it was not long before the flammable properties of crude were exploited by the Byzantines who made oil grenades as a naval warfare weapon. We will see that in North America the native Indians were using crude oil as an insecticide and for skin treatments long before the famous sinking of Drake’s Well in Pennsylvania in 1861.

This talk ends at the beginning of the first World War before submarines became sophisticated vessels so there is no highly technical content.

The first fully recorded submarine was built in 1620 by a Dutchman, Cornelius Van Drebbel, who was in the service of King James 1^st of England. Despite it being an underwater rowing boat, it proved to be very successful and Von Drebbel later built two larger versions in one of which it is believed the King accompanied Van Drebbel in a voyage up the river Thames.

Von Drebbel’s submarine was watched by thousands of disbelieving Londoners who gathered along the banks of the Thames.

However, it wasn’t until 155 years later in 1775 when an American called David Bushnell built a submarine intended to sink British warships during the American revolution against the British, that the full possibilities began to be realised by Governments and various prototypes began to be constructed.

In 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned another American, called Robert Fulton to build a submarine intended to sink British vessels but despite building a submarine which proved to be perfectly viable the French Naval authorities decided to abandon the project.

Various other experimental submarines were built in the following years but it wasn’t until the American Civil War that the Confederate submarine ‘Hunley’ successfully sank the Union warship ‘Housatonic’ in 1864 by ramming an explosive charge into its hull. Unfortunately, the explosion was so powerful that the Hunley submarine also sank.

Speaker: Angela Chantry

Lord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. In 1812, Byron embarked on an affair with the passionate, eccentric – and married – Lady Caroline Lamb. The scandal shocked the British public. He also had affairs with Lady Oxford, Lady Frances Webster and, it has been claimed, with his married half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He was the man for whom the phrase “mad, bad and dangerous to know” was coined!