The mystery of why a Confederate submarine sank, after becoming the first in the world to sink an enemy warship, has been solved…

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[h=3]HOW THE HUNLEY SUB MOVED[/h]Researchers announced in June last year that they had finally cracked how the submarine was propelled through the water.


Hidden underneath the rock-hard stuff scientists call 'concretion' was a sophisticated set of gears and teeth on the crank in the water tube that ran the length of the 40-foot sub.


These gears enabled the crew rotating the crank to propel the sub faster by moving water more quickly through the tube, conservator and collections manager Johanna Rivera-Diaz said.


The biggest surprise for Rivera-Diaz? Discovering that some of the men wrapped the crank handle in thin metal tubes covered with cloth to try to prevent blisters.


'You get really concentrated on a specific area working every day. I was finishing the crank system. One day, when I was through, I just stepped back and "Wow, this looks amazing",' she said.

 

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The narrow, top-secret 'torpedo fish' was built with cast and wrought iron with a hand-cranked propeller and arrived in Charleston in 1863 while the city was under siege by Union troops and ships.


The Confederate Navy hauled the sub up twice, recovered the bodies of the crew, and planned a winter attack.


Before the explosion, a lookout on the Housatonic spotted a bizarre vessel approaching just below the surface - with only its coning tower visible - and sounded the alarm.


The Housatonic's cannons couldn't be lowered enough to fire at the strange craft, so crewmen used rifles and pistols, but these were not effective.


Some historians say that the submarine showed a mission-accomplished lantern signal from its hatch to troops back on shore before it disappeared.


Soon after the signal had been fired, the sub sank about 4 miles off Charleston.

 

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Ever since the Hunley was raised from the ocean floor in 2000, scientists have worked to determine why the sub never returned to the surface

 

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The sub itself is only four feet in diameter. Eight schoolchildren can barely cram themselves into a replica nearby at the Warren Lasch Conservation Centre

 

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Park and Lyons machine shop building, Mobile, where the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley was constructed in 1863. Located at the corner of Water and State Streets, in Mobile, this old building housed the Gill Welding and Boiler Works when photographed in about 1960

 

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Inboard profile and plan drawings, after sketches by W.A. Alexander, who directed the submarine's construction

 

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More than a century later, in 1995, the Hunley was discovered off the South Carolina. It was raised in 2000 and brought to a conservation lab in North Charleston.


The crewmen's skeletons were found still at their stations along a hand-crank that drove the cigar-shaped craft.


They suffered no broken bones, the bilge pumps hadn't been used and the air hatches were closed.


Except for a hole in one conning tower and a small window that may have been broken, the sub was remarkably intact.


The eight crew members were buried in an elaborate ceremony at a Confederate cemetery in Charleston in 2004.


They were the sub's commander, Lt George Dixon of Alabama, James A Wicks, a North Carolina native living in Florida, Frank Collins of Virginia, Joseph Ridgaway of Maryland and four foreign-born men about whom less is known.


One is still only known as 'Miller.'


The sub itself is only four feet in diameter. Eight schoolchildren can barely cram themselves into a replica nearby at the Warren Lasch Conservation Centre.

 

[mplastered]

I’ve read several articles on this and this is not what I’ve read. The explosion itself killed all aboard. It concussed their brains instantly that was why they never moved and were found as is.

 

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I missed this 1cheersgif