Submarine snorkel
Coordinates: 68°43′43″N 16°34′36″E / 68.72861°N 16.57667°E
A submarine snorkel is a device which allows a submarine to operate submerged while still taking in air from above the surface. British Royal Navy personnel often refer to it as the snort. A concept devised by Dutch engineers was widely used on German U-boats during the last year of World War II. To the Germans it was known as a schnorkel.
Until the advent of nuclear power, submarines were designed to operate on the surface most of the time and submerge only for evasion or for daylight attacks. In 1940, at night, a U-boat was safer on the surface than submerged because sonar could detect boats underwater but was almost useless against a surface vessel. However, with continued improvement in methods of radar detection as the war progressed, the U-boat was forced to spend more time under water running on electric motors that gave speeds of only a few knots and with very limited range.
An early submarine snorkel was designed by James Richardson, an Assistant Manager at Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Greenock, Scotland as early as 1916, during World War I. Although the company received a British patent for the design, no further use was made of it—the British Admiralty did not accept it for use in their Royal Navy submarines.
In November 1926 Capt. Pericle Ferretti of the technical corps of the Italian Navy ran tests with a ventilation pipe installed on the submarine H 3. The tests were largely successful and a similar system was designed for the Sirena class, but was eventually scrapped; the following snorkel systems were not based on Ferretti's design.
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