Wilhelm Bauer
| Wilhelm Bauer | |
|---|---|
Wilhelm Bauer
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| Born | 23 December 1822 Dillingen, Kingdom of Bavaria |
| Died |
20 June 1875 (aged 52) Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria |
| Nationality | German |
| Engineering career | |
| Significant advance | submarines |
Wilhelm Bauer (23 December 1822 – 20 June 1875) was a Bavarian inventor and engineer who built several hand-powered submarines.
Wilhelm Bauer was born in Dillingen in the Kingdom of Bavaria. His father was a sergeant of a Bavarian cavalry regiment. Because of this, Wilhelm Bauer, after an apprenticeship as a wood turner, also joined the army. Working as an artillery engineer, he witnessed the German/Danish war for Schleswig-Holstein between 1848 and 1851.
Seeing how the Prussian coast was easily blockaded by the Danish navy, Bauer quickly developed a plan to build a new type of submersible ship to help break the blockade. He began studying hydraulics and ship construction. But before his studies could get very far, the troops of the German Confederation decided to withdraw and surrendered Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark. However, Bauer was determined to realize his plan at any cost and left the Bavarian Army to join the forces of Schleswig-Holstein.
It proved very hard for Bauer, who held only a low military, to get his plans through the military bureaucracy, not to mention getting funds to build his submarine. He finally succeeded with the help of Werner von Siemens and others, being granted a small sum to build a model of his proposed submarine.
Incendiary ships were a well known concept in blockade-breaking. A ship was loaded with explosives and set free to drift into the enemy fleet, exploding at contact. The incendiary diver was planned to work on a similar principle: It would dive under an enemy vessel, fix an electrically triggered mine to its hull and escape, igniting the mine from a safe distance. The more or less same technique was employed by all military submarine designs of that time, like Julius Kröhl’s Explorer, the U.S.S. Alligator by Brutus de Villeroi and the famous Hunley, which became the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel.
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