Cornelius Drebbel

Dutch inventor Cornelius Drebbel (1572-1633) earned a place in nautical history as the builder of the world's first navigable submarine. A self-taught engineer, Drebbel spent much of his career in the service of two of Europe's most powerful monar chies early in the seventeenth century, and it was for England's King James I that he built and tested sev eral leather-clad, submersible rowboats between 1621 and 1624.

Was Apprentice to an Engraver

Drebbel was born in 1572 in Alkmaar, a town in West Friesland, Netherlands. His father was believed to have been one of the town's burghers, or group of merchants and leading citizens who held political authority in the city. He had little formal education, learning to read and write in English and Latin—the latter the universal language of science, religion, and scholarship at the time—only later in life. In his teens he entered the engraving workshop of Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem as an apprentice. Goltzius was also an alchemist, an amateur chemist of medieval and Renaissance Europe in the era before the field was fully established as a science. Alchemists were primarily engaged in attempting to transform base metals such as iron, nickel, and zinc into gold. In 1595, Drebbel married Goltzius's younger sister, Sophia Jansdochter, with whom he would have four daughters.

The newlyweds soon returned to Drebbel's hometown of Alkmaar, where he opened an engraving business that made maps and pictures using early printing technology. A tinkerer by nature, he also began working on his own inventions, and in 1598 applied for and received an official patent for a perpetual-motion clock. His device needed no winding, for it was driven by gears that moved on their own via naturally occurring changes in atmospheric pressure. He also devised a way to supply Alkmaar's water needs, and a fountain of his design was constructed in Middelburg, a town in Zeeland, in 1601. In 1602, he received another patent, this one for a new type of chimney.

Word of Drebbel's inventions, especially that of the perpetual-motion clock, began to spread through Europe, and in 1604 he published a book, Een cort Tractat van de Naturae de Elementen (“On the Nature of the Elements”), which outlined his theories about the four elements of life— earth, fire, water, and air. He dedicated the Englishlanguage edition to King James I of England and Scotland (1566–1625), who was known for his devotion to alchemy and the occult. James invited Drebbel and his family to move to England, and gave them living quarters in Eltham Palace in London, where there were also rooms specifically given over to displays of Drebbel's inventions. Drebbel received an annual stipend and was technically a member of the royal court, but had been given responsibility for fireworks displays, which relegated him to the entertainers' section of official pageants, along with musicians and court jesters. One of his novelties was a magic lantern, the demonstration of which he described in a 1608 letter: “I am clad first in black velvet, and in a second, as fast as a man can think, I am clad in green velvet, in red velvet, changing myself into all the colors of the world … and I present myself as a king, adorned in diamonds, and all sorts of precious stones, and then in a moment become a beggar, all my clothes in rags,” he claimed, according to Tom Shachtman's Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold.

Boasted of Secret Powers

Drebbel had confided to James that he was working on a perpetual-motion machine, a mythical device that had intrigued Europe's thinkers for several centuries by then. Scientists and engineers attempted to create a device featuring parts that moved entirely on their own, with no human interaction or source of external energy. Drebbel did manage to produce a timekeeping device, described in a book by his contemporary Thomas Tymme as an enormous globe, mounted atop pillars and ringed by a water chute made of crystal; it provided the time, day, month, year, season, astrological period, phases of the moon, and tide patterns. Like his earlier clock, it was probably powered by atmospheric pressure, but Drebbel apparently claimed that he had uncloaked the mysteries of the universe, and reportedly told only King James the secret of its motion.

Around 1610, Drebbel and his family departed for Prague after receiving an invitation from Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), the Holy Roman Emperor. Like James, Rudolf was intrigued by alchemy, and had become the patron of several of Europe's most notable seekers of the so-called Philosopher's Stone, the mythical substance that was believed to have the power to transform base metals into gold and perhaps even reverse the aging process in human beings. Drebbel became the chief alchemist at Rudolf's court, with quarters at the magnificent Prague Castle that Rudolf enlarged to hold the extensive royal collections of exotic animals and mechanical inventions. During his time in Prague, Drebbel probably worked on a pump device for Rudolf, whose Bohemian kingdom held extensive Central European mountain ranges whose mineral wealth was just being discovered at the time. Devising a method of removing water from mine shafts also occupied several engineers of the era.

In 1611, Rudolf was ousted and Drebbel was taken prisoner by Frederick V's army at the start of the Thirty Years' War. Rudolf died a year later, and Drebbel appealed to James in England for help, who agreed to intercede as well as provide funds for the journey back to England for the inventor and his family. Drebbel seemed to have built an impressive automated fountain for the king, which played music and featured animated statues of sea deities from classical mythology. He also worked on a microscope which had two convex lenses, the first ever to feature a pair of optical lenses.

World's First Air Conditioner

In the summer of 1620, Drebbel demonstrated what he called a cooling machine—the prototype for the world's first air conditioner—to a royal audience in the Great Hall of Westminster Abbey. The site of the presentation is notable, for it was literally the largest room in all of the British Isles at the time, with a massive vaulted ceiling and a length of 332 feet. Inside the sacrarium, a smaller chamber, Drebbel chilled the air by unknown artificial means so well that the king began shivering and quickly exited back into the July heat.

Drebbel was already working on his next impressive feat of entertainment magic, the world's first navigable submarine, which he demonstrated on the Thames River in 1621. The design for a submersible vessel dated back to a proposal by English mathematician William Bourne in his 1578 work Inventions and Devises, but the problem of maintaining enough of an air supply to keep the crew alive proved the most daunting obstacle. But Drebbel's craft made a round trip from Westminster to Greenwich and back, which took three hours, as James and a crowd estimated in the thousands watched. He had modified a rowboat into upper and lower chambers, with its wooden exterior clad in greased leather to promote buoyancy.

Intensely secretive and always cautious to protect his position at court from usurpers, Drebbel kept no scientific notebooks, and left no drawings behind of any of his devices, so there are only educated guesses—some made hundreds of years later—on how his marvels actually functioned. There are two theories of how Drebbel solved the oxygen question on the submarine. One is that his submarine had pigskin bladders stashed underneath the seats where the crew of twelve rowers were stationed, and these bags were attached by pipe to the exterior. “Rope was used to tie off the empty bladders,” a BBC report explained, and “in order to dive, the rope was untied and the bladders filled. To surface the crew squashed the bladders flat, squeezing out the water.” But this seems an inadequate explanation for how the 13 humans had enough air to last three hours, and it is thought that Drebbel's more impressive feat was the isolation of the element of oxygen. His writings hint that he devised a way to produce it by heating saltpeter, a nitrate, and he probably worked on this during his time in Prague with another alchemist at Rudolf's court, Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636). His isolation and manufacture of oxygen—the element necessary to sustain human life— took place 150 years before a British scientist, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), officially discovered it.

Worked for Royal Navy

Drebbel built three craft, each one larger than the previous, between 1621 and 1624, and was given a position with the British Royal Navy to develop his ideas further. But the court magician lost his most important patron when King James died in 1625. James's successor, Charles I (1600–1649) gave Drebbel a post with the Office of Ordnance, where he worked on developing a floating bomb. In 1627 he was put in charge of the British Navy's fireships. This was a most spectacular form of floating bomb, and was loaded up with even more combustible materials then the average warship of the era, which contained sails, grease, tar, and gunpowder. The fireships were then set aflame by a skeleton crew near the enemy's ships, an act that could destroy an entire flotilla in a harbor. There was an attempt to use this tactic to help the Huguenots (French Protestants) at their enclave of La Rochelle, a port in the Bay of Biscay. But the English effort to aid La Rochelle in its defiance of the French king and Roman Catholic Church ended disastrously. The mission had been led by George Villiers (1592–1628), the first Duke of Buckingham, who was also a patron of Drebbel's. Villiers was assassinated by a disgruntled wounded army officer while attempting to organize a second campaign, and with the death Drebbel lost another influential patron.

Some accounts note that Drebbel may have been involved in one of the first serious schemes to drain the fenlands, or wetlands, of East Anglia, a project headed by a noted Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden (1590–1677). Drebbel had earned significant amounts of money in his lifetime, but both he and his wife were said to have squandered their income, she on a series of adulterous affairs. In 1629, he took over the management of an ale house, and died four years later on November 7, 1633. Two of his daughters married Abraham and Johannes Kuffler, a pair of German brothers who founded a dye house in the Dutch city of Leiden. The manufacture of their popular bright red dye known as “color Kufflerianus” was a closely guarded trade secret discovered accidentally by Drebbel years before. In crafting one of his thermometer devices, he realized that tin chloride made from naturally occurring carmine (at the time, ground-up insects known as cochineal) made the color much brighter and more durable.

Books

Science and Its Times, Volume 3: 1450–1699, Gale, 2001.

Shachtman, Tom, Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold, Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Online

“Cornelius Drebbel,” BBC Historic Figures, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/drebbel_cornelis.shtml (December 1, 2007).

“Who Was Cornelius J. Drebbel?” (Based on a text of Brett McLaughlin), University of Twente, http://www.drebbel.utwente.nl/main_en/Information/History/History.htm (December 1, 2007).