Submarines - A History in Patents

We recently reviewed a study of US aviation history in patents from Dataview Publishing and found some very interesting designs. Dataview is back, this time looking at the history of US submarine development from patents. This title looks at submarine designs from 1860 through the 1990s.

Dataview scanned a hardcopy original of this compilation into Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The one annoyance is that none of the pages are hypertexted from the table of contents, so you'll have to scroll through the lengthy file sequentially.

The title looks not only at submarine design, but at designs for a variety of subsystems that were intended to improve submarine functionality and safety.

For example, there are several rescue and escape system designs that pre-date WW2. From the same era is a design for an aircraft hangar on a submarine, something the US would not do during WW2, but definitely adopted by other nations. One more recent patent is for retractable gun turret that stows in a submarine vertical launch silo.

If you're a submariner or a naval history buff, you'll want to thumb through these various patents to see which ideas went to sea, which were all wet, and which of these ideas may still be nearing their time.

This title is recommended!

This title is available directly from the publisher at Dataview Publications (www.dataviewbooks.com).

My sincere thanks to Dataview Publications for this review sample!