08/31/2026
David Bushnell was a student at Yale College when the Revolutionary War broke out. After the battles at Lexington and Concord, the College closed early and sent its students home. Bushnell went back to his farm in Saybrook, Connecticut, and there began work on what he hoped would be a decisive contribution to the Patriot cause—the world’s first submarine.
While at Yale, Bushnell had devised a way to explode gunpowder underwater. His goal was to create a vessel that could approach an enemy warship from underwater, attach an explosive charge to it, then escape before the detonation. What he came up with was an oaken barrel-shipped boat, that would carry a single crewman who would use foot pedals and a hand crank to turn the propeller. It was an ingenious design, elements of which are still used in submarine technology today.
Working with his brother Ezra, and with New Haven clockmaker Isaac Doolittle, himself a brilliant engineer and inventor, Bushnell created his machine and dubbed it “the Turtle.” Operating the Turtle required great strength and stamina, and Ezra trained diligently to be its debut pilot. The brothers’ plan was for Ezra to take the ship out into New York harbor and sink the HMS Eagle, the British flagship.
Ezra fell seriously ill just before the planned attack. Rather than wait for him to recover, Bushnell recruited a volunteer, Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Connecticut Continental Line, to step in. After being hastily trained, on the night of September 6, 1776, Sgt. Lee quietly maneuvered the Turtle out to the Eagle, surfacing at its rudder just as planned. But unfortunately for Bushnell as his team, Lee was unable to attach the explosive—perhaps because his drill struck the iron plate around the rudder, perhaps because he was too exhausted from the effort of getting the Turtle to the target, or perhaps because he was suffering from oxygen deprivation. Soon sentries spotted Lee and the strange vessel and boats put off from shore to apprehend him. Seeing the danger, Lee released the mine, which floated away, then exploded, driving back his pursuers, and allowing him to escape. Lee and the Turtle made it back safely, but the mission, history’s first submarine attack, was a failure.
A few weeks later Lee and Bushnell tried again, this time targeting a British warship anchored off Manhattan, but British sentries spotted him on his approach, forcing Lee to abandon his attack.
Shortly after the failed second effort, the Turtle’s tender vessel was sunk during a British attack on Patriot ships at Fort Lee, New Jersey, taking the Turtle down with her.
Bushnell was later commissioned an officer in the Corps of Sappers and Miners and served at the Siege of Yorktown.
Kept top secret at the time, the story of the Turtle became publicly known when Thomas Jefferson discussed it in a 1798 lecture to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
Ezra Bushnell died in 1786 on the family farm in Connecticut, at age 39. Isaac Doolittle died in New Haven in 1800, at age 78. Ezra Lee served with distinction to the end of the war. After his death in 1821 at age 72, a sentence in his obituary read, “This soldier is the only man who fought the enemy upon land, upon water, and under the water.”
After the war, David Bushnell moved to Georgia, where he worked as a college professor and medical doctor, while continuing to design underwater mines. He died in Warrenton, Georgia in 1826, at age 86.
David Bushnell, the Father of Submarine Warfare, was born on August 30, 1740, two hundred eighty-six years ago today.
A Daily Dose…..
