A naming note
The title refers to the Holland 1, but the “Holland” name appears on several boats, and accounts number them differently. John Philip Holland, an Irish-born teacher and inventor who emigrated to the United States in the 1870s, built a small experimental boat in 1878, usually called Holland I, followed by a larger one in the early 1880s. The US Navy’s first submarine, commissioned in 1900, was a later design known as Holland VI, which the Navy named USS Holland. This article follows the line of boats, because it is the later ones that mattered most.
The early boats
The first small boat, tested on the Passaic River in New Jersey around 1878, was a trial of basic ideas, such as controlling depth and the safety of the operator. It was later sunk and recovered, and it survives in a museum in Paterson, New Jersey, according to most accounts.
The next boat, the Fenian Ram, was launched in 1881. Its backing came from Irish nationalist groups known as Fenians, who wanted a weapon against the British Navy. The relationship between Holland and his financial backers broke down, and the boat never carried out any attack. It did show that a larger, cigar-shaped craft could dive under control, and it fired a pneumatic gun.
Features that made the design work
Holland’s insight, repeated in many accounts, was that a submarine should behave like a fish, not like a floating boat that is dragged under. Several elements of his later designs are especially cited:
- A streamlined, rounded hull that is efficient when submerged.
- Horizontal rudders at the stern, which control the angle of the boat as it moves, so that it dives by moving forward instead of by taking on water until it sinks.
- A combined power system, which used a gasoline engine at the surface and an electric motor running on a lead-acid battery below the surface, with the engine recharging the battery.
- An onboard weapon system, which made it a warship and not just an experiment.
The mix of gasoline and electricity was not unique to Holland, but his boats made it work well enough to convince navies. A drawback was the fuel itself: gasoline vapor in a closed hull is dangerous, and later navies switched to diesel for that reason.
Holland VI and the Navy purchase
In the 1890s, the Navy held a design competition that gave Holland a chance. A rival, Simon Lake, was also developing submarines, with a different approach. The result, Holland VI, was launched in 1897. It was small, at roughly 54 feet in length, with a crew of a handful of men, and it carried a torpedo tube and a gun.
After trials, the US Navy bought it in 1900, and it was commissioned in October of that year as USS Holland. Many accounts treat that purchase as the beginning of the US submarine force. The Navy then ordered additional boats of this general type, called the Plunger and Adder classes, built through a company that Holland had helped start, the Electric Boat Company.
Influence abroad
The Holland designs were licensed or copied overseas. The Royal Navy ordered five Holland-class boats in the early 1900s, and they are generally considered the beginning of British submarine service. Japan bought Holland-type boats as well, and Russia acquired designs related to them. The craft were small and limited in range, but they gave navies hands-on experience with submarines for the first time.
French designers had been working independently, and Germany came later to the field. The Holland boats were therefore one influence among several, not the only source of modern design.
Holland’s later career
Holland himself fell out with the company he helped to found and left it in the early 1900s. He continued to work on other ideas, including aircraft, and died in 1914. His reputation rests mainly on turning an idea of a submarine into a design which several navies bought.
What the Holland boats did and did not do
They were not the first underwater craft, and they were not the first to use batteries. Their significance is that they combined buoyancy control, propulsion and a weapon in one package that worked reliably enough to be a standard purchase, and that was the point at which submarines became a normal part of naval planning. How they were used in two world wars is a different story, and the later boats were much larger and better equipped.