Oxygen was created by using the ship’s evaporator to turn seawater into pure water. This process was not unique to Nautilus, but because of the ship’s increased energy it could create far more freshwater than a conventional submarine. Seawater would be boiled into freshwater through a distillation process. We had washing machines and dryers on the boat.” “On the Nautilus they could make all the water we wanted. “Compared to diesel boats, it had all the creature comforts,” says Bill Engdall, of Waterford, a Nautilus plankowner (original crew member). And in the submarine world it was as roomy and luxurious as a suite at a Ritz-Carlton. Since the Nautilus was ultimately capable of making its own water and oxygen and its nuclear core could run for years, the ship could stay submerged almost indefinitely, the duration of a dive limited only by the amount of food that could be stored on board. Preston adds, “on a slow mission conventional submarines could stay submerged for most of a day,” but if “they were doing high-speed operations was a matter of hours and even minutes.” The diesel-powered submarines that preceded the Nautilus were “effectively surface ships that would dive occasionally,” says Reginald Preston, director of the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, where today the Nautilus is docked and open to visitors. Navy) - was powered by a nuclear reactor and shattered existing speed and dive records as soon as it launched. Light years ahead of anything else in the ocean, the Nautilus - with a hull designation of SSN 571 (Submersible Ship, Nuclear the 571st submarine built by the U.S. Named for the fabled ship in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it was in many ways Verne’s fantastic vision come to life.

It was launched from the Naval Submarine Base, also in Groton, in 1954. The Nautilus was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, built by General Dynamics Electric Boat at its plant in Groton. The previous year, in the late summer of 1957, the Nautilus submarine ventured under the Arctic ice from the Atlantic Ocean. It was a danger Anderson knew only too well. They knew these spikes likely extended downward into the depths of the cold water where they could potentially wreak havoc on a submarine and its crew.

As they went, Anderson and Lyon noted places in the ice floe where patches had collided, driving up sharp and jagged obstructions. The plane moved beyond the Bering Strait and above the Chukchi Sea. He watched the icy waters beneath him intently as the plane flew over a desolate stretch of the globe, its engine occasionally hiccuping. After World War II, the Soviet Union flew a plane there and landed on the ice, but in the whole of human history, no water vessel had ever made it there and back, and none had even dared claim the accomplishment.Īnderson hoped to avoid the fate of some of the less fortunate members of this explorers’ fraternity. A year later, Robert Peary also claimed to be the first person to reach the pole, but some also doubt he ever made it.

In 1908, Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the pole, but his claim is widely disputed. DeLong led an attempted voyage north that ended in tragedy after his ship was trapped in ice and many crew members, including DeLong, died. Most had been sent back unsuccessful, defeated by the shifting and unpredictable nature of the ice and confounded by the harsh, almost alien conditions of the region. For generations the North Pole had been a siren’s call for adventurers. They had traveled all this way to study the ice - ice Anderson hoped to conquer in a way no explorer ever had, not from above but from below. There they chartered a single-engine plane and were flown over the Bering Strait, the 60-mile passageway between the Russian mainland in Asia and Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska, the westernmost point in the Americas. From Seattle the men traveled to the tiny Alaskan village of Kotzebue.

Dec 1958 nautilus submarine photo