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Naval Gazing Part 7: We’re All Sunk By A Battle Submarine

You could have claimed that in an earlier draft of Shakespeare's play, he considered having the Turkish fleet sunk by a submersible rather than a storm. And the Turkish fleet could then say "We're all sunk by Othello's submarine"
 
I'm still trying to figure out how Ironshark happened as a name. The only thing shark-like about subs is their inherent smell; sort of like old blood mixed with the saccharine whiff of dissolving lead paint.
 
There were a number of successful trials, but Napoleon cancelled the project after visiting at a point where Fulton had disassembled the submarine, and deciding (despite eyewitnesses) it had all been a fake by a charlatan. The annoyed Fulton tried to take his invention to Napoleon’s enemy Britain instead, but the Royal Navy was not interested

These were two potential PODs for early submarine warfare that I didn't expect to see!
 
These were two potential PODs for early submarine warfare that I didn't expect to see!
There were a lot of things proposed (or used in a limited way) in the Napoleonic Wars that seem way too modern out of context - gas warfare, rockets and so on. I often feel the 'weird Napoleonic-era superweapon Luftwaffe '46 style' genre is underdone; one of Patrick O'Brian's earlier Aubrey-Maturin novels is set on a failed superweapon rocket ship that has been (badly) converted back to a conventional one. A lot of stuff in LTTW was basically me taking some of this and turning up the knob (as with the Chappe semaphore and the Cugnot steam tractors).
 
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