Monturiol's Dream: The Extraordinary Story of the Submarine Inventor Who Wanted to Save the World

A marvelous rediscovery: the compelling story of the strange and noble lifeand dreamof nineteenth-century utopian social revolutionary and self-taught engineer Narcs Monturiol, who invented the worlds first fully operational steam-powered submarine, not as a weapon of war but as a means of saving human life and spreading democracy.
Matthew Stewart tells the story of Monturiol from his childhood to his years living the dangerous life of a revolutionary. We see him at the bloody barricades and fleeingone step ahead of the Barcelona policeto the remote coastline of northern Catalonia. On that shore, watching teams of divers risk their lives gathering coral from the waters depths for use in the making of jewels, candelabras, and crimson pigment, he finds the true purpose of his life. He saves a man presumed dead from drowning and conceives of a craft that will protect the divers who harvest corala safe, hermetically sealed underwater vessel that will make the oceans bounty available to the common man.

Stewart writes about the building of Monturiols submarine: how, without scientific education (he was a lawyer by training), Monturiol read books on physics, chemistry, and biology; how he launched a hand-powered prototype submarine capable of reaching depths of sixty feet; how his efforts to gain government support for building a larger submarine were thwarted (his invention was dismissed by one official as having no useful applications). We see Monturiol, unwilling to give up on his dream, turn to the artists, poets, and musicians of Barcelona to help him mobilize the public to fund his project, and how he launched his second, much larger vessel five years later: the most advanced submarine of its day; at more than fifty feet long it displaced seventy-two tons and navigated reliably at depths of up to one hundred feet, with a unique system for eliminating carbon dioxide, replenishing oxygen in the interior cabin, and enabling its crew to remain underwater indefinitely. It had a steam engine for propulsion, a chemical furnace to heat the engine as it generated oxygen for the crew, external lights, portholes, and pincers for harvesting coral and other objects from the deep. It was the first true submarine; the world would not see its equal for another twenty years.

And we watch as Monturiols revolutionary friends, making use of his utopian ideals and notions of urban planning (a term he originated), forge a new culture for Catalonia and its capital city and create the radical design that resulted in an entirely new Barcelona.