They concluded these rushes of air to be sufficient enough to cause pulmonary and brain trauma, killing the crew instantly while barely leaving a broken bone. So, the crew was effectively killed by their own weapon. They mimicked the gunpowder explosions and blasted the submarine with pressurized air while monitoring the internal pressure inside the cabin generated by each blast. Friends of the HunleyĪ team of naval warfare experts and biomedical scientists reconstructed a scale model of the submarine using a similar steel used in Civil War-era ships. "Finding the cause of death of the crew has finally allowed us to declare the mystery solved." An X-ray reconstruction of the interior of the HL.Hunley shows the color-coded skeletons of the eight crewmen still at their stations with no broken bones. "The disappearance of the Hunley has long stood as one of the great mysteries of American history," lead study author Rachel Lance of Duke University said in a statement. In a study in the journal PLOS One, they explain how the crew died from an intense blast of air caused by setting off the black powder torpedo. “If you’re practising 200 yards away, and then you triple the size of your bomb and put it 16 feet away, you have to be at least aware that there’s a possibility of injury.Now scientists have reinvestigated the sub’s mysterious demise and found the cause of death of those unfortunate sub-mariners. “Blast travels really far underwater,” she said. This Russian submarine was in use some 50 years after the one which sank in South Carolina (PA Archive) It was a feat that would not be repeated for another fifty years. Traumatic brain injuries are also likely to have occurred, said Dr Lance. Delicate structures in the lungs would have been torn apart, causing instant death. She said: “When you mix these speeds together in a frothy combination like the human lungs, or hot chocolate, it combines and it ends up making the energy go slower than it would in either one.”Īs a result, soft tissue damage lasted longer and was amplified. This led to what Dr Lance called the “hot chocolate effect”. Passing from the water to the air inside the Hunley’s hull, the speed of the shock wave fell from about 1,500 to 340 metres per second, the study showed. Submarines have come a long way in 153 years (Owen Humphreys/PA) But the furthest any member of the Hunley’s crew was from the blast was just 42ft. When the warhead was rammed into the enemy ship’s hull beneath the waterline it exploded with enormous force. ![]() ![]() The Hunley’s “torpedo” was not self-propelled but carried on the end of a 16ft wooden pole that extended in front and slightly below its bow. Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years.” “You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains. It might seem incredible to think submarines were in use during the American Civil War (PA Archive) By that time the bodies of the trapped crew were so badly bloated and contorted that salvagers were forced to cut off limbs so they could extricate the men through the sub’s tiny hatchways. Ten days passed before the craft was recovered. They were killed instantly when the force of the torpedo’s explosion sent a shock wave blast through the submarine that would have pulverised the crew members’ internal organs, especially the lungs and brain. Four men escaped the sinking sub, but five others were trapped inside its iron hull and drowned. It has taken more than 150 years for US scientists to solve the mystery of how the men met their deaths. When the boat was raised in 2000, the skeletons of its eight crewmen were found seated at their respective stations with no sign of physical injury or any evidence that they had attempted to escape. This painting by Conrad Wise Chapman shows what the submarine would have looked like (Conrad Wise Chapman/PA) The Hunley demonstrated both the advantages and the dangers of undersea warfare. On its first and last mission on February 17 1864, the cigar-shaped submarine sank the 1,200 ton Union warship USS Housatonic outside Charleston harbour, South Carolina. Hunley was a submarine of the Confederate States of America that played a small part in the American Civil War, but a large role in the history of naval warfare. Its “engine” was a hand-cranked propeller and it carried a 135 pound copper keg of gunpowder at the end of a 16ft spar. The 39ft vessel, HL Hunley, took part in the American Civil War on the Confederate side. Crewmen aboard the first submarine to sink an enemy ship were killed by the pressure blast of their own torpedo, research has shown.
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