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Colt’s Submarine Battery – Today in History: April 13
April 13, 2021 • Expansion and Reform 1801-1861, Samuel Colt, Invention and Technology, War and Defense
Navy-Yard, Washington

Navy-Yard, Washington, ca. 1800
- Department of the Navy, Naval Historical Center

On April 13, 1844, Samuel Colt blew up a schooner on the Potomac River off the Washington (DC) Navy Yard to demonstrate the effectiveness of his invention, the underwater electric mine or submarine battery. Operated by electric current, the mine had already successfully been used to sink the gunboat Boxer and the brig Volta in 1842 but the demonstration held on April 13, 1844, was made expressly for President John Tyler and his cabinet. The introduction of an underwater mine operated by an electric current is a Connecticut first.

Learn More

Pearce, Allen S. 1854. “Colt’s Sub-Marine Battery Mentioned in the Broadside: Premium Apparatus Electricity Yields to the Mandate of Science! Professor Pearce Will Exhibit His Apparatus ...” http://hdl.handle.net/11134/40002:20137 (March 31, 2014).
Lundeberg, Philip K. 1974. Samuel Colt’s Submarine Battery: The Secret and the Enigma. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

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