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The last secret of the H.L. Hunley
James McClintock designed the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley. But the extraordinary last act of his life involved Scottish bomb-makers, Irish terrorists, trance mediums equipped with death rays …
Census records confirm that the submarine inventor was born in Ohio, and family tradition suggests that he grew up in Cincinnati and left home at an early age to join the crew of one of the great riverboats that plied the Mississippi, acquiring sufficient experience and skill to become “the youngest steamship captain on the river” in the years before the outbreak of the Civil War. By 1879 he was living in New Albany, on the Ohio River at the southern tip of Indiana, where – having failed in an attempt to promote a new sort of concrete sidewalk in Philadelphia – his occupation was recorded as “salesman.” This suggests that a considerable reversal of fortune had occurred to him since 1872, when he had been the moderately prosperous owner-operator of a dredge boat on Mobile Bay. This man introduced himself as James McClintock, explained that he had a background in submarine and mine warfare–and revealed that he had been hired by Rossa’s Skirmishing Fund to build 15 examples of a new sort of torpedo so powerful, he boasted, that a single weapon filled with 35 pounds of explosives “could sink an ironclad if exploded under her bottom, and could be carried in a great-coat pocket.”
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