Dive deep into the forgotten world of 1970s submarine innovation! The 1970s were a period of incredible advancements, and the underwater realm was no exception. From groundbreaking propulsion systems to revolutionary life support, discover the ingenious designs that almost changed naval warfare and exploration forever.
This decade saw engineers push the boundaries of what was possible with submarines. Uncover secret projects and bold concepts that, while not widely adopted, showcased the ambitious spirit of 1970s maritime technology.
Explore some of the most fascinating yet overlooked underwater inventions that emerged during this dynamic era of technological development. These forgotten ideas offer a unique glimpse into the past and the continuous quest for naval superiority and exploration.
#SubmarineTech #1970sHistory #NavalInnovation #UnderwaterInventions
This decade saw engineers push the boundaries of what was possible with submarines. Uncover secret projects and bold concepts that, while not widely adopted, showcased the ambitious spirit of 1970s maritime technology.
Explore some of the most fascinating yet overlooked underwater inventions that emerged during this dynamic era of technological development. These forgotten ideas offer a unique glimpse into the past and the continuous quest for naval superiority and exploration.
#SubmarineTech #1970sHistory #NavalInnovation #UnderwaterInventions
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00What if some of the cleverest submarine inventions ever made came alive in the 1970s, and almost
00:05nobody talks about them today?
00:07Engineers in that decade built craft that could grab a missing submarine off the ocean
00:11floor, suits that let one person walk a thousand feet down, and torpedoes that still serve
00:16the fleet today.
00:17Most of that hardware quietly slipped out of public memory while still shaping the way
00:21the world hunts, hides and studies the deep.
00:24So which forgotten submarine inventions from the 1970s deserve a second look tonight?
00:28Let us start with the very first one.
00:30Picture a small white rescue submarine, about the size of a school bus, riding piggyback
00:35on the deck of a much larger nuclear sub.
00:38That was Mystic, the world's first deep submergence rescue vehicle placed in service in 1970.
00:43Inside, the air smelled like rubber gaskets and warm electronics.
00:47Three pilots crouched shoulder to shoulder in a steel sphere lit by tiny gauges, with bare
00:53room left to pack 24 rescued sailors behind them.
00:56Mystic was born from grief.
00:57The Navy ordered her after the USS Thresher sank in 1963, with all 129 men lost.
01:04She could fly aboard a giant cargo plane, ride to sea on a sub, dive to 3500 feet and
01:10clamp onto the hatch of a wreck.
01:11Today, she rests in a museum in Washington state, replaced by a remote controlled rescue
01:16pod in 2008.
01:17If you were lying on the ocean floor right now, would you trust her to come for you?
01:21Next up is the Mark 48 torpedo, which became operational in 1972 and is still the only heavyweight
01:28torpedo carried by every American submarine today.
01:31Imagine a sleek green steel tube, 19 feet long, smelling faintly of autofuel II, the strange
01:37pink monopropellant that hisses and burns without any outside air.
01:40When fired from a torpedo tube, it streaked out trailing a thin guidance wire back to the
01:45launching sub, letting sonar operators steer it like a deep sea drone.
01:49It was built to chase Soviet nuclear submarines moving fast and deep, and it was designed to
01:54detonate right under a ship's keel, snapping its back rather than just punching a hole.
01:58Modern variants still ride the same swashplate engine layout.
02:01Have you ever held a tool from your childhood that still works perfectly today?
02:05Now picture a hulking white suit of armour, six and a half feet tall, weighing about 800
02:10pounds, standing alone on a deck like a forgotten knight.
02:13That was the gym suit, an atmospheric diving suit completed in 1971, named after a 1930s diver
02:20called Jim Jarrett.
02:21The diver climbed inside a magnesium shell with two thick glass portholes and the smell of
02:26fresh oxygen and grease.
02:27The suit kept normal air pressure inside while the ocean squeezed the outside, meaning no
02:31decompression sickness, no exotic gas mixtures, no nitrogen narcosis.
02:36In 1979, oceanographer Sylvia Earle wore one to walk on the seafloor at 1,250 feet untethered.
02:44Today, divers use sleeker hard suits and remote vehicles for the same work.
02:48If you could walk a quarter mile down into a black ocean alone, would you do it?
02:52The little research submarine Alvin got a brand new titanium pressure sphere during her 1973
02:57overhaul, and that change quietly opened up the bottom of the world.
03:00Before that, Alvin's steel ball could only handle about 6 nil feet.
03:05After, scientists could ride her down to nearly 12 nil feet, smelling damp metal and breathing
03:10recycled cabin air, with three of them stuffed into a sphere smaller than a backyard shed.
03:14It was Alvin's new titanium hide that let her crew see hydrothermal vents in 1977 off the
03:20Galapagos, with strange tube worms glowing in her headlights.
03:23Today, titanium hulls show up in luxury private submersibles you can charter for a vacation.
03:28Have you ever thought about how a quiet metal swap can change what humans get to see?
03:33Maybe the strangest sub ever placed in service was NR1, a tiny nuclear-powered research submarine
03:39nicknamed Nerwin. She joined the fleet in late 1969 and spent the 1970s on classified missions.
03:45Inside, the crew of 11 men breathed air made by burning chlorate candles. There was no kitchen,
03:51no shower, and the toilet often clogged. They ate frozen TV dinners, bathed once a week with a bucket of
03:56warm water and rolled around so much in the currents that everybody puked at some point.
04:01She could sit on the bottom at three zero feet for almost a month, picking up Soviet missile
04:05parts and tapping cables. Modern unmanned underwater vehicles do the same work without a single human
04:10aboard. Could you live like that for 30 days at the bottom of the sea? The big leap in American
04:15nuclear deterrence came when the Trident IC-4 missile deployed in 1979 on submarines. Picture a 34-foot
04:22column of solid fuel rocket, painted grey, sleeping inside a tube on a submarine hundreds of feet
04:28under. When the tube blew open, compressed gas shot the missile out of the sea like a cork from a
04:33bottle.
04:33Then its three solid fuel stages roared to life in the open air. A single Trident I could fly 4
04:39,000
04:39nautical miles and drop eight independent nuclear warheads on separate targets. It replaced the older
04:45Poseidon and turned every ballistic submarine into a moving doomsday machine. Today's Trident 2D5 does the
04:52same job with more range. Does it scare you a little to think those things were sleeping under
04:56the waves while you were watching Saturday cartoons? The Los Angeles class attack submarine
05:00joined the fleet in November 1976 when USS Los Angeles herself was commissioned. Sliding down the
05:06ways at Newport News, she was a 360-foot black cigar with a single seven-bladed propeller hidden behind
05:12her stern. Inside, the air carried the faint metallic tang of fresh paint, hot electronics, and brewed coffee.
05:17She ran on the S6G pressurized water reactor producing 165 megawatts, enough to push her past
05:2430 knots underwater. She was built to hunt the latest Soviet boats, fast and quiet, all while staying
05:29down for 90 days at a stretch. 62 of these submarines were built and many still serve in the fleet
05:35right
05:35now. When you were a kid, did you ever imagine the cars on your block had nothing on what was
05:39hiding
05:40under the ocean? Across the world, the Soviets answered with the Alpha class, also called Project 705
05:45Lyra, introduced in 1971. Imagine a sleek black submarine made almost entirely of titanium,
05:51glittering faintly silver wherever the paint scraped off. The yard workers had to weld it
05:56inside special inert gas tents because regular air would make the metal brittle. The hull was lighter
06:01and stronger than steel, and it cut its magnetic signature down close to nothing. Alphus could top
06:0640 knots submerged and dive past a thousand meters, deeper than any western torpedo could follow.
06:11Only seven were ever built, and the last one was retired by 1996. Today, titanium hulls are reserved
06:18for tiny scientific subs. Can you imagine an entire warship built out of the same metal as a luxury
06:23wristwatch? The Alpha's heart was even stranger. Beneath the deck plates sat a lead-bismuth liquid
06:28metal cooled nuclear reactor, which used molten metal rather than pressurized water to carry away heat.
06:33It hummed at a different pitch from a normal reactor, and the engine room glowed warm with insulated
06:38piping that had to stay hot at all times. The payoff was huge power packed into a small core,
06:43which gave the Alpha her cheater speed. The catch was terrifying. If the lead-bismuth ever cooled and
06:48hardened in port, the whole reactor turned into a useless, mummified brick. The Russians ended up
06:53scrapping the design. Today, every navy on Earth has gone back to pressurized water. Would you have signed
06:58up to serve on that submarine, knowing it could freeze itself to death? In the summer of 1974, the CIA
07:05pulled
07:05off one of the wildest engineering feats of the decade with a giant grabbing claw called Clementine,
07:10deployed under the Hughes Glomar Explorer for Project Azorian. Imagine a five-story tall set
07:16of steel fingers slowly lowered through a moon pool in the bottom of a 70 zero-ton ship, on 274
07:22sections of pipe screwed together one at a time. The air on deck smelled like seawater and machine grease,
07:28and the crew worked 12-hour shifts in total secrecy. The mission was to lift the wreck of a sunken
07:32Soviet submarine called K-129 from 16500 feet down. Clementine grabbed it, but a piece broke off on the
07:40way up. Today, no machine of that scale exists. Would you sail under a Howard Hughes cover story to steal
07:46a nuclear submarine? Before any of that, the wreck had to be found. That job belonged to a strange towed
07:51sensor sled known as the fish, used by USS Halibut to locate K-129 in the Pacific abyss. Picture a
07:5812-foot,
07:59two-ton steel package crammed with cameras, sonar arrays and bright strobe lights, dragged on a long
08:05armoured cable behind a converted spy submarine. Inside the Halibut, technicians sat in red-lit rooms
08:11watching black and white images develop, frame by frame, looking for any unnatural shape on the ocean
08:16floor. The fish could survive crushing pressure thousands of feet deep, snapping pictures that no
08:20human eye had ever seen. Today, autonomous undersea drones do similar work, but they steer themselves.
08:26Would you have the patience to stare at fuzzy seafloor photos for weeks, hoping to spot a missing
08:31submarine? For years, American attack submarines carried a weapon called Subrock, the UUM-44A
08:37submarine-launched nuclear depth charge, and the 1970s were its heyday. Imagine a torpedo-sized rocket
08:43sleeping in a 21-inch tube. When fired, it shot out the sub, broke the surface, lit a solid fuel
08:49motor,
08:49and flew through the open sky like a small missile. At a programmed point, its re-entry body separated,
08:54dropped back into the ocean miles away, and sank as a W55 nuclear depth bomb. A direct hit was never
09:01needed. Up to 75 American boats carried it before Subrock was retired in 1989. Today, no Western Navy
09:07has anything quite like it. Does it surprise you that submarines used to fly missiles out of the sea?
09:12Quiet detection became its own art form. The Soviet Navy fielded a sensor system called SOX, first introduced
09:18in 1969, and still used today. Instead of listening for engines or pinging with sound, SOX tasted the water.
09:25It looked for tiny changes in temperature, chemistry, and disturbance left in the wake of an enemy
09:29submarine, even hours after the boat had passed. Picture little sensor pods sticking out of the front
09:34of a Soviet attack sub, sniffing the sea like a hound on a trail. Western navies thought the idea
09:39was almost useless until they read declassified files. Today, similar non-acoustic sensors keep getting
09:44smarter on every new generation of Russian boats. Have you ever realized you can be tracked by what
09:49you leave behind, not what you say? Walk up to a modern submarine, and you will notice the hull
09:53looks bumpy, almost rubbery. Those are anechoic tiles, which the Soviets first put into wide use
09:59during the 1970s on the Victor class under the code name Cluster Guard. Imagine sticking thousands of dark
10:05rubber pads, each containing tiny air pockets, all over a steel hull with industrial glue. They smell
10:10faintly of rubber and salt. The tiles absorb enemy sonar pings and muffle the noise of pumps and turbines
10:16inside the boat, both at the same time. Western navies eventually copied the idea on submarines
10:21like the Royal Navy's HMS Churchill. Today, nearly every modern attack submarine wears them. Have you
10:26ever covered something in foam to keep it quiet and felt like a genius? The Soviets did it first to
10:31a
10:31warship. Below decks on the Los Angeles class lived another quiet revolution, the ANBQQ5 digital sonar suite,
10:37introduced in the late 1970s. Picture a sonar room lit by green CRT screens, the gentle hum of cooling
10:43fans, and operators with big padded headphones listening for the tiniest signature in the ocean.
10:48Older sonars used analog signal processing. The BQQ5 could digitally sort signals into separate
10:54frequencies, follow many contacts at once, and feed targets straight to the fire control computer.
10:59It used a giant spherical bow array of hydrophones and a passive flank array down the side of the hull.
11:04Today, submarines use the ANBQQ10, but the digital leap happened first. Does it amaze you that the
11:09room that found enemy ships looked a lot like an early video arcade? In 1977, the Navy quietly
11:15deployed the submarine-launched UGM-84A Harpoon anti-ship missile, giving attack submarines a new
11:21way to hit ships from over the horizon. Imagine a 15-foot missile sealed inside a water-type
11:26capsule that fit a standard torpedo tube. When the sub fired, the capsule swam to the surface,
11:31the nose cap popped, the solid rocket booster kicked in, and the harpoon roared off skimming
11:36low across the waves. Onboard radar guided it to its target 70-plus miles away. Before this,
11:41submarines mostly hunted with torpedoes alone. Today, every American submarine still carries
11:46harpoons or their cousins. Have you ever had a moment when your favorite tool grew a brand new
11:51trick overnight? The Navy also needed proper ships to carry the rescue subs we talked about earlier,
11:55so it built the Pigeon-class submarine rescue ships, the first one commissioned in 1973.
12:01Imagine a long catamaran with two hulls and an enormous open well in the middle, big enough for
12:06a DSRV to ride up out of the water like an oyster in a shell. The decks smelled like fresh
12:11paint and
12:11welding fumes, and helicopters could land on top. USS Pigeon and her sister USS Autolan were the first
12:17American open ocean catamarans in the Navy. They could hoist a rescue submarine, launch divers,
12:22and stand directly above a sunken hull all at once. Today, the Navy uses smaller, more flexible
12:28craft for the same role. When was the last time you saw a tool built around an entirely new shape?
12:32The civilian science world also got a fresh boat with DSV-4 Seacliff, originally commissioned
12:37in 1973 as a sister to Alvin and Turtle. She was a tiny submersible the size of a delivery van,
12:43painted bright orange and white, with little portholes the size of dinner plates. The cabin smelled like
12:48cold metal and ozone, and three people crammed inside with their knees together. She started
12:53life able to reach about 6-500 feet, then later got a titanium sphere of her own that took her
12:58down
12:58to 20-0 feet. The Navy used her to recover bits of crashed aircraft, lost weapons, and pieces of
13:04foreign hardware. Today, new privately owned subs like the Triton make Seacliff look like a Volkswagen.
13:09Did you know the Navy was running a fleet of mini-subs the whole time? Out behind every American
13:15attack submarine of the era, trailed a long thin cable known as Tactus, the tactical towered array
13:20sonar. Imagine an inch thick reinforced hose, hundreds of feet long, packed with delicate
13:25hydrophones, dragged miles behind the boat as a swimming ear. Because it was so far from the noisy
13:30engine room and propeller, it could hear sounds the boat itself was deaf to, including faint enemy
13:35contacts directly behind, in what crews call the baffles. The array let one submarine stalk another
13:40from much farther away. Today, every modern attack submarine carries a descendant of Tactus. Have you
13:45ever turned around and realized something had been right behind you the whole time? Finally, the Alpha
13:50class also pioneered something almost nobody talks about now, a heavily automated control system run
13:55by a crew of only 31 men, all officers. Picture a tight white control room with curved consoles, blinking
14:01indicator lights, and only a handful of seats. Most routine functions were handled by early computers and
14:06automatic systems, an enormous bet for the early 1970s. The Soviet Navy basically tried to design a
14:12submarine that was half spaceship. The price was constant maintenance and fragile electronics, and
14:17the Americans never copied the idea at scale. Today, modern submarines run with much smaller crews than
14:22they used to, thanks in part to lessons learned from the Alpha experiment. If your office had been
14:27automated 50 years ago, where do you think you would be working tonight? So there you have it. 20 forgotten
14:32submarine inventions from the 1970s, each one quietly steering a piece of the world you live in today.
14:37If even one of these stories surprised you, hit that like button, drop a comment with which invention
14:42blew your mind the most, and subscribe so you do not miss the next deep dive. Which one of these
14:46would
14:46you want to climb inside if you had the chance? Let me know down below.
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