Monthly Archives: October 2010

Captain Nemo’s Nautilus

The Nautilus is the fictional submarin featured in Jules Verne’s novels “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” (1870) and “The Mysterious Island” (1874). Verne named the Nautilus after Robert Fulton’s real-life submarine Nautilus (1800). Three years before writing his novel, Jules Verne also studied a model of the newly developed French Navy submarine Plongeur at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, which inspired him for his definition of the Nautilus.

The Nautilus  is designed and commanded by Captain Nemo nad as described by Verne is “a masterpiece containing masterpieces”.  Electricity provided by sodium/mercury batteries (with the sodium provided by extraction from seawater) is the craft’s primary power source for propulsion and other services. The Nautilus is double hulled, and is further separated into water-tight compartments. Its top speed is 50 knots. Its displacement is 1,356.48 French freight tons immerged (1,507 submerged). In Captain Nemo’s own words:

Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 meters, and its maximum breadth is eight meters. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square meters; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic meters; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic meters of water, or 1500.2 metric tons.

Captain Nemo's SS Nautilus

Captain Nemo's SS Nautilus



Operation Petticoat – The Pink Submarine

Operation Petticoat is a 1959 comedy film directed by Blake Edwards, and starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. The film tells in flashback form the misadventures of a fictional American submarine, the USS Sea Tiger, during the opening days of World War II.

Il Sottomarino rosa - operazione sottoveste

The Pink submarine - Operation Petticoat

Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine is a 1968 British  animated feature film based on the music of  The Beatles. It is also the title for the  soundtrack album to the feature film, released as part of the Beatles’ music catalogue. The film was directed by animation producer George Dumming , and produced by United Artists and King Feature Syndicate. The real Beatles participated only in the closing scene of the film, with the fictional counterparts of the Beatles voiced by other actors.

Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine - The Beatles