Brutus de Villeroi

Brutus de Villeroi (1794 – 1874)

Brutus began his career as a music and mathematics teacher. In the 1820s, he taught flute, horn, guitar, draughtsmanship and mathematics in Nantes, Tréguier (1821) and Saint-Brieuc (1823). In 1821, he filed a patent for his first invention, the "guitare-harmonique" (harmonic-guitar).

In 1863, after a dispute with his American associates, Villeroi proposed his submarine design to the government of Napoleon III of France, but it was rejected as impractical and poorly researched. The French Navy was also already working on another design, Plongeur, with a compressed air engine, which was launched in 1863.

De Villeroi remained in the United States and died of chronic bronchitis in 1874. He was buried alongside his wife, Eulalie de Villeroi, in Rosedale Memorial Park, in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. and later to representatives of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1837.

De Villeroi tried several times to sell his submarine designs to the French Navy (1832, 1855 and 1863), but he was apparently turned down every time.

In 1842, de Villeroi was reputedly a professor for drawing and mathematics at the Saint-Donatien Junior Seminary in Nantes, where Jules Verne was also a student, leading to speculation he may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the Nautilus in the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas; however, no evidence for Villeroi's employment at Saint-Donatien has yet been found, and no direct link between the two men has ever been established.

United States career In 1856, de Villeroi emigrated to the United States. During the late 1850s, Brutus de Villeroi went to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States, where he developed several submarines. He is recorded in an 1860 American census, where his occupation is described as "natural genius".

Salvage submarine (1859)

His first American submarine was built for salvage purposes, and it gained fame when it was seized on May 16, 1861, by the suspicious Philadelphia police as it sailed up the Delaware River. Commander Henry K. Hoff, USN, wrote a report to Captain S.F. Dupont, Commanding Officer of Naval Station Philadelphia, describing the performance of the submarine and its interest to the Navy:

De Villeroi's next ship, the USS Alligator, would be largely inspired from this design.

The Alligator (1862)

Plan of his submarine, by Brutus de Villeroi, describing the oar arrangement.

De Villeroi proposed a submarine design to the United States Navy, to counter the threat of Confederate States Navy ironclad warships. The Navy signed a contract with him in autumn 1861, for the submarine to be built in 40 days, for a sum of $14,000. The ship became the US Navy's first submarine, the Alligator. It was never officially commissioned and therefore does not have the "USS" prefix.

De Villeroi supervised the first phases of the construction in Philadelphia, but was progressively evicted from the project as he opposed some modifications to his design.

It was the first submarine to be ordered and built for the US Navy, the first to have a diver's lockout chamber, the first to have on-board air compressors for air renewal and diver support, the first to have an air-purifying system, and the first to have electrically detonated limpet mines. It was designed primarily to launch divers, who could then plant bombs under surface ships or perform operations underwater.