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Students dive into Hunley

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  • Students dive into Hunley

    Part of the story is solid. Part of it remains a mystery.

    What is certain is that on the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sank the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina to become the first submarine to sink a ship during combat.

    Then the Hunley itself literally sank into oblivion when it went down with its crew of eight. The resting place of the Civil War submarine, which had remained a mystery for more than century, finally was discovered in 1995 off Sullivan's Island.

    But before the submarine sank, the story goes, it flashed a blue light to Confederate soldiers on the shore to signal success.

    But as this part of the story comes from second- and third-hand accounts, it "gets a little fuzzy," says archaeologist Mike Scafuri of the Warren Lasch Conservation Center in Charleston, where the recovered Hunley is on display.

    Nobody knows whether the signal was supposed to be made directly after the attack or as the Hunley approached shore, Scafuri says. And another question remains: Could a lantern have produced a strong enough light for the soldiers to see?

    Hands-on investigation

    To try to answer the question of the mysterious blue signal, 12 students at Hamburg (Pa.) Area High School are building three replicas of the submarine's lantern in the school's metal shop.

    Retired history teacher Ned Eisenhuth and retired shop teacher Fred Lutkis began the project after expressing interest last summer in the history of the Hunley to the Lasch Conservation Center.

    Before they retired, Eisenhuth and Lutkis had worked with students at Minersville (Pa.) Area High School to create replicas of a Viking burial sled and a medieval cart.

    These will be the only true replicas of the Hunley's lantern, Eisenhuth says. Next month, the school plans to donate the best replica of the lantern to the conservation center, which has been studying the submarine since it was excavated in 2000 with help from the Friends of the Hunley Organization.

    Scafuri says the conservation center and the high school hope to answer the following questions with replicas of the only light source on the Hunley:

    •Could the soldiers on shore have seen the blue light from more than 1,000 feet away?

    •Just how powerful was the lantern?

    •Could the lantern actually produce a blue-colored light?

    Using X-rays and drawings from the conservation center of the actual lantern remnants from the recovered submarine, students have begun soldering and molding sheet metal to form the lantern.

    The lantern consists of three cylinders that fit tightly inside one another: the outside, inside and lens cylinders, says Lutkus.

    "The hardest part has been going off the diagrams (of the lantern) that were mailed to us" by the conservation center, says Hamburg senior Cody Wertz, one of six students working on lantern construction. "There's some stuff that you don't know exactly, that we have to guess to the best of our ability what they would have had."

    Goal: Historical accuracy

    Hamburg offers only woodshop, so Lutkus says he had to teach the students how to work with sheet metal, which proved difficult.

    "Sheet metal does not always do what you want it to do," Lutkus says. "You're taking a flat surface and making it three-dimensional. It's not like wood where, if you mess up, you can fix it or hide things. When you mess up with sheet metal, you have to scrap it and start over."

    Freshman Seth Kunkel says metalworking also can be dangerous: The soldering iron gets hot. He says he is picking up many of the techniques, such as using a roll iron to make cylinders and using a blowhorn stake to hammer metal into different shapes.

    Students also faced problems making the lamp historically accurate, Eisenhuth says. Restrictions on commercial whaling have made whale oil, which was burned in the original lamp, hard to come by.

    After consulting a lantern manufacturer, Eisenhuth says, he learned that kerosene — also available during the Civil War — would be a historically accurate alternative.

    The lanterns will be finished this month, and Eisenhuth says he hopes to donate two, rather than just the promised one, to the center and to put the third unused lantern on display at the high school.

    USA TODAY delivers current national and local news, sports, entertainment, finance, technology, and more through award-winning journalism, photos, and videos.


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  • #2
    Re: Students dive into Hunley

    Kudos to them and their instructor.
    GaryYee o' the Land o' Rice a Roni & Cable Cars
    High Private in The Company of Military Historians

    Comment


    • #3
      Re: Students dive into Hunley

      Much has happened since the high school project to "reproduce" the Hunley's lantern. The lantern from the Hunley has now been completely conserved, and several points must be made in the interest of historical accuracy. The student project was ill-conceived from the historical aspect, since the educators bought into the recently discredited blue lantern myth. The "blue light" which figures so prominently in modern accounts of the Hunley story was not produced by an oil burning lantern with a blue glass lens, as imagined by modern authors and researchers. That is a myth which was invented some thirty or more years ago, when researchers read the historical accounts of "blue light." What they failed to realize is that in 1864, "blue light" meant a pyrotechnic, hand-held flare, a firework, long used for signaling in the military and for general illumination in the civilian world. This is confirmed by period dictionaries (Webster's 1864 edition), military manuals (US and CS Ordnance Manuals, scientific texts, literature, newspaper articles, etc. Unfortunately, modern researchers have repeated the blue lantern myth ad nauseum, until it has been ingrained in the public consciousness, attaining the status of gospel. The high school instructors and students were similarly seduced by the blue lantern myth, and created (not reproduced, since no such blue lantern ever existed) a blue lantern which will be displayed and interpreted to the public, perpetuating the myth and bad history.

      The research which discredits the blue lantern myth, and explains the use of pyrotechnic blue light signaling during the Civil War, was published in Civil War Navy The Magazine Vol. 1 Issue 1 Spring 2012: "Blue Light and the H.L. Hunley Debunking the Blue Lantern Myth" by Christopher Rucker. The research has been summarized in the Civil War Courier August 2012: "H.L. Hunley's Blue Light Mystery Solved" and the Civil War News August 2012: "Research Explains Surprise that H.L. Hunley's Lantern Not Blue."

      Two YouTube videos demonstrate the manufacture and use of period pyrotechnic blue light: "Burning Blue Light" and "Making Civil War-Era Blue Light."

      The final, confirmatory nail in the coffin of the blue lantern myth is the lantern which came out of the H.L. Hunley, and has now been completely conserved. It is an ordinary, so-called "dark lantern" used as a nineteenth century flashlight. It was not intended to function as a signal lantern, and it has a clear glass lens. There is no way that it produced a blue light.

      Kudos to the high schoolers for their enthusiasm and the finished products with a clear glass lens, but the blue lantern they made should not be part of any public display.
      Chris Rucker
      Ferguson's (SC) Artillery Co.

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Students dive into Hunley

        Hallo!

        One could idylly speculate that the firing of a flare through the unclosed open hatch might have been responsible for swamping and sinking.

        Curt
        Curt Schmidt
        In gleichem Schritt und Tritt, Curt Schmidt

        -Hard and sharp as flint...secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
        -Haplogroup R1b M343 (Subclade R1b1a2 M269)
        -Pointless Folksy Wisdom Mess, Oblio Lodge #1
        -Vastly Ignorant
        -Often incorrect, technically, historically, factually.

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        • #5
          Re: Students dive into Hunley

          Gents-

          I am trying to remember what the show was called and my memory is failing me. I thought it was the "Unsolved History" series but I could not find it on the list.

          Anyway this show discussed the blue light question and also the possibilty of why the CSS Hunley sank. One of the possibilities they explored was that the sailors on board the USS Houstanic fired several rifle and pistol shots at the submarine. In an effort to test the damage a Civil War musket shot could do to the Hunley I believe they made a cast iron conning tower with windows and fired several pistol shots at the tower with little effect but the rifled musket cracked a piece of the conning tower off. The damage was very consistent with the damage found on the actual CSS Hunley. See the link below to a picture and story about it.


          Louis Zenti

          Pvt. Albert R. Cumpston (Company B, 12th Illinois Vol. Inf.-W.I.A. February 15, 1862)
          Pvt. William H. Cumpston (Company B, 12th Illinois Vol. Inf.-K.I.A. February 15, 1862 Ft. Donelson)
          Pvt. Simon Sams (Co. C, 18th Iowa Inf.-K.I.A. January 8, 1863 Springfield, MO)
          Pvt. Elisha Cox (Co. C, 26th North Carolina Inf.-W.I.A. July 3, 1863 Gettysburg)

          "...in the hottest of the fight, some of the rebs yelled out...them must be Iowa boys". Charles O. Musser 29th Iowa Infantry

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          • #6
            Re: Students dive into Hunley

            Pards,

            That was a National Geographic special. They cast the frame of the porthole with the same iron that was used on the original Hunley. While the Springfield musket was able to fracture the iron from a very close range, it is doubtful that the damage resulted in the Hunley's loss. We'll have to wait until the concretion is removed from the hull's exterior to learn whether there is any clue as to what sent the sub to the bottom, or prevented it from coming back up.

            Pyrotechnic blue light is pretty nasty stuff, and all manner of unexpected catastrophes might be expected if it was ignited in the sub and not promptly thrust out of the hatch for display to shore. Since it was hand-held and not fired into the air like a modern flare, it would have required some agility from Lt. Dixon to maneuver through the very narrow hatch with the burning signal. Perhaps he was able to light it while standing in the hatch, with his upper body out of the sub, but he would have had to shield his match from the wind and the splashing waves. Food for thought...
            Chris Rucker
            Ferguson's (SC) Artillery Co.

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