Personal submarines for romantic water-trips, 1944

An article in the Sept, 1944 issue of Popular Science pondered the future peacetime uses of Britain's "human torpedo" -- a "submarine motorbike" built for two. The article imagines that after the war it might find use for family outings and romantic underwater sight-seeing trips.

Little serious thought has been given to the peacetime possibilities, for sport and industrial use, of the “human-torpedo” craft designed to attack enemy ships and harbor installations. But I know of two men now assigned to one of these new naval weapons —one is a hairdresser in civil life and the other a dry cleaner—who hope to buy a decommissioned jeepmarine from the government after the war and use it to explore the Spanish Main for galleon gold.

The submarine motorbike has a cylindrical chassis 21 feet long. Two persons sit astride it behind conventional-looking motorcycle windscreens. They wear diving suits that weigh less than 50 pounds, and their hands are left bare. Each person can dress himself for undersea cycling in less than five minutes. Oxygen flasks carried on their backs permit them to remain submerged for 10 hours. They may dismount at will and, by regulating the air-escape valve, make their suits so buoyant that they can float like fish at any level. Deflating their suits permits them to walk, with their lead-soled boots keeping them vertical.

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