The Chambered Nautilus

The Navy reached back into history to find a fitting name for the atomic submarine now abuilding, and finding it, broke from its tidy modern-day custom of naming all submarines after deep-sea fish. The name of the atomic craft: U.S.S. Nautilus.

It was a famous old sub name. Long before Robert Fulton puffed up the Hudson in his steamboat in 1807, he was experimenting with a long, platter-shaped submarine named Nautilus.* Jules Verne used the name for the spike-nosed boat commanded by Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Over the years, two U.S. Navy subs have been christened Nautilus, and the best-remembered of them was the monster 3,000-ton boat of World War II fame. Launched in 1930, she was huge and .deadly, twice as big as ordinary fleet boats, with a pair of six-inch guns, two decks and six 21-inch torpedo tubes. Before she was scrapped because of old age in 1946, World War II's Nautilus went on 14 successful patrols, was the first U.S. sub to sink a Japanese aircraft carrier (the 10,000-ton Soryu, at Midway), and landed raiders before the invasions of Tarawa, Makin and Attu.

The Nautilus' new atomic sister is being built behind a tight security curtain, but by announcing her famous name, the Navy also gave a hint of how fast the work is progressing. The keel will probably be laid soon after the first of the year, and her prefabricated sections will be welded together soon after. From all indications, the new Nautilus will be ready for her shakedown cruise before the end of 1952.

* After the pearly, spiral-shelled mollusk, the "chambered nautilus" of which Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main . . .

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