September 30 is the day, in 1954, that the USS Nautilus was commissioned. It was not only the world’s first nuclear submarine; it was the first nuclear-powered vessel of any kind. In 1954, people thought nuclear power was going to define the future. There were predictions that electricity was going to be free because nuclear power would be so available. That led to things like “all-electric homes” in the 1950s and 60s, which turned out to be relative money pits when electricity turned out not to be anywhere near free.
The Nautilus was named after Captain Nemo’s submarine in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” but it actually wasn’t the first US submarine with that name. There was a “USS Nautilus” commissioned in 1930; it served in WWII. Before that, the USS Nautilus was a 76-foot schooner used by the Navy in the 1800s to survey coastlines. And the USS Nautilus before THAT was another schooner, built in 1799, that carried 12 cannons. The British Navy captured that one in the War of 1812.
But wait, there’s more! There have been submarines and ships named “Nautilus” in the navies of England, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and France. The first working submarine (as far as we know) was built by Robert Fulton in 1800, and he named that one the Nautilus too. There have been private ships named “Nautilus” as well, including the first ferry to Staten Island, NY that had an engine (that was in 1817). But the best Nautilus story may have to do with the War of 1812. Remember that the British captured the USS Nautilus from the US? Well in the very same war, the US captured the HCS Nautilus from the British. They had to give it back though, when it turned out that the war had actually ended before the capture. News sometimes traveled slowly in those days.
“Nautilus” turns out to be eerily popular as a name for practically everything. There was an Atari video game called “Nautilus” in the early 1980s, and later on a video game COMPANY called “Nautilus” (they had nothing to do with that particular game). In other computer-related areas, there’s a file manager for Linux called “Nautilus,” the old Digital Equipment Corporation VAX 8700 minicomputer was called “Nautilus,” and there’s (well there was) a TCP/IP-based secure telephone client, again for Linux, again called “Nautilus” (you have to be able to tolerate confusion if you’re going to use Linux).
That last Nautilus is actually an elaborate play on words. In Verne’s novel, the Nautilus submarine was able to overtake and defeat any clipper ship. In the early 1990s, the US government was (not for the first or last time) trying to ensure that nobody had any kind of cryptography that the feds couldn’t read whenever they wanted. The plan at that time involved the “Clipper Chip”. The secure telephone client would be able to “defeat” the Clipper Chip’s surveillance method, and that’s why it was named Nautilus.
The Clipper Chip was abandoned after only three years, but the Nautilus client software was available until at least 2014.
In less specialized fields, you could live in Nautilus, which is a neighborhood in Miami Beach, you could drive a Nautilus (an SUV made by Lincoln; they didn’t sell very many), wear a Nautilus luxury watch, subscribe to at least three magazines called “Nautilus” (only one of them having anything to do with actual Nautiluses), and you could get the song (by Bob James) and an album (by dreDDup) called Nautilus, which you could listen to via your B&W Nautilus speakers. And then, of course, you could go work out on your Nautilus gym equipment.
An actual Nautilus is a kind of mollusk. They’re considered “living fossils” because modern ones are virtually identical to fossils hundreds of millions of years old. The name “nautilus” comes from Greek, and actually referred to a different animal originally — an octopus. Those were called “nautilus” — which means “sailor” — because for some reason people thought that particular octopus used its arms as sails (they don’t).
The animal called nautilus now is the “chambered nautilus.” The chambers are in their spiral shell, they add to it (chamber by chamber) as they grow. If you find a nautilus shell and cut it open, you’ll see a mathematically perfect logarithmic spiral. Nautilus shells are fairly rare, but the 1927 photograph of one by Edward Weston is one of the most famous photographs ever. Its title, as you might expect, is simply “Nautilus.”
