The Secret Underwater Weapon That HUMILIATED Britain | Yorktown (1776)

The Secret Underwater Weapon That Nearly Sank a British Warship | New York, 1776 In the summer of 1776, with the British fleet anchored in New York Harbor and General Washington's army about to be pushed off Long Island, a Yale-educated Connecticut inventor named David Bushnell finished the strangest weapon ever launched against the Royal Navy. He called it the Turtle. A one-man, hand-cranked wooden submersible, roughly the shape of two turtle shells clamped together, with a screw drill mounted on top designed to attach a gunpowder mine to the hull of a British warship. On the night of September 6, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee climbed inside, was towed out into the harbor by rowboat, and disappeared beneath the surface toward Admiral Howe's flagship, HMS Eagle. What followed was the first documented submarine attack in the history of warfare. It didn't work quite the way Bushnell had hoped. But it came far closer than anyone in the British fleet realized at the time — and it changed what was possible in naval warfare forever. In this video, we tell the story of the Turtle, the Yale inventor behind it, the sergeant who piloted it into the middle of Britain's most powerful fleet, and the night an American submarine came within a copper hull's thickness of sinking a Royal Navy warship in 1776. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into American history and the forgotten stories that shaped the country. #AmericanRevolution #DavidBushnell #TheTurtle #NavalHistory #RevolutionaryWar #AmericanHistory #MilitaryHistory