Was there ever a steam powered submarine?

Answer 1

The answer is yes, but it might not be what you think. The early application of steam power to do work saw its use in a wide variety of vehicles, both on land (cars, trains, etc.) and on water (steamships). Steam generation requires a heat source, and in all the early applications of steam, some form of combustion was employed to boil the water. We had to burn something. That meant using air, or at least the oxygen in it. The submarine, which had long been dreamed about, had crept along in its development. But it always used human power (or springs or something else quirky) to drive it under water. Some early attempts were made at employing electric motors with batteries, and later on that finally became the key to building a "real" u-boat. Designers added an internal combustion motor that drove a generator, and they also added a big bank of batteries. The "modern" submarine began service. These submarines had to surface to charge batteries, but could run quite a few hours submerged. They had limitations, but were an extraordinarily effective weapon in World War II. (There are a lot of articles about that.) World War 2 ended on a note that saw the entrance of applied atomic energy. The use of a nuclear reactor as a heat source for powering a submarine, which had already been envisioned, was realized by designers and engineers, and then built. The submarine was given a nuclear reactor, the primary useful product of which is heat, and the heat was used to generate steam. No air is required in that process. Almost all of the new military submarines have a nuclear reactor, and it is used as a heat source. But they have "conventional" steam plants with steam driven turbines that power up the propeller (called a screw) and steam turbine generators that make electricity.