The World's First Submarine was Launched in the Passaic River? How an Irish School Teacher from New Jersey Changed the World in 1878

 May 22, 1878 was a warm spring day in New Jersey.  

On that day Irish born American engineer John Philip Holland, a bespectacled school teacher by trade then residing in Paterson, New Jersey, climbed aboard a strange looking craft early in the morning and descended below the surface of the Passaic River.  Before a startled crowd of helpers and onlookers, wearing a three piece suit and bowler hat, he risked his life in an angular sort of tube made of riveted cast iron, that weighed over two tons and was fourteen feet long.  He had named his invention after himself--the Holland Boat-- it was history’s first truly modern, self-propelled, submarine.

The Passaic River flows for approximately eighty miles through most of northern New Jersey.  The Passaic River’s source is a picturesque pond called Dubourg located in the affluent suburb of Mendham, while the mouth of the River empties out into the Atlantic Ocean at Newark Bay one of the Garden State’s most urban areas and one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes for the import and export of raw material and consumer goods.

Map of the Passaic River

And it was on that day, May 22, 1878, just outside the burgeoning industrial center of Paterson, New Jersey, on the banks of the Passaic River that one of history’s most incongruous events took place when an Irish-American immigrant, inventor, school teacher and would-be revolutionary named John Philip Holland descended, at the risk of his own life in a craft that he designed and helped build, with funding from a group that some Victorians called Irish terrorists.  

The cast iron craft that went beneath the water of the Passaic River that day weighed nearly two and a half tons and was propelled by a four horsepower gasoline engine.  The Holland Boat # 1 sailed for almost ten minutes beneath the water in the shadows of Paterson, New Jersey’s great falls in 1878.  After almost ten minutes of submerged propulsion Holland and his newly invented “submarine” were forced to surface after perilous engine troubles.

In only ten minutes on that fateful day in May of 1878, after a lifetime of visionary dreaming and years and years of hard work, Irish-American school teacher John P. Holland had become not only famous overnight in his home state of New Jersey, but he had also made manifest in a single stroke of inventive genius and daring, all of  Ireland’s hopes and dreams of independence from the yoke of British rule.  

As proof of Holland’s everlasting fame in New Jersey a plaque was erected at the site of his descent over forty years later, and eighteen years after his death.  It reads:

“John P. Holland’s first submarine was launched in 1878, a one man craft with engine which after a series of trials was sunk in the Passaic River at this spot where she lay buried until raised in 1927 by a group of Paterson youths who presented her to the City of Paterson--October 1, 1927.  

Clearly, this is one of the rare instances where a group of “youths” actually did something good for history and for their city!  But all kidding aside, the invention and development of John Philip Holland’s Boat, history’s first modern submarine, was no laughing matter.

Plaque dedicated to Holland

Born in County Clare Ireland in 1841, despite spending the majority of his adult life living and working in New Jersey, John Philip Holland always considered himself first and foremost an Irishman, and not only that, he considered himself to be an Irish freedom fighter.

In the late 1840’s as a young boy during Ireland’s Great Potato Famine Holland suffered from such dire malnutrition that it permanently damaged his eyesight and left him nearly blind.  Although, he had dreamed of becoming a sailor and a fisherman like his father, his poor eyesight prevented him from ever going to sea himself as a sailor--so from about the age of twelve onward Holland developed a fascination with ship design and began to dream of creating a submersible boat that would allow his homeland of Ireland to defeat the vaunted Royal British Navy in battle.

As a teenager Holland immigrated with his family to the United States in search of a better life, but he retained his dreams of designing a submarine and of gaining Ireland’s independence.  Beginning in 1872 and again in 1875, Holland attempted to pitch his idea for a self-propelled submarine to the United States Navy, but each time he was rebuffed by the U.S. government.  To add insult to injury, just after he first arrived in the United States, while residing in the city of Boston, Holland slipped and fell on an icy patch of pavement during a snowstorm and broke his leg in several places, which forever after, caused him to walk with a pronounced limp.  

           It was while spending weeks in the hospital recovering from his leg injuries that Holland perfected his idea and design for what would become Holland Boat # 1.  But, no matter how hard and vociferously he pushed his idea and design for history’s first submarine to the United States government it seems as if the United States government, at that time, thought John Philip Holland was nothing more than a half-blind, now limping crackpot with a half baked idea straight out of a Jules Verne Sci-fi novel.

         If Holland’s Boat was ever going to get off the ground and go beneath the water, so to speak, he needed to find a backer who would pay to finance his idea.

Eventually, only a few years after first pitching his design to the U.S. Navy  using his family back in Ireland funding for development on Holland’s submersible boat would come from a most unlikely, and somewhat illicit, source--the Fenians.

During the 19th century the term “Fenian” was used as a sort of derogatory catch-all to describe anyone who was in favor of Irish Home Rule, but very often it was used to describe a large but loosely organized pro-Irish independence organization called the Irish Brotherhood.  A largely political organization, with a paramilitary wing, the Irish Brotherhood was dedicated to the establishment of a free and independent Irish Republic through political means, as well as violence if necessary and it was at its most powerful during the last decades of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century.

The dream of the Irish Brotherhood was to cause a simultaneous uprising in both Ireland and Canada that would pressure Great Britain both politically and militarily to grant their homeland its independence.  Of course, as history tells us, such a scheme never materialized and the Irish Brotherhood itself was largely eradicated after it led the failed Easter Uprising of 1916 in Dublin.  

Irish Brotherhood Poster in America ca. 1870

However, during the 1870’s the Irish Brotherhood sent dozens of secret agents to North America in order to make contact with their Irish countrymen in the United States and attempt to enlist their support in a potential rebellion against British rule.  It was at this time that John Philip Holland most likely would have made contact with Fenian agents who, due to Holland’s influential maritime connections back in Ireland, agreed to finance development on his submersible Holland Boat.

In fact beginning in May of 1878--after a series of tests on the Passaic River in New Jersey, all of which were either prematurely aborted or sank to the bottom--once John Philip Holland finally perfected his submarine in 1881 he promptly rechristened his craft the Fenian Ram.  He hoped that one day his submarine would be used to sink the unsuspecting ships of the British Royal Navy.

None of those dreams ever came to pass as the goal of Irish independence was delayed by the might of the Victorian Era British Empire and by the tumult at the turn of the 20th century.  Overall, support for the Fenian cause in the United States and Canada proved elusive and with an uptick in bombings and political assassinations on behalf of the cause of world anarchy many people began to view the Irish Brotherhood as a dangerous terrorist organization.

Holland, however, once he had perfected his design didn’t quit.  He built new and better prototypes of his submersible Holland Boat and the nearly blind, Irish Immigrant teacher who walked with a pronounced limp and spent most of his life in New Jersey, claimed his rightful place in history as the inventor of the modern submarine.

Ironically enough first the United States Navy and then none other than the British Royal Navy itself, who after seeing Holland’s craft in action, would order that production on Holland Boats begin and a submarine fleet be constructed for both navies.

John Philip Holland would pass away on August 12, 1914 less than two weeks after the start of the First World War.  At exactly the same time that John Philip Holland had been developing and perfecting his Holland Boats in New Jersey German engineers thousands of miles  away had been working on submarines of their own--the infamous U-Boats of World Wars One and Two.  The 2oth century would mark the age of conflict fought beneath the seas.

Today, John Philip Holland is interred at the Cemetery of the Holy Sepulchre in Totowa, New Jersey.  He is immortalized in both the United States and in Ireland with a John P. Holland Center that is dedicated to his life and research into ship development in County Clare, Ireland, and a charter school named in his honor in Woodland Park, New Jersey that commemorates his work as an educator.

Holland Boat #1 on display at Paterson Museum

The original Holland Boat # 1 which first plunged below the surface in May of 1878 and was raised from the depths of the Passaic River back in 1927 is now on display at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey.