In 1824, Kazimir Chernovsky, the son of a poor landowner from near Minsk, entered the Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. The student was no longer young, at that time he was 33 years old, fascinated by revolutionary ideas, which was not uncommon for that time even among the nobility. It is not surprising that Chernovsky did not graduate from the academy, and in 1829 ended up in the cell of the Shlisselburg Fortress for free-thinking.
Soon an unusual letter fell on the table to Emperor Nicholas the First, in which the author reported that he had been working on the project of an underwater vessel for several years. Chernovsky, the author of this letter, assured the autocrat that, given a sufficient amount of material and workers, he was ready in 40 days to make a submarine, with which it would be possible to descend to the seabed to collect pearls and plants.
In addition, the author separately emphasized the indispensability of the "secret" boat in military affairs: it can sneak up on enemy ships and destroy them, remaining unnoticed. There was nothing like this in the navies of other countries.
The emperor became interested in the project, and demanded from the prisoner to provide a detailed plan for the construction of this boat. Three weeks later, the manuscript "Description of Submarine Vessels" lay on his desk. What was contained in this work?
Chernovsky proposed to make a cylindrical boat hull of iron, covering it from the inside with leather in order to keep warm inside. This vessel moved with the help of seven pairs of oars with leather cuffs, preventing water from entering the hull. The submersion of the boat and the ascent to the surface were provided by 28 tanks. When immersed, they were filled with water, and when they surfaced, the water was squeezed out using special levers. Chernovsky also developed a mine, which was installed on the bottom of an enemy ship.
The project was approved by the emperor, who handed it over to Pavel Bazin, general of the Corps of Railways, a higher technical educational institution in Russia. It was he who was instructed to continue work on the creation of the submarine. And then something strange happened - having received all the drawings in his hands, Bazin suddenly declared this invention useless, and soon left for his homeland - in France. He probably took all the documents with him.
And Chernovsky himself, probably desperate to be released, attempted suicide, but the guards managed to save him. He was amnestied and sent into exile in Arkhangelsk, where he even managed to get the position of a minor official in the provincial administration.
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But, as you can see, Chernovsky never got rid of freethinking, he planned to seize a military ship and go on it to Italy, to help local revolutionaries. Chernovsky was again arrested and sent to the city of Sarapul, Vyatka province, where he spent the last years of his life.
The inventor, whose plans never materialized, died in Sarapul in 1847 at the age of 56. By the way, his idea was far from the first. Back in 1718, a certain Efim Nikonov turned to Peter the Great with a project to build a "hidden ship".