Nautilus: The Story of Man Under the Sea

Nautilus tells the dramatic story of the conquest of inner space from the eccentric pioneers of the late nineteenth century to the supercraft of the modern world, using the words of the men who invented and worked on the machines. The unsung heroes of two world wars tell what life was really like under the waves - the fear and frustration, the boredom and bravery - whether manoeuvring through mines in the Mediterranean, chasing convoys in the Atlantic, or strapped into a human underwater torpedo, about to face certain death. The wonder of underwater exploration is described by those who made the journeys - breaking new barriers of the deep in a bathyscope or discovering the wreck of the Titanic.
The book tells too of the dramatic race between the two superpowers to build the most powerful nuclear submarine fleet; Russian scientists and naval officers describe for the first time how they set about the task of constructing a nuclear submarine, starting from scratch and with little knowledge of advances in nuclear physics in the rest of the world.