William Bourne

William Bourne, often called William Bourne of Gravesend, lived from about 1535 to 1582 and was an English mathematician, innkeeper and former Royal Navy gunner who presented the first design for a navigable submarine and wrote important navigational manuals. In 1574 he produced a popular version of Martín Cortés de Albacar's Arte de Navegar, entitled A Regiment for the Sea, criticising parts of the original and giving the seaman a more practical manual that described observing the sun and stars with a cross-staff and plotting coastal features from the ship by taking bearings with triangulation. A jurat of Gravesend named in its charters of 1562 and 1568, he worked as an innkeeper there, and his book Inventions or Devises of 1578 detailed one of the first recorded plans for an underwater navigation vehicle, an enclosed craft that could submerge by decreasing its overall volume.