USS Albacore

Sitting in a landscaped park just off the highway in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, resting in a specially dug berth that holds it like a cradle, is a submarine that quietly changed the shape of every warship that followed it. This is the USS Albacore, and the teardrop curve of its hull is one of the most consequential designs in the history of naval engineering.

The Albacore was laid down on March fifteenth, nineteen fifty-two at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, just across the river. It was launched in August of nineteen fifty-three, not as a combat vessel but as a pure research submarine, a floating laboratory built to answer one question: what shape moves through water most efficiently?

The answer came from wind tunnels, not the sea. Engineers at the David Taylor Model Basin in Maryland and at Langley Air Force Base tested a fat teardrop with a circular cross-section rather than the long cigar shape that submarines had used since the Civil War era. Everything about the conventional submarine design had been optimized for surface travel. The Albacore was optimized entirely for moving underwater, where submarines actually fight.

The results were dramatic. Where previous submarines could barely manage ten knots submerged, the Albacore eventually hit thirty-three knots underwater, faster than the nuclear submarines of its day, using only conventional diesel-electric engines. It was the fastest submarine in the world.

American attack submarines since the Albacore, beginning with the nuclear-powered Skipjack class of the nineteen sixties, have followed the teardrop hull the Albacore pioneered. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers has designated it a national historic engineering landmark.

You can tour its interior today at Albacore Park. It is worth the stop.