The Engraver Who Went Under the Thames

Alkmaar and Haarlem

Drebbel was born in Alkmaar and trained as an engraver under Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem. In 1595 he married Goltzius’s younger sister, Sophia. Two years later he engraved a large plan of his home town, and we hold it: the 1597 map of Alkmaar, signed “Cornelius Drebbel sculptor”.

By 1598 he had turned to machines. That year the States General of the Dutch Republic granted him a patent for an engine to raise fresh water “like a fountain … to a height of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty and more feet through pipes”, and for “a clock or time-pointer that one may use for fifty, sixty, yes a hundred or more years in a row, without winding”. In 1602 they gave “Cornelis Jacobsz Drebbel, burgher of Alkmaar” another, for making smoking chimneys draw.

The perpetual motion

The clock that never needed winding made his name. He took it to England around 1605, where James I and Prince Henry lodged him at Eltham. In 1612 the clergyman Thomas Tymme published the first picture of it, describing “a most strange and wittie inuention of another Archimedes … as it was presented to the Kings most royall hands, by Cornelius Drebble of Alchmar in Holland” (Tymme, A Dialogue Philosophicall, To the Reader). Tymme used it as an argument that the earth stands still. Thirty-six years later John Wilkins found that absurd.

What drove it? Drebbel’s answer, in a letter to King James printed with his treatise, is that he found the cause by watching fire:

Seeking with skillful inquiry that hidden cause which always forced water downward, I finally discovered it through the observation of the wonderful nature of fire. … I understood how the earth is carried in the middle of the air, how the water encircles the earth like a ring, and how all things seek the center, except for fire.

Others guessed at the mechanism. Beeckman heard in 1622 that it was two glass half-rings holding a liquid that went up and down with the tide. The Jesuit Gaspar Schott wrote in 1657 that Drebbel “is said to have enclosed two opposing and highly antipathetic liquids in a glass ring, which fought against each other in a perpetual struggle” (Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica, p. 377). The likeliest explanation today is that the liquid rose and fell with changes in air temperature and pressure: a thermometer and barometer made into a clock.

Prague, and prison

In 1610 Drebbel went to Prague to work for the Emperor Rudolf II, promising Prince Henry he would be back within six months. Instead Rudolf’s brother Matthias seized power and in 1611 imprisoned Rudolf’s council, “amongst others, Drebbel”. His ovens and instruments were destroyed. Matthias later freed him and paid for his journey home.

Many accounts add a second imprisonment in 1619–20, under Ferdinand II. We found no document for it, and Drebbel’s signature in the album of Joachim Morsius puts him in London in November 1619.

The book

Drebbel’s one treatise, on the elements, came out in Dutch in 1604 and in Latin at Hamburg in 1621, translated by Petrus Lauremberg; Morsius edited its companion treatise on the Fifth Essence. We hold the Latin in a Geneva printing of 1628, with an English translation, and the German translation printed at Leiden in 1608. Its voice is not what one expects from a court engineer. He claims nothing from the authorities:

… communico, quæ ipse à Naturâ hausi atque accepi.

I share those things which I myself have drawn and received from Nature.

For (I call God to witness) I have used here neither the writings of the ancients nor the help of any man…

And he describes the elements as something he can arrange by hand:

I can suspend earth in the middle of water, water in the middle of air, and air in the middle of fire within a closed glass vessel … And in this way, I make the high low, the low high, the light heavy, and the heavy light.

Athanasius Kircher took that glass “sphere of elements” seriously enough to argue about how it could be made (Kircher, Magnes, p. 309).

Under the Thames

Back in London, around 1620, Drebbel built the boat Beeckman heard about. Robert Boyle, forty years later, had the story from Drebbel’s own family:

…a Vessel to go under Water; of which, tryal was made in the Thames, with admired successe, the Vessel carrying twelve Rowers, besides Passengers; one of which is yet alive.

Boyle, New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall (1660) (Internet Archive).

How did the rowers breathe? Boyle’s informant, “an Ingenious Physitian that marry’d his daughter”, said Drebbel held that it was not the whole air but “a certain Quintessence (as Chymists speake) or spirituous part of it, that makes it fit for respiration”, and that he restored it from “a Chymicall liquor” carried in the boat. The French traveller Balthasar de Monconys heard much the same in London in 1663: Drebbel “knew how to extract a subtle spirit from the air” (Monconys, Journal des voyages, p. 33).

By 1648 John Wilkins could write in Mathematicall Magick that a submarine was possible:

…beyond all question, because it hath been already experimented here in England by Cornelius Dreble…

In Paris, Marin Mersenne had called it

Notum est nauiculam à Cornelio Drebellio in Anglia constructam, quæ sub aquis depressa natabat

well known that a small ship was constructed by Cornelius Drebbel in England, which swam while submerged under the waters

The young Huygens

In 1621 a young Dutch diplomat, Constantijn Huygens, met Drebbel in London. In appearance, he wrote, Drebbel was a Dutch farmer, but his learned talk recalled the sages of Samos and Sicily. Huygens came back that December and saw him constantly for a year: “We possessed Drebbel for a whole year, and he possessed me too.” He bought a camera obscura from him, showed it to the painters Jacques de Gheyn and Torrentius in The Hague, and wrote to his worried parents that Drebbel was no sorcerer.

His son Christiaan, born four years before Drebbel died, later credited him with the compound microscope:

Anno autem 1621 apud Drebelium nostratem conspecta fuisse Microscopia hujusmodi Londini in Britannia, ipsi qui adfuerant sæpe mihi narraverunt, ipsumque primum auctorem eorum tunc habitum.

As for the year 1621, those who were present have often told me that such microscopes were seen in London, England, at the home of our countryman, Drebelius, and that he was then considered the first inventor of them.

The microscopes travelled fast. In 1622 Drebbel sent Jacob Kuffler, brother of his future sons-in-law, to sell them abroad. Kuffler demonstrated one in Paris before Marie de’ Medici, and the collector Peiresc bought one. Peiresc’s instruments went on to Rome, where they would not work until Galileo got them going in 1624 and began making his own.

Home, and war

The Dutch had not forgotten him. On 5 January 1624 two members of the States General were asked to consult Prince Maurice on whether to invite “Mr Cornelis Drebbel … to come over from England, to speak with him”. He stayed in England. Under Charles I he worked for the Navy and the Duke of Buckingham, building fireships and “water-petards” for the expeditions to La Rochelle in 1627 and 1628, reportedly at £150 a month. The expeditions failed. Drebbel died in London in 1633.

The heirs

His inventions outlived him because his family kept them. Two of his daughters married the brothers Abraham and Johannes Sibertus Kuffler. Johannes Sibertus, a physician trained at Padua, ran a dye works in Leiden with a new tin-based scarlet, and carried the self-regulating oven into Samuel Hartlib’s circle in the 1630s. In 1662 Jonathan Goddard suggested to the new Royal Society “Drebbel’s method of governing a furnace by a thermometer of quicksilver”. Christopher Wren built a furnace “like Mr Kuffler’s”, and a grandson’s recipe book preserved the oven’s design.

One secret did not survive. Kuffler told Beeckman in 1634 that on his deathbed Drebbel said he could make perfect telescopes, with which his children could all become rich, but he died before he wrote it down.

What we could not confirm

• Ferdinand II. The 1619–20 tutoring and imprisonment have no document behind them.
• Francis Bacon. Often linked to Drebbel; we found no passage in which Bacon names him.
• Michael Maier, Simon Stevin, the Rosicrucians. No documented tie. Morsius is the only bridge to Rosicrucian circles.
• James I in the submarine. The story that the king rode in it is not attested.
• Jacob Kuffler was the brother of the two sons-in-law, not a son-in-law himself.