I remember the family trip to Chicago @ 76-77 maybe. (My mind is ...sometimes gone ;) Anyway it was during The King Tut display we also visited the U-505 submarine. Pretty cramped space. Very Cool.
My dad was part of a special Navy program after the war to convert an American sub with a snorkel so they could run the diesels under water, captured German tech. Called the GUPPY program. They had a lot of problems with it, and had some high level civilian support, he said Charles Kettering came out to the boat for consultations. Kettering worked for Delco, or really, he WAS Delco, having invented the ignition distributor and the electric starter some years prioe and was a pretty sharp guy.
Dad said one of the problems was the diesels - huge Fairbanks-Morse engines would draw lots of air when running at full tilt. A ball check valve on the snorkel kept sea water from being ingested into the intake when seas were rough, and this resulted instant very wide swings in air pressure. Said he’d wake up in his bunk with blood coming out of his ears. Nuclear propulsion made all of those experiments moot, anyhow.
I remember visiting Seawolf park in Galveston as a kid. I was about 7 or so. They had a small sub you could tour. I was amazed that sailors lived in that thing.
Late FReeper Rodney(mylife) was a submariner during the cold War. We would do the Texas Cowboy shoots and hung out a bit. He told me they even smoked cigarettes submerged. I was like “what? No way!”. But apparently they did. Wish he was still around.