"The first published prescription for a submarine came from the pen of William Bourne, an English innkeeper and scientific dilettante. Bourne first offered a lucid description of why a ship floats - by displacing its weight of water - and then described a mechanism by which:

It is possible to make a Ship or Boate that may goe under the water unto the bottome, and so to come up again at your pleasure. [If] Any magnitude of body that is in the water... having alwaies but one weight, may be made bigger or lesser, then it Shall swimme when you would, and sinke when you list..."