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It’s January 1778—two years into the American War of Independence. Things are bleak. The Continental Army, a ragtag band of colonialists, is encamped at Valley Forge—freezing, hungry, and sick. Meanwhile, their fearless leader, George Washington, is facing a political coup from inside the Continental Congress. And, across the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin is trying to convince France that supporting the American experiment isn’t just throwing good money after bad.
If it has any hope of keeping its revolutionary army together, America needs a win—and quick. Enter David Bushnell and the Battle of the Floating Kegs.
Rolling down the river
On January 6, 1778, Bushnell released dozens of floating mines, kegs filled with gunpowder and equipped with a new fuze designed to ignite on contact, down the Delaware River. The goal was to use the tides to guide the kegs to the British navy anchored in the Philadelphia harbor, where they would explode upon contact with the hulls.
The kegs were duds. They arrived slowly and in full daylight, ineffective against the British ships that had installed logs around them to protect against ice. However, despite their clumsy entrance, the kegs caused widespread panic and for a full day the impressive Royal Navy expended its guns on anything floating in the harbor. It was far from a resounding success for the Americans, but it made the great British navy look a bit ridiculous, which was perhaps enough of a win to buoy American supporters. Francis Hopkinson captured the moment in a song called “Battle of the Kegs,” published in local newspapers, in which he mocked the British response:
Such feats did they perform that day,
Against those wicked kegs, sir,
That years to come, if they get home,
They’ll make their boasts and brags, sir.
The Battle of the Kegs became a rallying cry for the revolutionaries, a story of American ingenuity in the face of British oppression. But perhaps more important for the identity of this new American military, it was the opening salvo of America’s relationship with technology and military innovation.
Who was the founding father who catalyzed the American military’s quest for technological advantage?
Born in Saybrook, Connecticut, to a farming family, David Bushnell was the eldest of five children. When his father died at twenty-six, he inherited his family farm and could have spent his life tilling the rocky soil of Southern New England. But the intellectually curious David wasn’t satisfied with the farming life, and at thirty-one, he sold his part of the farm to his brother and entered Yale. At Yale, Bushnell threw himself into his studies, exploring mathematics, natural sciences, and religion. He was particularly interested in military technology and began to experiment with naval mines as part of his studies.
When the revolution broke out in 1775, Bushnell turned his academic interests into inventions for the American military, experimenting with low-cost weapons designed to harass the far more capable British navy. His Turtle was the first submarine, a hollowed-out diving bell piloted by a human operator, designed to deploy mines while submerged. The Turtle was never successfully able to damage a British vessel, but the ingenuity of invention impressed onlookers like George Washington, who in a postwar letter to Thomas Jefferson described Bushnell as “a man of great Mechanical powers—fertile of invention—and a master in execution” who had embarked on “an effort of genius.”
Bushnell was intrigued by mines, and spent the rest of the war experimenting with them to combat the British vessels blockading American ports and keeping vital supplies from both the American military and colonial citizens. In 1776, he sent tethered mines (firepower kegs with a crude contact fuze attached by rope to a small American vessel) toward a British frigate that was harassing American ports near New London, Connecticut. A nearby British schooner noticed the line and reeled it onto the vessel to inspect the unknown object. At that point, the mine exploded, sinking the schooner and killing three sailors. It wasn’t Bushnell’s intended target (that was the British frigate Cerberus) but it left an impression on the Royal Navy. The captain of the British frigate wrote back to England, “[T]he ingenuity of these people is singular in their secret modes of mischief.”
A salute to David Bushnell
After the war, Bushnell settled into relative obscurity, more than likely teaching at a local college. But his impact on the American military was far more profound than the effectiveness of his inventions. Bushnell demonstrated how technology could create military advantage and how new weapons might shift the balance of power and create a groundswell of support and hope in the face of overwhelming odds.
Today, the American military may have more in common with the Royal Navy of the Revolutionary War than with the scrappy colonialists, but the quest for technological advantage remains the same. The American military was built on the foundations of technological innovation, and we can thank people like David Bushnell for demonstrating how a vibrant intellectual environment, leadership willing to take risks, and plucky inventors can help create a military able to safeguard a nation for two and a half centuries.
Jacquelyn Schneider is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is the author, with Julia Macdonald, of The Hand Behind Unmanned: Origins of the US Autonomous Military Arsenal (Oxford University Press, 2025).