Cornelis Drebbel

Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel (1572 to 1633) was a Dutch engineer and inventor who built the first operational submarine in 1620 and contributed to the development of measurement and control systems, optics and chemistry. Born in Alkmaar into an Anabaptist family, he attended the Latin school there and the Academy in Haarlem, where his teachers included Hendrik Goltzius, and became a skilled copperplate engraver with an interest in alchemy. He worked as a painter, engraver and cartographer and in 1598 obtained a patent for a water supply system and a sort of perpetual clockwork. In Middelburg, a spectacle making center, he may have learned lens grinding, and he later constructed a magic lantern and a camera obscura. Around 1604 he moved to England, probably at the invitation of James I, was accommodated at Eltham Palace and attached to the court of Prince Henry, and astonished the court with a perpetual motion machine, automatic and hydraulic organs and optical instruments.