Brutus de Villeroi

In 1845, Villeroi was granted a knighthood by the assumed prince Alexandre-André de Gonzaga-Mantova, a swindler who sold fake decorations.

In the same year, he joined the executive board of a railway company and filed a new patent for a technology meant to help trains to climb mountains.

[5] In 1863, after a dispute with his American associates, Villeroi proposed his submarine design to the government of Napoleon III of France, but it was rejected as impractical and poorly researched.

She was also equipped with hatches with leather seals in order to make possible some manipulations outside the hull, a small ballast system with a lever and piston, and a 50 lb anchor.

In 1842, de Villeroi was reputedly a professor for drawing and mathematics at the Saint-Donatien Junior Seminary in Nantes, where Jules Verne was also a student, leading to speculation he may have inspired Verne's conceptual design for the Nautilus in the 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas; however, no evidence for Villeroi's employment at Saint-Donatien has yet been found, and no direct link between the two men has ever been established.

His first American submarine was built for salvage purposes, and it gained fame when it was seized on May 16, 1861, by the suspicious Philadelphia police as it sailed up the Delaware River.

Dupont, Commanding Officer of Naval Station Philadelphia, describing the performance of the submarine and its interest to the Navy:[6] In justice to Mr. De Villeroi we should state that the boat in question was constructed for salvage purposes and not for war uses, (for the latter, he proposes if his services are accepted by the Government to construct another on a larger scale whose greater capacity would afford additional facilities for the maneuvers of the men while it would also be provided with greatly increased power of propulsion) so that in the experiment we have considered the machine employed simple as a model to demonstrate the principles to be established by the inventor.De Villeroi's next ship, the USS Alligator, would be largely inspired from this design.

De Villeroi supervised the first phases of the construction in Philadelphia, but was progressively evicted from the project as he opposed some modifications to his design.