Eighteen-Year-Old Builds Submarine

Justin Beckerman, an 18-year-old high school student from New Jersey, built and wired a fully-functional, one-man submarine. When he was younger, Beckerman began by making things out of balloons and string, but as the years went by his inventions grew in scale and complexity.

At the age of 12, instead of complaining about having to help with the housework, he developed a remote-controlled car that could mop and vacuum. The materials he uses in his creations are often technological cast-offs from family and friends, or garbage scavenged from electronics recycling facilities.

Justin and a few classmates created robots while attending the West Morris High School robotics club. He even made his own blender. Beckerman salvages every old or broken device he can find, along with donations from friends and neighbors, and occasional trips to electronics recycling facilities with his dad.

He’s built remote-controlled vacuums, miniature-model jet engines, and headsets that can play DVDs. The submarine is by far the teen’s biggest project to date.

Aside from looking up the underwater pressure at his target depth of 30 feet, Beckerman says he did not do much research online. He set up a workstation in his family’s basement, and even custom-built a cart to hold the sub.

His many tools included a circular saw, a Sawzall, a voltmeter, and a soldering iron. The submarine’s circuitry requires 2,000 feet of wire, to power lights, sensors on the ballast tanks, the compressor, fan, motor, pump, and many other pieces of equipment, Beckerman said.

Beckerman picked up his electronics skills by wiring a tree fort with remote-control outlets and lighting. The amount of wire needed for this project kept him busy for two days just feeding wires through the hull of the sub. His previous venture, a sub made out of plastic containers and duct tape, didn’t hold pressure and collapsed.

The pressure hull of the sub is made from a corrugated drainage pipe. This isn’t a bad idea as the tube is engineered to be buried in the ground and carry a load of earth on top of it. It’s designed to go down just 30 feet, which explains the lack of half-dome caps on either end; the pressure just isn’t that great at that depth.

The buoy floating to his left is his tether to the surface. Fresh air is pumped from here into the sub. He’s also included safety features like a 20-minute air tank in case he gets into a bind, and a quick opening top hatch. That hatch is a hemisphere of clear acrylic which lets him view what’s around him.

The Nautilus took high school inventor Justin Beckerman just six months and $2,000 to put together – all while keeping on top of his homework. The vessel can remain submerged for up to two hours and travels beneath the waves at one and a half miles per hour.

Beckerman says he is going to use it to “explore the lake, see fish and hopefully find a bit of history, like the cannons from my neighbors’ historic house” that, he says, were dumped in the lake during renovations in the 1960s. The Nautilus is not Beckerman’s first submarine. In fact, it is his fourth. The previous iteration could dive to five feet but had a less sturdy frame constructed from plastic containers and duct tape. It was propelled by two motor scooter engines, connected to metal blades and two 12v batteries.

His inventions, especially the sub, got him into many magazines and interviews, Beckerman has also used his talent to create award-winning art sculptures out of the fluorescent glass from computer screens.