High-School Teen Builds One-Man Submarine for $2,000

Via: CNN:

The submarine’s body may be constructed from drainage pipes and the hatch from a recycled skylight, but according to its 18-year-old inventor, this single-person U-boat can plunge to a depth of 30 feet and has already completed three successful dives.
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.
“He has been building things since he was two years old,” says his mother, Jess Beckerman. “If we tried to help him we would just get in the way and mess things up.”
The submarine has ballast tanks to maintain its depth and equilibrium; air vents that bring oxygen down from the surface; a functioning PA and a range of emergency systems including back-up batteries, a siren, strobe lights, a breathing apparatus and a pump to fight leaks. 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.