Creuzbaur, Robert Walter
Robert Walter Creuzbaur (April 18, 1823 - October 23, 1911) was a German-American Texas-based engineer, inventor, surveyor, and draftsman. Creuzbaur was born in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. His early education remains opaque, but he emigrated to the Republic of Texas around 1840. Creuzbaur is generally associated with the Texas General Land Office and the seminal Texas maps of Jacob Raphael De Cordova (1808 - 1868). He also produced an important early map of Austin (1853), a map of the exploring expedition of John S. Ford, and Creuzbaur's Guide to California and the Pacific Ocean (1849). During the American Civil War (1861 - 1865), he supported the Confederate cause, for which he invented a new type of iron-plated gunboat, the Sea King, intended to fight the Union blockade. In addition to iron plating, the boat boasted what he called 'pneumatic static ship propulsion' and a 'submarine cannon' (The patent office records this as a torpedo). The Confederacy could not gather enough funding to construct the new ship. After the Civil War, he relocated to Brooklyn, New York. There, he worked as a railroad engineer and continued to promote and refine his ship designs, about which he wrote a letter to Theodore Roosevelt in 1811. Creuzbaur died in Brooklyn in 1911.
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