Several things spring to mind:

1. A brand of very high end audiophile speakers made by B&W. Nautilus speakers create exceptional sound by eliminating echoes from the back of the box by using a speaker shape reminiscent of a nautilus shell.

2. The next generation file manager for GNOME (v2.0).

3. The animal that the previous two were named after, a cephalopod of the phylum Mollusca, that as a species, has survived relatively unchanged for millions of years in the oceans, much like the coelacanth.

The amazing thing about this creature is the design of its shell. As the nautilus grows, it creates additional septa in its shell, creating new chambers within it. These chambers are linked by a tube through which the nautilus controls the amount of water and gas there are in each chamber.

With its watertight chambers providing adjustable bouyancy, the nautilus uses a funnel it has for jet propulsion by squirting out water in the direction opposite to whatever direction it wishes to go.

A nautilus can ascend from 2000 ft below sea level to sea level without any problems arising from the difference in pressure.

• What is Nautilus?

  Nautilus is an open source file manager and graphical shell being developed by Eazel, Inc. and others. It is part of the GNOME project, and its source code can be found in the GNOME CVS repository. Nautilus is still in the early stages of development. It will become an integral part of the GNOME desktop environment when it is finished.

• Is Nautilus a web browser?

  As a shell, Nautilus has viewers for many different types of content. For HTML, there's a viewer that uses Embedded Mozilla. this is what people think of when they say, "It's a web browser too". You can also make alternate HTML viewer components and the extensibility of Nautilus means they'll show up in the shell. There's even an HTML component based on GtkHTML in the Nautilus sources, but the Mozilla-based one is working better.

  Nautilus can be downloaded from http://nautilus.eazel.org

In addition, the world's first operational nuclear submarine was named Nautilus in homage to Verne's prescience. It was a U.S. Navy ship, and set many 'firsts,' including the first submerged global circumnavigation^*, the first submarine trip to the North Pole, etc. Today the Nautilus is a museum and can be visited at the submarine base at New London, CT USA.

*: DerekL has informed me that I'm wrong, and the USS Triton was the first nuc to circumnavigate the world while submerged. Thanks!

Nautilus is, as told above, the newer graphical file manager for GNOME desktop environment, meant to replace the old, crappy gmc. It was developed by company called Eazel until they closed down; the development is still active, though.

One of the designers of the system is Andy Hertzfeld, an important member of the original Apple Macintosh team back in 1981. The Mac connection doesn't end here - the GNOME 2 folder themes and file emblems were drawn by famed icon graphician Susan Kare.

Nautilus is a very cool file manager, even for a die-hard CLI user like me. Here are some of the interesting features:

• Bookmarks. I can't possibly say how much I love to be able to bookmark a directory, where the heck it happens to be.
• FTP and all GNOME virtual filesystem things actually work. This makes it one of the coolest-looking FTP programs out there =)
• Automatical thumbnail creation - and text files have a couple of first lines visible in the icon. Makes finding of relevant files easy.
• Previewing of music files. Keep mouse pointer over a MP3 or Ogg and it starts playing it, ending when you move the pointer off the icon.
• Resizable icons.
• Emblems. You can give different files and directories an "emblem" - that is, a graphical marker that signifies something. (Heart for "Favorite", Sunglasses for "Cool", and so on...) This helps you to find the right file or folder from among the zillions. (Search function also finds by emblems.)
• All metadata and other data is saved as XML...
• Need to do something tricky to your files? Just write a script, drop it to ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ and it can be accessed from the script menu!

Microsoftites probably like the following features:

• Capable of using Mozilla/Gecko to render web pages. Yeah, you can type URLs to it and it will open stuff just fine. (This, assumed you've installed the Gecko component, otherwise you get raw HTML...)
• Yeah, it has a "desktop" if you want it. And trash cans. And all the stuff. No need to use that confusing "command line". And you can fill your desktop with your file icons. =)
• It's almost as "pretty" as Windows XP Luna interface. Almost.

Some annoyances:

• Takes a few seconds to start. (And this is a PIII-600 with 256 megs of memory. Nautilus is not for the weak or people of low processor speed. =) The performance is a bit better in Nautilus 2, though.
• Creating and editing app-launching icons is a bit hard. (needs command line stuff and editing...)
• Does not automagically mount filesystems when they're referenced.
• Can't drag link from Mozilla to Nautilus to download it. This could make downloading things easier...
• Does not follow directory symlinks to the linked place. (If I have ~/foo symlinked to /mnt/bar, going to ~/foo should automagically send me to /mnt/bar, but Nautilus says I'm in ~/foo. This will make Newbies feel right at home, but for someone who understands the symlink principle, it's not convinient - and the directory metadata may, in some circumstances, apply to one directory but not the other!) I need to make "Nautilus links" to get there.

The modern nautilus's smooth, brown-striped shell houses a small squishy beast with 90 sheathed tentacles. Because the shell's chambers follow the golden ratio of 1:1.6180 in a logarithmic spiral, mathematicians love this creature. Renaissance goldsmiths loved it too, encrusting the shell with jewels and metals to serve as a lavish goblet. Similar shells were often displayed in churches to showcase their beauty as created by God and embellished by Man.

As cephalopods, nautiloids are related on the one hand to octopi and squids, and on the other hand to the extinct ammonites, which have coiled shells serrated like ram's horns.

The nautilus we know and love, N. pompilius, is a survivor of a dazzling prehistoric diversity of shelled cephalopods. Nautiloids have lived in the ocean for over 500 million years. They are older than the dinosaurs, older than the crocodiles, older than the horseshoe crabs. The fossil record shows a number of fantastic nautilus shells, including straight shells, cones, crescents, and large open coils totally unlike the nautilus we know today. Some shells had spikes, spines, or wings. One creature, Endoceras, was upwards of ten feet long and crawled along the ocean floor. Others, including the very first cephalopod Plectronoceras, moved by squirting water out of its chambers and through an open funnel.

The fleshy parts of the nautiloids (if we may extrapolate from living specimens) also include as many as ninety tentacles, two pairs of gills, simple lensless eyes that work like a pinhole camera, and a leathery hood to close the shell when the animal retreats inside it.

A blood-rich tube of tissue called the siphuncle can secrete gas into the shell's chambers to make the nautilus float, or release gas to allow it to sink. The nautilus adjusts its buoyancy this way, ascending from the depths of the Pacific every night to scavenge near the surface.

As the nautilus grows, it closes off chambers in the shell behind it. Each chamber is slightly larger than the previous one—in N. pompilius they are larger by a factor of (1 + sqrt(5))/2 , which corresponds neatly to the golden ratio. Rene Descartes wrote a treatise on the geometry of N. pompilius, proving the congruence of the segments and finding that the logarithmic growth of the shell represents a fibonacci spiral.

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Chambered Nautilus"

Nautilus Pompilus is a Russian band. Their genre would be classified as "progressive rock". They had many albums, some dealing with politics, some dealing with heartbreak, some dealing with life. An interesting thing about this band is that they switched vocalists (and even their style of music) several times.

Generally, they were most popular during the mid 80s and early 90s, although they are still around. In my opinion, their best album is definitely Knyaz Teshini. It has some superb songs, such as Ckovanie Odnoi Tsepyo, which is a symbolic song about communism, beautifully written, with a hint of satire and excellent guitar and synthesizer parts. Knyaz Teshini itself is also an excellent song, with a nice beat and a good synth part.

I would strongly recommend getting this album if you can understand Russian. If not, then you won't appreciate it that much, obviously because you will fail to understand the lyrical content, which is a key part. If you are willing to learn Russian, then listening to Russian bands (including Nautilus) would obviously help. Knowing Russian isn't a requirement however. Most Americans that I know who have listened to this album enjoyed most of the songs on it. It just requires a diverse musical taste.

The first vessel to swim under the North Pole.

When naming a submarine, Nautilus is one of the first words that comes to mind. It's proven. There's a long and distinguished tradition of naming vessels Nautilus.

The animal — the chambered nautilus of the sea — is a slowmoving, homely little creature. But it's got a nice name. The term itself is derived from the Greek word for sailor.

Among the many military vessels named Nautilus are a seventeen-gun schooner that fought pirates for the US Navy before the War of 1812, an escort motorboat that patroled the waters off New York City at the end of World War I, and a diesel-powered submarine that sank three vessels at the Battle of Midway.

That's right, diesel-powered, like a truck. Or a Volvo.

Every internal combustion engine requires a mixture of air and fuel. The mixture allows the ignition which powers the engine. In cars and boats, that's easy enough: include an air-intake system with valves and controls to inject the cylinder chambers with the right proportions to combust with a spark. Liquid gasoline does not burn and under most circumstances fire cannot survive without oxygen. Vaporized fuel and air with a spark provided by a battery.

In a submarine, air is a problem.

Diesel Submarines have to carry batteries to power the ship while submerged, which places a severe limit on the time it can stay underwater. The batteries must also be recharged frequently, a task that can only be accomplished while surfaced. This extended period of exposure makes the submarine a vulnerable target, which is why recharging was performed at night whenever possible.

Under way on nuclear power

Captain Hyman Rickover was already a veteran of the Bureau of Ships when he devised nuclear propulsion for watercraft. The idea came to him while he was on assignment in the Atomic Energy Commission's reactor complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His plans for the Nautilus came shortly thereafter.

Nuclear propulsion is much simpler than it sounds.

Actually it's not, unless you know the intricacies of nuclear fission. Rearrange an atom's tiny parts in unnatural ways, the atoms produce energy — lots of it. Hiroshima was a victim of atomic rearrangement. Atoms are profound things.

But it really is simple. Take a steam engine. Replace the tons of coal with a pound of Uranium. Literally a pound. Uranium is dense; a pound of it takes up about as much space as a golfball. Fission produces heat energy which powers the engines. There's your nuclear propulsion. No air tubes to the surface, no chambers of coal or tanks of diesel. If the crew did not need food they could stay underwater almost indefinitely.

Some specs:

Displacement: 3533 tons surfaced, 4092 tons submerged
Length: 323.8 feet
Beam: 27.8 feet
Draft: 22 feet
Speed: 22 knots surfaced, 25 knots submerged
Test depth: 700 feet
Armament: Six 21-inch torpedo tubes
Crew: 13 officers, 92 enlisted

The Nautilus broke every endurance and speed record in the world. When she was decommissioned she'd gone on 2500 dives and logged over 500,000 nautical miles. Her history is a long one. But her crowning achievement was her swim under the pole.

She was laid down June 14 1952 in Groton, Connecticut, authorized by Congress some three years earlier with the hull code SSN-571. She wouldn't be commissioned or see open waters for two more years. She was lowered into the Thames River on January 21 1954 when first lady Mamie Eisenhower broke a bottle of champagne across her hull.

By now, engineer Hyman was out of the picture. Nautilus was under the eye of Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson of the US Navy. The vessel spent yet another year docked for further construction and testing. She submerged for the first time in January 1955, signaling the historic message "Underway on Nuclear Power."

Say that today. See what happens.

Five months later she shattered the speed record, traveling 1300 nautical miles south in less than ninety hours. Once upon a time you moved your submarines with leg power, like a bicycle.

Nautilus spent the next two years rendering anti-submarine technology obsolete. She could stay submerged for incredible lengths of time and move out of dangerous areas with record speed.

Early in her career SSN-571 matched the Nautilus of Verne's imagination inch for inch, logging 60,000 nautical miles. Instead of two million gallons of diesel she burned off a pound of Uranium. She was barely a tenth of the way done.

90° N

Draw a line from any point on the equator to the center of the earth; go from the center of the earth to the North Pole. Right angle.

The first time she swam under the polar pack ice, Nautilus did not pass the North Pole. After docking in New London in July 1957 she cut some 1300 miles under the glaciers, now under the command of Commander William R. Anderson. Inconvenience struck when Anderson attempted to surface into a sheet of ice, tearing up two periscopes. After she emerged from the ice, Nautilus proceeded to the European coasts for various defense inspections — one must make the most of a swim beneath the Arctic — returning to New London at the end of October.

Operation Sunshine followed in April 1958: the swim under the Pole. She made her way up the west coast of the US, stopping at San Francisco and Seattle, finally girding herself for the second long journey north.

In mid-June she entered the Chukchi Sea, encoutering deep and impenetrable ice drifts. She made her way to Pearl Harbor to await better ice conditions.

It was a short wait: about a month later she was on her way to Pole again. She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley August 1. Two days later, around midnight, she crossed the top of the earth. Stoically, she continued on, surfacing northeast of Greenland after nearly four days and two thousand miles underwater.

She continued to Portland, England, receiving the first Presidential Unit Citation ever issued during peace time from US Ambassador J.H. Whitney.

Nautilus was far from finished when she crossed the North Pole. She would not be decommissioned for over twenty years. Verne would have shat had he learned that a real craft lived to swim half a million miles.

The Museum

Today, Nautilus is a museum.

I don't mean that there's a museum built around Nautilus — the vessel itself is now a museum.

Two years after she was decommissioned in 1980, she was designated a National Historic Landmark. After some touring and extensive conversion work at Mare Island Naval Shipyard, she was towed back to Groton, Connecticut in July 1985.

Today she rests near the docks at New London and attracts some quarter-million visitors annually.

Transitional Man adds that the bulk of today's subs are still diesel-powered.

IWhoSawTheFace adds that diesel subs are better-suited for stealth operations because they are much quieter.

US Naval Institute
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/history/subsbeforenuc/revolution/father.html
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/history/subsbeforenuc/revolution/nautilus.html
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/history/subsbeforenuc/revolution/snorkel.html

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautilus_(submarine)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571)

Houghton Mifflin
http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/ships/html/sh_063600_ussnautilus2.htm

Navysite
http://www.navysite.de/ssn/ssn571.htm

Sub Guru
http://www.subguru.com/nautilus571.htm

US Navy Submarine Force Museum
http://www.ussnautilus.org/history.html

On submarines & submersibles:

• Trieste
• David
• Nautilus

Nau"ti*lus (?), n.; pl. E. Nautiluses (#), L. Nautili (#). [L., fr. gr. a seaman, sailor, a kind of shellfish which was supposed to be furnished with a membrane which served as a sail; fr. ship. See Nave of a church.]

1. Zool.

The only existing genus of tetrabranchiate cephalopods. About four species are found living in the tropical Pacific, but many other species are found fossil. The shell is spiral, symmetrical, and chambered, or divided into several cavities by simple curved partitions, which are traversed and connected together by a continuous and nearly central tube or siphuncle. See Tetrabranchiata.

The head of the animal bears numerous simple tapered arms, or tentacles, arranged in groups, but not furnished with suckers. The siphon, unlike, that of ordinary cephalopods, is not a closed tube, and is not used as a locomotive organ, but merely serves to conduct water to and from the gill cavity, which contains two pairs of gills. The animal occupies only the outer chamber of the shell; the others are filled with gas. It creeps over the bottom of the sea, not coming to the surface to swim or sail, as was formerly imagined.

2.

The argonaut; -- also called paper nautilus. See Argonauta, and Paper nautilus, under Paper.

3.

A variety of diving bell, the lateral as well as vertical motions of which are controlled, by the occupants.

© Webster 1913.