USS Nautilus (SSN-571) Nuclear Landmark. Visitors may tour the forward two compartments, with guidance from an automated system. Despite similar alterations to exhibit the engineering spaces, tours aft of the control room are not permitted due to safety and security concerns. USS Nautilus (SSN-571) USS "Nautilus" (SSN-571) was the world's first operational nuclear-powered submarine and the first submarine to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole on 3 August 1958. Sharing names with Captain Nemo's fictional submarine in Jules Verne's classic 1870 science fiction novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", and named after another that served with distinction in World War
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea errors, sometimes dramatically changing the meaning of Verne's original intent (including uniformly mistranslating French "scaphandre" — properly "diving apparatus" — as "cork-jacket", following a long-obsolete meaning as "a type of lifejacket"). Some of these mistranslations have been done for political reasons, such as Nemo's identity and the nationality of the two warships he sinks, or the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of his cabin which originally included Daniel O'Connell. Nonetheless, it became the standard English translation for more than a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it and its mistakes (especially the mistranslation of the