The name was no accident. Jules Verne had imagined a submarine called Nautilus in his 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a vessel powered by an inexhaustible energy source that could roam the world's oceans without surfacing. Eighty years later, Captain Hyman G. Rickover made Verne's fantasy a practical reality. Congress authorized the construction of a nuclear-powered submarine in July 1951, and Rickover personally supervised every detail. President Harry Truman laid the keel at General Dynamics' Electric Boat Division in Groton on June 14, 1952. Mamie Eisenhower christened the vessel on January 21, 1954, and it was commissioned into the United States Navy on September 30 of that year. The designers drew inspiration from an unlikely source: the German Type XXI U-boat from World War II, whose streamlined hull had revolutionized underwater performance. Nuclear power solved the submarine's oldest limitation. Diesel-electric boats had to surface regularly to run their engines and recharge batteries. Nautilus consumed no air and produced no exhaust. She could stay submerged indefinitely, limited only by the endurance of her crew.

The Nautilus rewrote the submarine record books almost immediately. In May 1955, she traveled from New London to San Juan, Puerto Rico entirely submerged, covering the distance in less than 90 hours at the highest sustained speed ever recorded for a submarine. It was the longest submerged cruise in history. From 1955 to 1957, the Navy used Nautilus to investigate the tactical implications of a submarine that could move fast, dive deep, and stay under for as long as her crew could endure. The results were sobering for submarine hunters: radar and anti-submarine aircraft, the technologies that had proved decisive against U-boats in World War II, were suddenly obsolete against a vessel that never needed to surface. On February 4, 1957, Nautilus logged her 60,000th nautical mile, matching the fictional endurance Captain Nemo had achieved in Verne's novel. Life had caught up with literature.

The Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, and America needed a technological triumph of its own. President Eisenhower ordered the Navy to send a submarine under the North Pole. Under Commander William R. Anderson, Nautilus departed Seattle on June 9, 1958, for Operation Sunshine. The first attempt failed when deep drift ice in the shallow Chukchi Sea blocked the route through the Bering Strait, with insufficient room between the ice and the sea floor. After retreating to Pearl Harbor to await better conditions, Nautilus tried again on July 23. She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley on August 1 and reached the geographic North Pole at 11:15 PM Eastern Time on August 3, becoming the first watercraft ever to do so. Navigation beneath the arctic ice cap was treacherous. Standard magnetic compasses were useless above 85 degrees north, and normal gyrocompasses became wildly inaccurate. A special gyrocompass built by Sperry Rand was installed just before departure. Commander Anderson had quietly prepared a backup plan: using torpedoes to blow a hole in the ice if the submarine needed to surface in an emergency. After 96 hours beneath the ice, Nautilus surfaced northeast of Greenland. At a White House ceremony on August 8, Eisenhower presented Commander Anderson with the Legion of Merit and announced the crew had earned a Presidential Unit Citation, the first ever issued in peacetime.

For the next two decades, Nautilus served as a workhorse of the Atlantic Fleet. She deployed with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean, participated in NATO exercises, and during October 1962, joined the naval blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis. By May 1966, she had logged 300,000 nautical miles. She was not without her share of hard knocks: in November 1966, she collided with the aircraft carrier Essex while operating at shallow depth. Toward the end of her career, age caught up with the pioneer. Her hull and sail vibrated so severely that sonar became ineffective at speed, making her vulnerable to the very detection she had once rendered obsolete. The lessons learned from Nautilus's limitations shaped every nuclear submarine that followed. On April 9, 1979, she departed Groton on her final voyage, arriving at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California on May 26. She was decommissioned on March 3, 1980.

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982 and named the official state ship of Connecticut in 1983, Nautilus was towed back to Groton after an extensive conversion and opened to the public on April 11, 1986, as part of the Submarine Force Library and Museum. Today, she receives approximately 250,000 visitors annually, who can tour her forward two compartments guided by an automated system. A major restoration completed in 2022 at a cost of $36 million included blasting and painting the hull, new top decks, and upgraded interior lighting and electrical systems. From the air above the Thames River, the Nautilus is visible at her berth near Naval Submarine Base New London, her black hull a quiet monument to the age of nuclear propulsion. She remains the vessel that proved a submarine could go anywhere in the world's oceans, stay as long as her crew could stand it, and return home under her own power, needing nothing from the surface but the occasional message.