Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Financial challenges would prove greater than Lake anticipated. Although he was fortunate that one of his investors was William Malster, president of the Columbia Dry Dock and Iron Works in Baltimore, where the Argonaut would be built, he was not so lucky when another investor turned out to be a swindler.

  Lake, by his own admission, still callow, was approached by a man he later called only “Mr. H-” who purported to be friends with the Vanderbilts, the Astors, and the Goulds. He was living in a mansion in Baltimore and was introduced to Lake by an officer of the bank in which Lake intended to keep his new company’s accounts. After a lengthy and elaborate series of feints and dodges, Mr. H- succeeded in being named general manager of the new firm and was on the verge of obtaining Lake’s signature on blank stock certificates and $2,000 in company funds, as well as the rights to the patents Lake had applied for, when Malster intervened and saved the young inventor. It cost Lake and Malster a bit of money to untangle the company’s affairs, but Lake had learned a lesson that would stay with him his entire career.

  “The raising of capital to most inventors is a serious problem,” he wrote later. “It has been so with me. I have always been interested in mechanical accomplishments, but dreaded the necessity of trying to raise capital to carry on those experiments. I have never valued money for itself or felt the need of it except when I did not have it. I think this is the case with most inventors, which is the reason why so many of them go to unscrupulous promoters who rob them of their inventions, or else often tie them up so that they themselves are incapable of continuing their development work.”5

  Free of Mr. H-, Lake began to oversee construction of the Argonaut in autumn 1895 at Columbia Dry Dock, and he soon acquired an interesting neighbor. Holland too chose to build his submarine at Columbia, issuing a deposit with funds he had obtained from the United States Treasury. E. B. Frost was uncomfortable with Holland being in such proximity to a former competitor, especially since William Malster was a principal in Lake’s new venture.

  But Holland did not share Frost’s concern. Lewis Nixon, who supervised construction at the Cramps’ shipyard, had become someone with whom Holland worked very well. But Cramps had mishandled the first bid, which might well have been the cause of the two-year delay, so Holland solved the problem by hiring Nixon as a consulting engineer, where he could supervise construction of the Holland boat at Columbia, and also make sure that both Malster or Lake behaved aboveboard.

  But despite the advantage of an assured sale to the navy, and for once not having to put up any money, it became apparent early in the process that Holland’s contract would not mark the end of his frustrations. The naval experts assigned to oversee production of the boat, to be called the Plunger, and ensure adherence to the agreed specifications, were notably inexpert—like most naval officers, they had no practical experience with submarine design—and, as is often the case with those who lack knowledge, were that much more inflexible for their ignorance.

  As a further complication, Holland was forced to deal with multiple panels of experts. While the Bureau of Ordnance was responsible for overseeing most of the construction, the Bureau of Steam Engineering was responsible for determining propulsion specifications. Holland had initially wanted to use a gasoline engine, but the navy had no “Bureau of Gasoline Engineering,” so steam it would be—as it turned out, quite a lot of steam.

  When Holland asked “what propulsion would be approved for the Plunger, he was told that twin screws must be installed, whatever else.” The twin screws, which would need be powered by a massive engine generating fifteen-hundred-horsepower, was the only means the steam engineers could divine to achieve the required horsepower and fifteen-knot cruising speed on the surface or awash. Holland tried to explain that “he had to have a propeller in the axis of the spindle-of-revolution shaped boat [along the keel] to push her under and to push her up, and if compelled to install twin screws in addition to their engines, there would be great and unnecessary complications.” For one thing, the navy did not shield steam engines in those days, and the temperature the motors would generate inside the hull, especially when the vessel was submerged, would be sufficient to “roast the crew.” But the steam engineers were having none of it. “Holland was told that was a matter for him to meet, but that she must have twin propellers.”6

  To power the boat when submerged, Holland feared that he would be forced to used stored steam, but he was allowed to switch to far more efficient battery power. Thus in addition to three steam engines, the Plunger would also carry a battery array capable of powering an electric motor at seventy horsepower. To accommodate all this equipment, much of which Holland considered unnecessary and detrimental to performance, the Plunger was designed to be eighty-five feet long, as opposed to thirty-six for Lake’s Argonaut.

  Size and weight would not be the only detriments to performance. Holland wanted to control the depth as he always did, with horizontal planes, but the navy decided that the submarine must essentially hover underwater, maintain depth without moving forward, so vertical propellers were added.

  How the Plunger was armed also became contentious. The Bureau of Ordnance insisted on two torpedo tubes. Holland had designed the craft for one and explained that “in view of the shape of the bow, two eighteen inch tubes would destroy her bow lines,” thus making the vessel more difficult to maneuver. But “twin torpedo tubes were declared to be absolutely necessary, so Holland sorrowfully got to work to get those requirements into his working plans.”7 Holland became so frustrated at dealing with “boards” that when asked to define one, he referred to a dictionary entry that read, “long, narrow, and wooden.”8

  William Kimball was appalled, but he had once again been assigned to extended sea duty, so the navy’s most knowledgeable officer would be unavailable until construction was under way. Before he left, however, he met with Frost and said, “In my opinion, the Plunger had been made an utter failure. I expressed the opinion that the only practical thing to do, provided the company had the necessary pluck and the more necessary money, was to build a boat of their own and demonstrate what she could do.”9 It was a course that Holland would have been thrilled to follow, but the “necessary money” was not there to do it. There was no choice but to move forward with the navy’s specifications and hope a workable boat could be salvaged.

  That task was made even more complicated when Holland was taken ill with respiratory problems. That summer, he also welcomed into the world his third child. Holland did his best to remain engaged on a project on which his reputation and posterity depended, but it is difficult not to conclude that he felt the fates had once more aligned against him.

  E. B. Frost faced the same issues but from a different perspective. He was far too wily a lawyer and a businessman not to see that a future so problematic must be somehow prepared for. Regardless of the impediments, the success or failure of the company, at least for the immediate future, was totally dependent on John Holland. Only he could salvage the Plunger and, if he could not, only he could develop an alternative. As any positive outcome was dependent on chronically fragile lungs, Frost took out a hefty life insurance policy on Holland, which would not, however, cover fatality during an underwater voyage.

  But to Frost, the risk of a dead inventor was potentially no greater than the risk of an unhappy live one. Nothing prevented Holland, who Frost had come to see as a “mechanical genius, who, properly handled, was worth millions of dollars,” from simply leaving his company and starting over if he became sufficiently disgusted with the navy’s bastardization of his design. So to bind Holland to him, Frost, with great fanfare, granted him a large, although less than controlling, block of stock in the company.10 In return, Frost convinced Holland that, as an owner, it was only fair that anything he developed remain property of the company, rather than pass to Holland as an individual. Holland, thus approached in a spirit of honor and fairness, agreed and signed over his patents. There are indications that Frost tried also to obt
ain patents Holland held not related to submarine design, but it does not appear that he was successful. Holland’s short-sightedness in signing over patents potentially worth a fortune to a company he did not own has been explained away as naïveté, idealism, or simply a lack of alternatives, but a man who had spent two decades dealing with the Fenians, Edmund Zalinski, naval bureaucrats, and a variety of other self-interested characters should have known better.

  As 1895 drew to a close, Holland had become more and more frustrated with the navy’s intransigence. He was now certain, as Kimball had been certain, that the submarine he had been forced to design would not work. Nonetheless, if he spoke publically of his convictions or stopped work, the company’s financing would disappear. Holland wasn’t alone in being discouraged. Lewis Nixon, the consulting engineer he had hired, threw up his hands in despair and refused to even visit the Baltimore shipyard. Holland was unsuccessful in luring a replacement, and William Malster was not going to help, since, if Holland’s company failed, Lake’s—and Malster’s—would rush in to fill the void.

  Oddly, the closer the Plunger came to becoming an immense boondoggle, the more fawning the coverage became in the press. By early 1896, “Holland’s name appeared almost daily in the great metropolitan newspapers, and magazines sent feature writers to Baltimore to report on the progress of the Plunger.” In February 1896, for example, an article in the Washington Morning Times extolled Holland’s craft, which it compared to the “the mystic ships of the Arabian Nights,” one that “will do away with the necessity of warships for defense or fighting.”11 Harper’s Round Table added, “It may make as great a revolution in naval warfare as the famous Monitor, built by Mr. Ericsson, did in the war of 1861. For what battle-ship would be proof against it? The biggest of all battle-ships would only sink quicker than smaller ones, and huge warships of all kinds would be nothing more than death-traps for all those aboard them.”12 An engineering trade magazine was less flamboyant but equally enthusiastic. “The Holland submarine boat, invented by Mr. John P. Holland, has awakened wonderful interest in this country [and] shows the tremendous advantage possessed by a vessel of this description over one floating on the surface of the water. It proves that the construction of submarine vessels which can be perfectly controlled is no longer a matter of experiment, and in addition shows that warfare in the future, when carried on at sea, may be like the battles of great cetaceans.”13

  The accolades stoked public—and congressional—anticipation for a vessel that most Americans considered only as science fiction. In May 1896, as Holland was beginning to consider that he might have no choice but to abandon the project, the House held hearings on the Plunger. One of those called before the naval affairs committee was Captain (later Admiral) Alfred Thayer Mahan, a past president of the Naval War College, whose books, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 and The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812, would have perhaps more influence on American foreign policy than any volumes in United States history.14 “In our present unprotected position,” Mahan testified, “the risk of losing money by the government by reason of the boat’s being a failure is more than counterbalanced by the protection the boat would be if a substantial success.”15 Lieutenant Commander Kimball was another witness. “Give me six Holland submarine boats, the officers and crew to be selected by me, and I will pledge my life to stand off the entire British squadron ten miles off Sandy Hook [New Jersey] without any aid from our fleet.”16 The following month, Congress voted to appropriate $350,000 for the construction of two additional submarines “of the Holland type.”17

  That none of the senators and representatives even considered any other type of undersea craft further inflamed the man building a very different sort of vessel just yards from the Plunger, who was absolutely convinced that they should have. Simon Lake rarely needed a spur to righteous indignation, but $350,000 made him even more determined to make his enemies, real and imagined, regret their lack of foresight.

  CHAPTER 13

  ARGONAUT

  Lake had a good platform from which to do so. Unfettered by navy requirements and working with private funds, he was free to build the Argonaut to any specifications he pleased. As a result, rather than build a warship, Lake chose to return to his original vision of building a vessel that could patrol the bottom for exploration and salvage. This design would not be immediately adaptable as a warship, but Lake, never perturbed by the opinions of others, was convinced that it was what the navy wanted nonetheless.

  Building his Argonaut within hailing distance of the Holland boat had the obvious potential of causing friction between the two camps, but, although the two sides did not fraternize a great deal, there were no reports of hostility. Lake, even at this early stage of his career, seemed to have understood that the eighty-foot behemoth being thrown together next to him would never sail successfully; and Holland, forced to build such a contraption, was embarrassed to be doing so next to a competitor who he knew would appreciate just how poor a design it was.

  In any event, while construction of the Plunger limped along, progress on the Argonaut proceeded apace. Although he would adhere to the same principles as with the Argonaut Junior, the full-size boat was built of steel plates, three-eighths of an inch thick, and displaced fifty-nine tons when submerged. Lake would submerge the Argonaut more like a submersible than an attack vessel, essentially dropping it like a stone to the sea bottom. He would first release half-ton anchor weights, then take on water ballast until the vessel was negatively buoyant. The Argonaut, like all boats he designed, would then descend on an even keel, parallel with the sea floor, rather than diving at an angle. In this first model, Lake did not install diving planes, the only serious submarine designer who failed to do so. (Subsequent models would have them.)

  At a depth of fifty feet, which was as deep as the Argonaut was designed on most occasions to operate, a crew might succeed in escaping if the negatively buoyant vessel was disabled; at greater depths they were almost certainly doomed. The fifty-foot limit was set by a ventilation pipe of that length carried on the outside of the hull, which could be raised to the surface, supported by a float. The air taken into the hull would supply the crew by means of an internal blower, and, more important, feed the submarine’s motor. Another pipe of equal length extended from the stern to carry exhaust gases.

  The Argonaut employed a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine; Lake later claimed he was the first to do this. In fact, since Holland had tried the ill-fated Brayton engine previously, Lake was merely the first to employ an Otto-style engine, the sort of internal combustion engine that would become commonplace in automobiles and surface ships. Holland had tried to install an Otto-style engine in the Plunger but had been refused by the navy’s steam engineers.

  Lake initially designed his boat to carry a crew of five. As with his wooden model, three corrugated wheels were fitted to the bottom of the hull, the rear wheel smaller than the two seven-footers in front. The thirty-horsepower engine would drive both the single propeller and the wheels, which, once the Argonaut had settled on the bottom, would, in effect, simply drive about looking for available salvage. A powerful electric searchlight was mounted in the bow, and the boat also had a system of internal lighting, all run off storage batteries charged by a dynamo, again driven by the gasoline engine. (Lake would later admit that the searchlight had little utility, except for patrolling the sea bottom at night, which he had scant intention to do.) Compressed air tanks were installed to create sufficient pressure inside the boat to allow a diver to enter and exit through a compartment built in the bow. In case of a mishap, the compressed air would also provide a reserve of breathable air for the crew that could last up to twenty-four hours. While the air reserve would seem to mitigate the risks from negative buoyancy, in practice, locating and then safely removing a crew from a disabled vessel resting on the bottom in seventy-five or one hundred feet of water in one day presented enormous challenges
with the technology available in 1896. It would likely require a second Argonaut-style submarine standing by to effect the rescue.

  Argonaut

  By early 1897, the Argonaut was near completion. Scientific American, the nation’s most prestigious science magazine, sent a reporter to examine Lake’s boat and he came back with a glowing report, describing the vessel as “capable of rising to the surface and submerging at will, and propelled in any desired direction when on the bottom. A door may be opened, through which the occupants, by donning a diving suit, may pass from the interior to the outside and back again. The boat will be used principally for searching the bed of the ocean adjacent to coastlines, and in locating and recovering sunken vessels and their cargoes.”1 Engineering journals were equally enthusiastic.

  Accolades notwithstanding, use of an internal combustion while submerged necessitated a series of modifications. Although “special care” had been given to seal the fuel tanks, with the tanks internal, it proved impossible to prevent gasoline fumes from filling the cabin. “The tanks were tested under hydraulic pressure and found to be tight, but the fumes from gasolene (petrol) are very searching, and, after filling the fuel tanks and keeping them filled overnight, gasolene fumes were found to exist in the boat the next morning to such an extent that I would not venture to make a start until a fuel tank had been built outside of the vessel, where any escape of fumes would not form an explosive mixture.”2

  Carbon monoxide was another problem. “On our first submarine run, after we had been down about two hours some of us commenced to experience a dull pain at the base of the brain and a decided feeling of lassitude. On coming to the surface a couple of our men collapsed completely, and one was very sick all night. I could not understand the cause of this, as nothing of the kind had occurred in my previous hand-propelled vessel, so we made another submerged run the following day, and after about the same period of time the pain in the head and weariness came on again.”3 Lake discovered that when the engine backfired, carbon monoxide was escaping past the piston rings and seeping into the base of the engine and from there into the boat.