Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Julia did some research into health problems caused by sleep deprivation—one of the first studies of its kind. With her data, she secured endorsements from doctors, hospitals, and public health officials, as well as from luminaries such as Thomas Edison, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain. Then she embarked on a furious lobbying campaign. Julia Rice went to police stations, health departments, regulators, and even Congress to press her demands for stringent restrictions of noise on the river. “There is no haggling about expenses,” she told the New York Tribune, “because I pay them all myself.” To press her case, in 1906 she established the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise, the first noise pollution movement in the nation.

  The following year, New York and a number of other eastern cities enacted the noise restrictions Julia Rice had sought, and Villa Julia became a much easier place to get a good night’s sleep. Of course, the Rice family did not get to appreciate their victory for very long, as within months, they would move to the Ansonia.

  But Julia was not done. She campaigned against other sources of noise pollution, particularly in the vicinity of hospitals. She persuaded Mark Twain to help, particularly in convincing children to promise not to play noisily outside hospital windows. Julia Rice died of pneumonia on November 4, 1929, fourteen years and two days after her husband. Although many of the restrictions she secured were rendered moot when automobiles overran city streets, hospital quiet zones still survive and are Julia Rice’s legacy.‡

  Elihu Frost’s legacy was rather different. Although he remained a trustee of Electric Boat as late as 1919, in 1909 he sold most of his holdings and ceased active participation in the firm. When Frost died in August 1925, he left an estate of only $507,000, a substantial amount of money to be sure, but nowhere near what his holdings would have been had he not sold at the low. In addition, Frost had accrued some significant expenses over the years.

  In December 1909, shortly after Frost left Electric Boat, his wife Marie obtained a divorce in Reno, Nevada, on the grounds of “extreme cruelty” and allegations of infidelity. Mrs. Frost “had for months endeavored, with the aid of detectives, to find evidence against her husband in New York. But believing that the New York courts would not entertain the testimony of hired detectives, she induced a society friend to act as her detective, and one night learned enough of her husband’s actions to make her realize that she could never live with him again.”9

  Frost luxuriated in the benefits of being a wealthy single man in New York until 1915, when, at fifty-five, he married twenty-two-year-old Rosalind Harrington. (Four years later, his ex-wife, Marie, married the extremely wealthy Baron de Cartier, the Belgian ambassador to the United States, and became a baroness.) But in only five years, in January 1920, Frost posted notices in New York newspapers stating that he would no longer be responsible for his wife’s debts, and then two days after that filed for divorce. It seemed that Rosalind, long the subject of “lively gossip,” had taken up, somewhat publicly, with a bartender at a local hotel. Frost evidently paid Rosalind a good bit of money not to contest the action or talk to the press.

  For the remainder of his life, Frost plied his trade, often, ironically, as a divorce lawyer. In October 1925, two months after his death, the New York Times ran the following headline. “ELIHU FROST ESTATE LEFT TO A WOMAN.”10 The article reported that Frost, “inventor and pioneer builder of submarines . . . cuts off all blood relatives and his adopted daughter, and leaves virtually all of his estate to Mrs. Helen Evans, described in the will as ‘a friend,’ whom he is said to have met in the Fall of 1924 in Providence, R.I.” A number of relatives sued, alleging that Frost’s “friend” had used age-old means to improperly persuade a doddering old man—Frost was sixty-five—to ignore his loved ones in favor of a hussy. But fourteen months later, the courts awarded the bulk of the estate—$350,000—to Mrs. Evans. Frost’s portfolio at the time of his death was said to contain “many worthless stocks.”

  With both Rice and Frost gone, Electric Boat was left in the hands of Lawrence Spear, described as “an undistinguished plodder . . . a born first mate, but an unpromising skipper.”11 Fortunately for the company, not only had war demand made it impervious to mediocre management but before he died, Isaac Rice had made a deal that ensured Electric Boat’s continued prosperity.

  Unlike Simon Lake, Rice had hedged his submarine bet with other product lines—Electric Launch (Elco) and Electro-Dynamic motors being the most prominent—so it could build surface craft and supply motors to other armament manufacturers as well. When Rice had switched from Lewis Nixon’s shipyard to the Fore River yard, he found a kindred spirit in Fore River’s owner, Charles Schwab, who also owned Bethlehem Steel and had guided it to unprecedented growth. Rice and Schwab joined forces, each essentially becoming the exclusive supplier or marketer for the other. Schwab secured for them an exclusive supply contract with the British Admiralty, understandably more desperate for submarines than almost anyone in the wake of the U-9 disaster. Thus even after Rice was gone and the company had passed to less talented management, profits rolled in. During World War I, Electric Boat built 85 submarines for the navy, Elco built 722 submarine chasers, and the Submarine Boat Company built 118 cargo ships.

  After the war, when demand for armaments, particularly submarines, essentially evaporated, Electric Boat survived when the Lake Company did not only because of their other businesses. At one point, the navy did not order an undersea vessel for eleven years. But when it did, Electric Boat was there, and has been the principal supplier of American submarines ever since, going from gasoline, to diesel, and finally to nuclear power. In 1952, the company, by then diversified into a full range of products, on air, land, and sea, most but not all for defense, changed its name to General Dynamics. It is now one of the largest defense contractors in the world.

  John Holland, of course, shared in none of the company’s success. For a time after his attempt to establish a rival to Electric Boat was litigated into dissolution, he sent letters to the navy secretary or other officials trying to interest them in his ideas. Eventually, he gave up. He settled into home and community life, teaching Sunday school, founding a local drama group, and becoming active in the American Irish Historical Society. He suffered from rheumatism, which got progressively worse, and his lungs grew weaker.

  Frank Cable wrote, “Unknown to his neighbors as a man of any note . . . his small frame stooping, his gait awkward, his manner nervous due to his near-sightedness, which increased with the years, yet keen-brained, studious, and ambitious to the last, he spent much of his time at the rear of his home, where he had a workshop sealed with various locks. He did not marry until nearly fifty, and in his declining years was surrounded by a growing family of five.”12

  By late July 1914, he was bedridden and two weeks later, on August 12, John Holland, surrounded by his wife and children, died of pneumonia.

  Submarines have progressed to the point that even the most imaginative science fiction writer of John Holland’s time would have been incredulous. The most recent model produced by the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics—and an even more advanced model in the works—is the Virginia-class fast-attack submarine.

  First launched in 2004, these boats are true marvels, 377 feet long, 34 wide, and with a displacement of 7,800 tons. They carry a crew of 15 officers and 117 enlisted men, their range is unlimited, and they can cruise almost indefinitely, limited only by food stores and maintenance requirements. They can dive to perhaps sixteen hundred feet. Nuclear powered on both the surface and submerged, Virginia-class submarines can make more than twenty-five knots in both attitudes. For weaponry, they are built with twelve vertical tubes to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles, and four torpedo tubes that fire intensely powerful Mark 48 torpedoes.

  Although hardly designed with an open-floor plan, these boats bear almost no resemblance to the stifling, fetid, almost impossibly claustrophobic cylinders in which submariners were forced to live—and often die—through
most of the twentieth century. There is decent air to breathe, decent food to eat, and ample room in which to move around.

  The technology is stunning. Virginia-class submarines have no periscopes. Instead, two “photonics masts” hold a variety of digital cameras, both normal and infrared, mounted on telescoping arms. With no need for the captain to hang on to periscope arms—a standard scene in virtually every submarine film ever made—the control room has been moved down a deck to gain more space, with enough screens mounted on the walls to make it look more like Silicon Valley than the depths of the ocean.

  For all these advances, however, Virginia-class submarines, like all modern submarines, are built around two basic principles—retaining a store of positive buoyancy while cruising submerged and maintaining a fixed center of gravity.

  They all sail in the spirit of John Holland.

  _____________

  *Others, of course, like the ability to send out a diver, would become standard as submarines increased in sophistication.

  †Thus the U-9 had finally succeeded in achieving what Holland had set out to do almost fifty years earlier—sink British warships.

  ‡The Rices’ children also led extraordinary lives. One founded the Poetry Society of America. Another, Marion Rice Hart, was the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in chemical engineering and obtained a master’s in geology from Columbia University. While working as a sculptress in Avignon, France, at age forty-five, on a whim, she purchased a seventy-two-foot ketch and piloted it around the world. She served in World War II as a radio operator in the signal corps, often aboard a B-17, and became fascinated with airplanes. She learned to fly after the war, and eventually made seven solo trips across the Atlantic, the last when she was eighty-three years old. She continued to fly alone, often for thousands of miles, until she was eighty-seven. She had no children and her husband divorced her when she “refused to be like other women.”

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BOOKS AND ARTICLES

  Archer, William. The Pirate’s Progress: A Short History of the U-boat. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918.

  Barber, Francis M. Lecture on Submarine Boats and Their Application to Torpedo Operations. Newport, RI: United States Torpedo Station, 1875.

  ———Lecture on the Whitehead Torpedo. Newport, RI: United States Torpedo Station, 1875.

  Barnes, John Sanford. Submarine Warfare, Offensive and Defensive, Including a Discussion of the Offensive Torpedo System, Its Effects upon Iron-clad Ship Systems, and Influence upon Future Naval Wars. New York: Van Nostrand, 1869.

  Barnes, Robert Hatfield. United States Submarines. New Haven, CT: H. F. Morse Associates, 1944.

  Beresford, Charles William. The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford. Boston: Little, Brown, 1914.

  Bishop, Farnham. The Story of the Submarine. New York: Century, 1916.

  Bowers, Paul. The Garrett Enigma and the Early Submarine Pioneers. London: Airlife, 1999.

  Bradford, Royal Bird. Notes on the Spar Torpedo. Newport, RI: United States Torpedo Station, 1882.

  Burgoyne, Alan H. Submarine Navigation Past and Present. 2 Volumes. London: E. G. Richards, 1903.

  Cable, Frank T. The Birth and Development of the American Submarine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924.

  Clark, George R., et al. A Short History of the United States Navy. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911.

  Compton-Hall, Richard. The Submarine Pioneers: The Beginnings of Underwater Warfare. Cornwall, UK: Periscope Publishing, 1983.

  DeCanio, Stephen J. “The Future Through Yesterday: Long-Term Forecasting in the Novels of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.” The Centennial Review 38, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 75–93.

  Dewey, George. Autobiography of George Dewey: Admiral of the Navy. New York: Scribner, 1913.

  Doherty, William T. The United States Navy, 1865–1907. University of Wisconsin–Madison: Unpublished Thesis, 1920.

  Domville-Fife, Charles W. Submarines, Mines and Torpedoes in the War. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914.

  ———Submarines of the World’s Navies. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911.

  Emery, Clark. “A Further Note on Drebbel’s Submarine.” Modern Language Notes vol 57, no. 1 (June 1942): pages i-xi.

  Fay, Harold J. W. History and Development of Submarine Signals. A paper presented at the 29th Annual Convention of the American institute of Electrical Engineers, Boston, June 27, 1912.

  Fennell, Philip and Marie King, ed. John Devoy’s Catalpa Expedition. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

  Field, Cyril. The Story of the Submarine from the Earliest Ages to the Present Day. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908.

  Franklin, Roger. The Defender: The Story of General Dynamics. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

  Fyfe, Herbert C. Submarine Warfare, Past and Present. London: E. G. Richards, 1907.

  Gray, Edwyn. British Submarines at War: 1914–1918. New York: Scribner, 1972.

  Grudin, Robert. “Rudolf II of Prague and Cornelis Drebbel: Shakespearean Archetypes?” Huntington Library Quarterly 54, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 181–205.

  Hansen, David M. “Zalinski’s Dynamite Gun.” Technology and Culture 25, no. 2 (April 1984): 264–79.

  Hendrick, Burton J. “Great American Fortunes and Their Making.” McClure’s Magazine, November 1907, 33–48.

  Johnson, Alfred S. et al. The Cyclopedic Review of Current History, 1897. Boston: New England Publishing Company, 1898.

  Jolie, E. W. “A Brief History of U.S. Navy Torpedo Development.” NUSC Technical Document 543615. Weapons Systems Department. September 1978.

  Keidanz, Hermann. Twenty Years of the Rice Gambit: In Memorium, Isaac Leopold Rice. New York: American Chess Bulletin, 1916.

  King, Charles Brady. Personal Side Lights of America’s First Automobile Race. New York: Privately printed by Super-power printing company, 1945.

  Lake, Simon. Submarine: The Autobiography of Simon Lake. New York: Appleton-Century, 1938.

  ———The Submarine in War and Peace: Its Development and Possibilities. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1918.

  ———Under-Water Torpedo-Boats: The Submarine Versus the Submersible, Their Merits and Their Menace. Bridgeport, CT: Lake Torpedo Boat Company, 1906.

  March, Francis A. et al. History of the World War: An Authentic Narrative of the World’s Greatest War. New York: Leslie-Judge, 1919.

  Martin, Thomas Commerford. Electrical Boats and Navigation. New York: C. C. Shelley, 1894.

  Morris, Richard Knowles. John P. Holland, 1841–1914: Inventor of the Modern Submarine. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1966.

  Niven, John, Courtlandt Canby, Vernon Welsh, ed. Dynamic America: A History of General Dynamics Corporation and Its Predecessor Companies. New York: Doubleday; General Dynamics Corporation, 1960.

  Parsons, William Barclay. Robert Fulton and the Submarine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1922.

  Poluhowich, John J. Argonaut: The Submarine Legacy of Simon Lake. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.

  Ragan, Mark K. Submarine Warfare in the Civil War. New York: Da Capo, 2003.

  Rice, Isaac L. What is Music? New York: D. Appleton, 1875.

  Rye, William Brenchley. England As Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First. Comprising translations of the journals of the two Dukes of Wirtemberg in 1592 and 1610; both illustrative of Shakespeare. With extracts from the travels of foreign princes and others, copious notes, an introduction, and etchings. London: John Russell Smith, 1865.

  Sleeman, Charles W. Torpedoes and Torpedo Warfare: Containing a Complete and Concise Account of the Rise and Progress of Submarine Warfare. Also a detailed description of all matters appertaining thereto, including the latest movements. Portsmouth, UK: Griffin and Company, 1889.

  Speake, Jennifer. “The Wrong Kind of Wonder: Ben Jonson and Cornelis Drebbel.” Review of English Studies 66, no. 273 (February 2015): 60.

  Spear, L
awrence Y. “Submarine-Boats: Past, Present, and Future.” Transactions—The Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. New York: Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, December 1902.

  Sueter, Murray F. The Evolution of the Submarine Boat, Mine and Torpedo, from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Time. Portsmouth, England: J. Griffin, 1907.

  Talbot, Frederick A. Submarines: Their Mechanism and Operation. London: W. Heinemann, 1915.

  “Testing a Pneumatic Dynamite Gun.” Science XIII, no. 312 (January 25, 1889): p. 56.

  Tuchman, Barbara W. The Proud Tower. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

  Weir, Gary. Building American Submarines, 1914–40. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1991.

  Weiss, George. America’s Maritime Progress; A Review of the Redevelopment of the American Merchant Marine. New York: New York Marine News, 1920.

  Wheeler, Harold F. B. War in the Underseas. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1919.

  Whelehan, Niall. The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

  MAGAZINES AND JOURNALS

  American Chess Bulletin. New York: American Chess Bulletin.

  American Engineer. Chicago: Smith & Cowles.

  American Magazine. New York: Colver Publishing House.

  Dive. Wilmington, California: Gaff Productions.

  The Electrical Trade. Chicago: The Electrical Trade.

  Electrical World and Engineer. New York: McGraw Publishing Company.

  Engineering Magazine. New York: The Engineering Magazine Company.

  Forum. New York: The Forum Publishing Company.

  Marine Engineering. New York: Marine Publishing Company.

  Marine Review. Cleveland: Penton Publishing Company.

  North American Review: New York: Allen Thorndike Rice.

  Science. New York: American Association for the Advancement of Science.