Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  When the cruiser Vesuvius was completed in 1888, Zalinski’s star seemed in full ascent. In addition, over the next few years, enormous dynamite guns were employed to guard the harbors of New York and San Francisco. Every time a gun was test-fired, observers were amazed at its accuracy.

  But the same bureaucratic intransigence that would frustrate John Holland did in the pneumatic gun as well. Some of the issues that bedeviled Zalinski were real—the gun’s lack of range would surely make it vulnerable to long-range pounding, either on land or at sea, and on the Vesuvius, the breach of the gun needed to be below deck, meaning that its position was fixed and the ship had to change course to fire in a different direction. Also, the velocity of shells shot pneumatically was not sufficient to pierce the thick armor found on large warships. But Zalinski’s most intractable problem was opposition from his fellow army officers. His lack of West Point lineage finally caught up with him. When he was promoted to captain in 1889, after more than two decades as a lieutenant, and then assigned as military attaché to St. Petersburg, Russia, resentment among his peers boiled over. Impediments, delays, and negative reports trailed after every new dynamite gun installation. Zalinski, then in Russia, was helpless to defend his invention.

  Eventually enthusiasm for Zalinski’s weapon evaporated. The dynamite guns installed for shore defense were replaced and, after a brief, inconsequential appearance in the Spanish-American War, the Vesuvius, the only dynamite cruiser ever built, was scrapped. After two bouts of illness, Edmund Zalinski, over his vehement protests, was forced to retire from the army in 1894. He lived for another fifteen years before dying of pneumonia in 1909. He chose to be buried in Rochester, New York, rather than Arlington National Cemetery.

  _____________

  *The island was demolished in 1960 to make way for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

  †A camera lucida—Latin for “light chamber”—is a device that uses an arrangement of mirrors to project an image of an object onto a surface. Because the object is not viewed directly, the person at the eyepiece has no sense of depth—distance—or the actual size of what he is looking at. In a submarine, it would provide the direction in which a surface ship was sailing, but little else. In modern applications, the projections are generally to a piece of paper and are used to trace a copy of a drawing or graphic.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHASING THE CARROT

  John Holland was once again out of work. Although William Kimball had called him “the best submarine man in the United States, if not the world,” the Navy Department had been unable to secure an appropriation to pay him a draftsman’s salary. But the environment for innovation appeared to be improving. After nearly two decades of almost total atrophy, the navy finally seemed committed to a program of modernization.

  The change had begun in early 1881, when James A. Garfield replaced Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House and appointed William H. Hunt to be secretary of the navy. In November 1881, Hunt, appalled at the condition of the service he was to oversee, began his annual report to Congress with a dire warning:

  The condition of the Navy imperatively demands the prompt and earnest attention of Congress. Unless some action be taken in its behalf, it must soon dwindle into insignificance. From such a state it would be difficult to revive it into efficiency without dangerous delay and enormous expense. Emergencies may at any moment arise which would render its aid indispensable to the protection of the lives and property of our citizens abroad and at home, and even to our existence as a nation. We have been unable to make such an appropriate display of our naval power abroad as will cause us to be respected. The exhibition of our weakness in this important arm of defense is calculated to detract from our occupying in the eyes of foreign nations that rank to which we know ourselves to be justly entitled. It is a source of mortification to our officers and fellow-countrymen generally, that our vessels of war should stand in such mean contrast alongside of those of other and inferior powers.1

  Until that point, few questioned the army’s first call on the Treasury. For more than a decade after the Civil War ended in 1865, the army had been required to staff an occupation force in the old Confederacy to enforce the Reconstruction Acts and ensure that newly freed slaves were not murdered wholesale by resentful whites. After the army was pulled from the South in 1877, attention had turned west, where the bluecoats were overrunning various Native American tribes to secure expansion of the nation’s boundaries. In addition, the previous presidents, Hayes and Grant, had been decorated army generals.

  Still, a nation whose east and west borders were oceans needed a navy, at least for defense, and the United States essentially didn’t have one. “The year 1881, when Garfield succeeded to the Presidency, marks the lowest mark to which the navy has ever sunk since the days when the United States had to pay ransom to Algiers. Out of 140 vessels on the navy list in 1881, 25 were tugs and only a few of the rest were in condition to make a cruise. Not a single ship was fit for [military] service. An engraving published in 1881 pictured the fleet being reviewed by the President, a pathetic attempt to put the best face possible on our miserable ships. This group represented the best dozen vessels in the navy at that time; they were all built of wood, and included not only the side-wheel steamer Powhatan, but the ancient Frigate, Constitution! And the batteries mounted by these ships were chiefly smooth-bores left over from the Civil War.”2

  Secretary Hunt appointed an advisory panel of senior naval officers—who had little else to do—to make recommendations for improving the fleet. That act caused sufficient resentment among army brass and Congressmen that Hunt was shunted from office by new president Chester Arthur only six months later and shipped off to Russia as the new ambassador.* The panel’s recommendations, of course, included sweeping changes in procurement, and building essentially a new navy from the ground up. They called specifically for building two first-rate steel unarmored cruisers; six first-rate steel double-decked, unarmored cruisers; ten second-rate steel cruisers; twenty fourth-rate wooden cruisers; five steel rams; five torpedo gunboats; ten cruising torpedo boats; and ten harbor torpedo boats.† The total cost would be $29,607,000.‡

  Congress initially balked at doing anything—the same posture they had taken for years—on the grounds that the American people did not care to spend money on a more modern navy and, besides, there was no need to improve the fleet until a war actually began. A New York congressman observed, “I believe if there were any deep-seated and well-founded sentiment among the people that we ought to increase and build up our navy, the present Congress as well as past Congresses would have received demonstrations upon this subject which would have demanded an affirmative answer.”3

  But Congress had misread public sentiment—the state of America’s fleet had become so scandalous that inaction was becoming untenable. Admiral George Dewey, later to become “the hero of Manila Bay,” wrote that “In October 1882, I was ordered to the command of the Juniata, which was to proceed to China. She was a relic of a past epoch of naval warfare, which you would have expected to see flying the flag of some third-rate power. She was as out of date as the stagecoach. One reason, perhaps why so little was seen of our ships in home ports for twenty years after the Civil War was that the sight of them might arouse the people’s demand for a naval policy which did not represent a mere waste of money in keeping relics in commission.”4

  Reluctantly and with a good deal of grumbling, in March 1883, Congress allocated funds for the construction of three modern, armored cruisers, and one dispatch boat. Prophetically, given the building frenzy to come, these became known as the “ABCD ships”—Atlantic, Boston, Chicago, and Dolphin. Construction on those vessels was begun almost immediately. In 1885, Congress authorized two more heavy cruisers and two gunboats. Sentiment about a modern navy had changed to the point that the Chicago Tribune in July 1886, wrote in an editorial, “There never was a time when the call for a navy and adequate coastal defense was more pressing. There never was a time w
hen the people were more unanimous in demanding them. There never was a time when the country was in better financial condition to afford it.”5

  Such was the popularity of the new naval program that each party in the 1884 presidential election tried to outdo the other in its commitment to America’s naval might. Republicans, under Maine senator James G. Blaine, claimed a commitment to restoring the navy to past strength, although the party was unclear as to just what that meant. Democrats, whose standard bearer was New York’s Grover Cleveland, proclaimed that government had a sacred duty to protect the rights of all its citizens at home and abroad, and this could only be achieved if the nation had modern warships to enforce its edicts. When Cleveland was elected, he declared that, in addition, a nation with as extended a seacoast as the United States needed a powerful navy, and to give it one, Cleveland appointed as his secretary of the navy, William Collins Whitney.

  Patriarch of the great family fortune, Whitney would enter the submarine saga twice, from essentially opposite directions, which was fitting. Whitney’s life was replete with opposites: he was at once a political reformer and a political hack; a man whose sound management saved New York City millions and one whose stock manipulations bilked both private and public interests out of just as much; a generous patron of the arts and the epitome of Gilded Age greed. Whitney was described by a muckraking journalist as “having wonderful mental gifts . . . brilliant, polished and suave . . . physically handsome, loved by most men and all women . . . displaying those talents for diplomacy that made him the mastermind of presidential cabinets and the maker of American presidents.”6

  Whitney was born in 1841 into a distinguished family—his father was an army general and his mother was descended from William Bradford, a signer of the Mayflower Compact and governor of the Plymouth Colony. At the outbreak of the Civil War, many men of Whitney’s background entered the officer corps of the Union army, but Whitney chose to remain at Yale. After he graduated, in 1863, Whitney moved on to Harvard to study law, and then joined a prominent New York firm after one year in Cambridge. At the same time, he married the daughter of future Ohio senator Henry Payne.

  Whitney began his professional life as a progressive reformer. He helped found the Young Men’s Democratic Club, and then was hired by Samuel Tilden to help build the case that brought down Boss Tweed. He failed to gain elective office on his own, when he was defeated in a run for district attorney in 1872. But when Tilden was elected governor in 1875, Whitney was appointed as New York City’s corporation counsel. In addition to gaining an insider’s knowledge of city politics, Whitney oversaw agreements with private contractors and holders of city franchises, experience that he would later put to extremely profitable use. In his seven years as the city’s top lawyer, Whitney also burrowed into records and files and helped recover as much as $20 million that Tweed had stolen from city accounts.

  When he left city government in 1882 to help Grover Cleveland get elected president, Whitney’s credentials as an honest, brilliant administrator were unquestioned. He proved to be one of Cleveland’s most successful fund-raisers and was rewarded with his pick of jobs in the new administration. He chose the Navy Department.

  Whitney built on the progress that had begun in the previous administration, so much so that he would ultimately receive the lion’s share of credit for creating a modern American navy. By 1890, although it was in his successor’s administration, Congress had become so caught up in the spending frenzy that it appropriated funds for the construction of three state-of-the-art battleships. More would follow.

  When naval modernization began, basic needs were such that appropriating funds to add submarines to the fleet was not a possibility. But Whitney aggressively pursued every option. Submarine experiments were sufficiently in the news that it seemed undersea warfare, at the least, deserved study. William Kimball urged the head of the Ordnance Bureau, Commander (later Admiral) Montgomery Sicard, to urge Whitney to move forward with a submarine program.

  The problem was that no one in the navy or anywhere else in government knew how to go about it. In 1887, Kimball suggested the navy “ask for bids for furnishing a submarine just as bids were asked for furnishing shoes or canvas.” Although the idea was at first “considered revolutionary and impractical,” with no better ideas forthcoming, Kimball was asked to draw up specifications for the competition.7 The winner, a skeptical Whitney agreed, would be awarded a sizable government contract (up to $2 million) to produce the vessel.

  Kimball’s requirements, published in August 1888, were quite sophisticated. To be awarded a contract, a “Steel Submarine Torpedo Boat” must cruise at fifteen knots on the surface and eight submerged; retain positive buoyancy at all times; be able to remain submerged for two hours at a time; carry provisions for ninety hours at sea; be able to withstand water pressure to 150 feet; complete a turn in an area no more than four times its length; and deliver a torpedo with a one-hundred-pound charge. The boat would need to displace at least forty tons but no more than two hundred tons submerged, and it was “suggested,” although not required, that the motor generate one thousand horsepower.

  While subsequently there would be accusations that these requirements were drawn to guarantee Holland won the contract, Kimball had little to draw on but his knowledge of Holland’s designs. By this time, as many as a dozen others were experimenting with undersea craft in various parts of the United States and Europe, but no one had succeeded in creating a working boat and Kimball had, correctly as it turned out, accepted Holland’s basic principles as the basis to create a working submarine.

  Designs had to be submitted through a builder recognized by the Navy Department, and Holland chose Cramp & Sons Shipbuilding of Philadelphia, an experienced shipyard, well thought of in Washington. He was surprised to find out that another competitor, Thorsten Nordenfelt, had submitted a bid through Cramps as well. Nordenfelt had evidently submitted the same design as for the boat that sank on its way to Russia. Although a full postmortem on the sinking had yet to be published, a boat that had come to such an accursed end was unlikely to garner much support.

  In addition to Nordenfelt, two others submitted designs. One, George Baker of Chicago, seemed to be a serious inventor, but he had yet to go beyond preliminary planning. But lack of specific construction costs would not prevent his winning the contract, and his plans were conceptually quite refined. His manner of driving the boat was particularly advanced and would eventually be adopted by other designers, including Holland. “He combined two independent sources of power, steam for surface propulsion and an electric motor for running submerged. A clutch connection with the steam engine enabled it to drive the electric motor as a dynamo to charge the accumulators while running awash.”8 Baker’s means of maintaining stability, however, two propellers on beveled gears that could rotate 180 degrees, would prove impractical.

  The other entrant epitomized the sort of experimentation that is inevitably undertaken before any great technological breakthrough, when designs get closer and closer to the ultimate solution but fall short of the right combination for success—they tend to be inventive, quirky, with certain features that are quite clever, all on a machine that doesn’t work.

  Josiah Tuck of San Francisco fell into this category with a submarine he called the Peacemaker. Thirty feet long, with a crew of three, his first design required the captain, dressed in a diver’s suit and helmet, to stand outside the hull, “in a kind of well amidships up to his waist,” from where he would steer the vessel and release a set of mines with cork floats that would rise through the water and attach themselves with electromagnets to either side of the hull of an enemy ship. The Peacemaker would then cruise a safe distance away and the mines would detonate electrically. Unmanned, the New York Times described the boat as looking like “a shark with a hole in its back.”9 Depth was controlled solely by taking on or expelling ballast. The most salient feature of the Peacemaker was a “fireless engine,” in which a solution of caustic soda w
as used to generate steam. Representatives of both France and China expressed interest in purchasing the vessel, but a deal was never consummated. Tuck eventually abandoned the notion of the captain standing outside the boat, and he installed a clear dome over the well.

  Tuck’s Peacemaker

  In August 1886, “in the broiling sun,” the Peacemaker made a test run in the Hudson River, in front of “300 persons, 50 of whom were ladies in charming Summer costumes.” While those spectators were in awe of a boat that disappeared under the surface and remained hidden for thirty minutes, the submarine had actually performed poorly. Once submerged, it was unable to maintain either constant depth or longitudinal stability. In a demonstration in November, before a number of senior military officers, including William Tecumseh Sherman, the Peacemaker would not submerge at all and “obstinately remained on the surface of the water.”10 As a result, Tuck’s invention “went to join the long list of non-successful submarines.”11

  With a choice of one design whose prototype sank, another that could not stay submerged, a third whose architect had yet to build anything, and John Holland, the Bureau of Ordnance did not have a great deal of difficulty coming to a decision. Holland was overjoyed.