Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  But not for long. Either because Cramps shipbuilding refused to guarantee all six specifications or because Secretary Whitney found the costs to high, or possibly because pressure was brought to bear not to waste precious funds on the silly and fanciful, the contract offer was withdrawn. Shortly afterward, however, the competition was reopened, in theory to new designs although none were submitted. Holland was again declared the winner.

  This time, before a dollar was disbursed, Grover Cleveland was out and Benjamin Harrison was in. Harrison’s navy secretary was an army man, Benjamin F. Tracy, who saw the lack of a credible surface fleet as a much more pressing need than Holland’s undersea phantasm. Tracy diverted the funds to traditional warships and Holland was once again without working capital. John Holland, after fifteen years of work and despite being widely considered the most accomplished and knowledgeable submarine designer in the world, found himself broke, jobless, and without prospects.

  For the first time, it seemed that Holland might give in to frustration and despair, as had Bushnell, Garrett, Bauer, and others before him. But William Kimball urged him not to give up, that submarines were the future and Holland would eventually have a hand in shaping it. Another man, Charles Morris, owner of a dredging company, who had briefly employed Holland during the Fenian Ram days, also encouraged him not to lose hope.

  In addition, Holland had been tinkering with an idea for a better motor to power a submarine. The Brayton motor appeared inadaptable to underwater travel and, although only steam seemed capable of generating the horsepower the navy specifications had required, Holland sensed that the Otto-type internal combustion engine, which had begun to be employed in another recent invention, the automobile, would work for submarines as well. Morris wanted Holland to at least design the new motor until interest in submarines was rekindled.§

  But Holland was no longer prepared to continue to work on designs that no one wanted. Instead, he began to tinker with a different project that had become all the rage—flying machines. Although his supporters later claimed his designs were well thought out, they were actually amateurish, showing little or no understanding of the principles of flight. While engaged in this quixote-esque pursuit, in May 1890, Holland accepted a job at Morris’s dredging company at $4.00 per day.

  But John Holland’s life was marked by that most cruel of fates—perpetual, unrealized hope. Just when it seemed that he would pass anonymously into history, promise once more intervened. As Harrison had defeated Cleveland in 1888, Cleveland defeated Harrison in 1892, and with Cleveland’s return came a return of interest in the submarine.

  William Whitney did not return to the administration—he had left to seek the literally greener pastures of Wall Street, from which he would later play an incidental but key role in submarine development. In March 1893, however, Cleveland’s new navy secretary, Hilary Herbert, reinstated the submarine contract. Congress appropriated $200,000 for the new venture, with the specifications the same as for the aborted 1888 bidding.

  John Holland was back in the submarine business. This time, he would have help.

  _____________

  *President Garfield had been assassinated in September 1881.

  †Rating was determined by how many guns and men a ship carried.

  ‡About $750,000,000 today.

  §“Otto” type engines remain standard in piston-driven automobiles. They use four strokes to complete a full cycle. During the first stroke, downward, a mixture of gas and air is sucked into a cylinder; the second stroke is up, sometimes generated by a flywheel, where the mixture is compressed; a flame is introduced into the cylinder to detonate the fuel, causing a downstroke, the power stroke; the piston is then sent back upward by the spinning flywheel, which forces the burned gasses out an exhaust valve. With multiple cylinder engines, the flywheel becomes unnecessary as the cylinders are arranged to fire at different times, which provides momentum for cylinders not experiencing a power stroke. Brayton engines also compress the fuel, but not in the cylinder. Brayton pressurized the air in its own chamber, passed it through vaporized fuel, and then into a chamber where it was ignited by a steady flame, as opposed to the spark used as ignition in the Otto. The “injected” fuel burned rather than exploded to drive a piston. The engine was reciprocal, meaning that the piston was driven back and forth by alternating expansions on either side. Each thrust allowed the spent fuel from the previous thrust to be expelled. The “constant pressure” principle was later called the “Brayton cycle” and found application in gas turbines, which are now employed to power jet engines.

  CHAPTER 11

  CHALLENGERS

  Well before the November 1892 election, a clever, young, well-connected attorney named Elihu B. Frost, “E. B.,” decided that Holland’s “torpedo boat” might be an idea worth investing in. He spoke with Charles Morris and tried to get a sense of what was needed to get Holland restarted. He was pleased to learn that Holland had obtained a string of patents for his designs and had even more pending; less pleased to know that Holland—and Morris—had no investment capital of their own. Frost asked his father, Calvin, also his law partner, to ask around in Washington and find out if submarines might be in the navy’s future plans. (Their law offices were at 120 Broadway in New York City, but Calvin in particular did a good deal of business in the capital.)

  Frost did nothing further for some months, likely because he had heard from his father that Secretary Tracy had no interest in reinstating the submarine contract. But as soon as the election was over, Frost either learned of or strongly suspected that the submarine competition would be revived. He began laying the groundwork for a partnership with Holland. On February 28, 1893, in advance of Cleveland’s inauguration, Frost told Morris he was prepared to form a company with Holland and would provide whatever funds were necessary to get the inventor back to the shipyard.1 A few days later, on March 3, 1893, Congress approved an appropriation of $200,000 to fund the construction of a working submarine. The navy’s ordnance bureau appointed three serving officers to form the Board on Submarine Torpedo Boats, which would evaluate the competing designs and construction cost estimates, and then submit recommendations to Commander Sicard and incoming Secretary Herbert. Just weeks after that, the John P. Holland Torpedo Boat Company was incorporated in New York State—John P. Holland, manager, and Elihu B. Frost, secretary-treasurer.

  By June, Holland had completed plans for his board submission, a significantly improved design from the one that had won the previous two competitions. The unreliable Brayton was scrapped. On the surface or running awash, the boat would be powered by twin one-thousand-horsepower steam engines, each of which would turn a rear propeller. Once submerged, the exhaust stack would be retracted, and the boat would be powered by a battery array. Storage batteries, called “chloride accumulators,” were a nascent technology and performance and life of the charge were ongoing problems. Still, electricity was silent, did not generate excessive heat inside the hull, and required no venting. To recharge the batteries, Holland, like Baker, would install a dynamo that would turn when the steam engines were engaged.

  The vessel would carry sufficient compressed air to run submerged for up to twelve hours, and compressed air would also be used to launch Whitehead torpedoes from the dual tubes mounted in the bow. The air reservoirs could be refilled with retractable tubes thirty feet long that would be extended above the surface while the boat remained submerged.

  As with all Holland designs, the boat, eighty feet long and eleven across, had a fixed center of gravity, was always positively buoyant, and could dive at however steep an angle was required. Diving planes were at the rear. A pressure gauge would automatically halt the dive before the boat reached its crush depth of 180 feet.

  As in Tuck’s Peacemaker, the captain would stand on a platform in the center of the boat, allowing him to peer out of a domed conning tower fitted with plate-glass windows. From there, he could pilot the boat and fire the torpedoes. The turret was armored to
protect the conning tower and the smokestack. An engineer was stationed immediately below.

  Holland and Frost submitted the $7,500 deposit and $90,000 surety bond required with each bid, and then, at the end of June, traveled to Washington to officially present their plans at the office of the secretary of the navy.

  Although the board had expected as many as eight designs to be submitted, it turned out that there were only three. Nordenfelt and Tuck had dropped out. George Baker, however, was still in the hunt. He had come a long way since the previous competition four years before. Not only had he built a submarine, he had sailed it.

  Baker, who had made his money inventing a machine to fabricate barbed wire, had been fascinated with undersea navigation for years, although for most of his life, he lived and worked in Iowa. He set up a Chicago office in 1887, mostly to have access to Lake Michigan, and then moved to Detroit, also to be on the water.

  Completely self-taught, his 1893 boat was an odd combination of primitive and predictive. In an era of ever-heavier armored construction, he had fashioned his submarine of wood—oak, six inches thick, with one-inch wood sheathing. He had installed a dual propulsion system, steam on the surface and a battery array when submerged. Baker’s exhaust stack would also be retracted, but he had no armor protection for it or the conning tower. His captain was stationed on a center platform as well, peering out of a windowed dome. The first prototype was a disaster. It leaked through the wooden seams at a twenty-foot depth, his steam motor was balky, and at one point during surface running, the batteries exploded. If he had been submerged, he could not have gotten out alive. By July 1892, however, he had built a functional vessel and was making test runs in the Detroit River.2

  Baker boat

  His working boat was cigar-shaped, forty feet long and nine across—much stubbier and less hydrodynamic than Holland’s—and could be operated by a crew of two, although there was room inside for five, if necessary.3 It seemed to retain a store of positive buoyancy but some reports indicate that it became negatively buoyant to submerge.

  The vessel was propelled by twin four-bladed propellers, mounted amidships rather than at the rear. It could make eight knots on the surface, but only four or five submerged. The propellers were mounted on a bevel that would turn on an angle to submerge the boat or bring it to the surface, and then return to the horizontal to propel it forward. “By placing the propellers also at the point of the boat’s centre of gravity,” an engineering journal observed, “Mr. Baker has sought to secure greater stability and to maintain the craft, under all circumstances, with its keel parallel to the surface of the water.”4 But mounting the propellers as Baker had done created difficulties in maintaining stability and constant depth, and the only report of its underwater performance indicated that he had been unable to solve either problem.5 Baker’s craft would also descend on an even keel, a method Holland had disparaged as slow and unwieldy.

  Interior of the Baker boat

  But George Baker knew that coming up with a design was only one part of the requirements—as important, likely more so, was gaining the influence to get it approved. This Baker had done superbly. By the time the contract was to be awarded, Baker had cultivated an impressive array of supporters for his wooden boat in Congress and the Navy Department.6 Among his most important converts was the new head of the ordnance bureau, Captain William T. Sampson, a highly touted line officer who had captained an ironclad in the Civil War and would command the blockade of Havana in the coming war with Spain. As soon as Sampson took up his duties, replacing Montgomery Sicard, Baker traveled to Washington to meet him. The two spent a good deal of time together, and also with Iowa senator William Allison. In addition, while in the capital, Baker had the foresight to hire a retired army general as his lawyer.

  By the time the board was to officially accept plans and specifications, June 30, 1893, Baker was confident he had outmaneuvered John Holland, at least sufficiently to prevent Holland from grabbing an outright victory. Still, there was a third entrant, a newcomer to submarine design, someone who neither Baker nor Holland had ever before encountered. His name was Simon Lake and, astoundingly, he was only twenty-seven years old.

  Lake had been raised in Toms River, New Jersey, on the Atlantic Ocean, sixty miles east of Philadelphia. He had a lengthy pedigree—his father’s family had settled in America in the 1700s and his mother’s ancestors had landed in Massachusetts in1632. The elder Lake was a successful businessman, the owner of a foundry and machine shop, and his father, also named Simon, had built the first bridge to Atlantic City, a city he had helped found.

  The younger Simon had become fascinated with submarines as a boy, when he read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “Shortly afterward, I took up the study of natural physics and became interested in the use of the diving bell. Being an excellent swimmer and fond of boats, I spent most of my vacation times on or about the water.” In 1880, at age fourteen, as John Holland was testing the Holland 1, Lake drew up a design for an undersea vessel that contained many of the elements he would use in later craft, such as diving planes and an air lock so that divers could enter and exit the craft underwater, as they had in Verne’s Nautilus. “These plans were shown to my father, who rather discouraged me in the matter on the ground that submarine navigation was something that great engineers had given a lot of attention to, and that I had better give more attention to my regular school studies than to fooling around with experiments of that nature.”7

  He followed his father’s advice to a point. Although he stayed in school, he left a year later to study mechanical engineering at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He returned home at seventeen to work in his father’s foundry, where he showed sufficient flair to be made a partner just after his twentieth birthday. It soon became apparent that Lake’s real talent was invention. He designed and built a number devices used in local fishing boats, including a dredge and steering gear, but he never stopped tinkering with the idea of a vessel that could navigate under water.

  Simon Lake

  Unlike virtually everyone else who was involved in the same quest, Lake was not thinking of developing an undersea craft as a weapon of war, but rather for commercial use, primarily salvage. His idea was to build a boat with a wheeled bottom that he could literally drive along the seabed. Divers would be able to gather whatever had sunk there, entering and exiting the boat by means of the air lock.

  He applied for a patent for a basic design in 1893. Like Holland and Baker, he would employ dual propulsion—a steam engine on the surface or shallowly submerged, but compressed air rather than electricity if the boat went deeper. Also like Baker—but unlike Holland—his boat would not dive and surface on an angle, but rather on an even keel, always parallel to the sea floor. A “viewing tube” would allow the captain to peer above the surface when submerged, and other, longer tubes would extend to the surface to refresh the air for the crew and vent exhaust if the boat was running on steam.

  When he heard of the 1893 competition, Lake drew up his plans and traveled to Washington full of optimism, with visions of leaving as the United States Navy’s anointed submarine builder. As soon as he arrived at the office where the bids would be opened, however, he realized that water was not the only medium in which he needed to learn to navigate.

  I was still a youngster and knew nothing about the difficulties met by outsiders in getting hearings before government officials in Washington. On the appointed day, in June 1893, on which the bids were to be opened, I appeared in Washington with my plans and specifications under my arm, and was directed to the room adjoining the Secretary’s office, where a large number of people were assembled. At this time I knew nothing of anyone else’s experiments in submarines, and thought that I was the first and only one. I was consequently much disturbed to see so many people present. I sat down on a lounge, and a young man a little older than myself sat down on the lounge alongside of me and said, “Well, I suppose you are here on the same errand as the rest of
us; I see you have some plans, and I suppose you have designs of a submarine boat which you are going to submit.” I said, “Yes, and I guess there are going to be a good many plans submitted, judging by the number of people who are here.” The gentleman then said, “No, I only know of two others who are going to submit plans: there is Mr. J. P. Holland, the gentleman standing over there, and my father, Mr. George C. Baker, of Chicago.”8

  Lake then inquired as to the identity of the others in the room. Young Baker, as it turned out, knew just about all of them. “There is Senator So-and-so, and Congressman So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, the great lawyer.” When Lake realized that all the notables were there to lobby for his opponents, he said to himself, “Well, Lakey, it looks as though you were not going to have much of a show here.”

  Lake’s account from there differs from others. According to Lake, he returned to Baltimore after the submission “to tend to other business,” but “was much surprised, therefore, to receive, some time afterward, a telegram from the editor of the New York Tribune, a Mr. Hall, stating that he had received information from Washington that my plans were looked upon most favorably by the majority of the Naval Board and that they were going to adopt my type of boat.” Lake claimed that Hall asked for a description of his submarine and an interview, but neither appeared in the Tribune until October 1894, more than one year later.*9 Further, Lake said he did not bother returning to Washington, because he assumed he would be informed by the navy secretary’s office when the contract was official, “which is proof positive,” he added, “that I was still young and ignorant.”10

  But no summons to the capital was forthcoming. “Nothing further was heard of the matter until I saw a notice in the paper that it had been decided not to build any submarines at that time, and that the matter had been postponed indefinitely.” Lake never backed away from the assertion that his design had been chosen. “Some years afterward I met the late Admiral Mathews, and he informed me then that he had been a member of the board, and that four of the five members of that board were in favor of adopting my type of boat and of having the government start the development of a submarine on those lines, but that the constructor of the board opposed it on the grounds that when the boat was running on the bottom on wheels she might run off from a precipice and go down head first, and reach so great a depth as to be crushed, evidently not realizing that her great static stability and the use of her hydroplanes would prevent this from happening.”