Holland
The Holland was indeed an immense advance from the Plunger, or from any other attack boat ever put into the water. Propulsion was with a single screw, powered on the surface by a forty-five-horsepower Otto-type gasoline engine—precisely the sort that Holland had not been allowed to install on the Plunger—and a seventy-five-horsepower electric motor powered by an Exide battery array that could run for eight hours underwater.3 Exide batteries, also called “chloride accumulators,” were fabricated by a recently developed lead-acid process someone had dubbed “excellent oxide.” They were not only far more powerful than any batteries previously available but also longer lasting and rechargeable. The process had been patented and the product was sold exclusively by the Electric Storage Battery Company, a corporation that had recently been acquired up by a New York financier named Isaac Rice.
With the Otto engine and Exide batteries, dual propulsion had become practical. In a rendition quite likely overdramatized, Holland was later said to have come upon the arrangement serendipitously. After encountering “the usual difficulty in obtaining the right engine,” he had “almost despaired of finding one.” But then, “Chance took the inventor to an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden, where he noticed the exhibit of an electric-light plant designed for a country home. The generator was driven by a 50 horsepower Otto gasoline engine . . . the internal-combustion gasoline engine giving large power with small space and weight had just been developed . . . ‘That is what I want for my boat!’ he exclaimed. He promptly bought the engine and installed it on the Holland.”4
In his new boat, Holland found a simple means to ensure a fixed center of gravity, thus solving the longitudinal stability problem that had bedeviled designers since the Hunley. Because the Holland dove and surfaced at an angle, no significant volume of water could be allowed to slosh around in ballast tanks that were only partially filled, which could lead to a fatal uncontrolled plunge. Other designers had tried pendulums, some, like Bauer, lead weights that would ride forward or back along the keel, and still others had installed pumps that would be activated automatically to return the vessel to proper attitude.*
Each of those methods, however, was slow and cumbersome. Holland correctly assumed that an attack submarine would need the enhanced speed and maneuverability angle diving would create, and so boats would be driven downward by rear diving planes, not gravity. The Holland, according to its designer, would be able to submerge in sixty seconds, three or four times faster than an even-keel descent. Skeptics, of which there were many, including Simon Lake, considered “porpoise diving” inefficient and dangerous in that it might provoke fatal instability—excess water in the bow could not be compensated for quickly enough.
Holland’s epiphany was that in order to create a fixed center of gravity, ballast must remain fixed as well. He therefore designed his main ballast tank to fit around the center of the vessel like a belt and to always be completely full. A smaller, rear tank was kept full as well. Holland then installed a forward trim tank that was only two feet long, not enough to affect the boat’s attitude when only partially full. He could take on and expel water from this tank to compensate for used fuel, a fired torpedo, or any other incident that would alter the distribution of weight inside the boat. (He would soon install dedicated compensation tanks that would hold the same weight in water of a fired torpedo.) With stability thus maintained, the stern planes could angle the boat up or down with little difficulty.
The hull of the Holland was extremely hydrodynamic—Nixon and Busch contributed a great deal to its design—and for armaments, the Holland had one eighteen-inch torpedo tube in the bow, as well as an eight-inch pneumatic gun mounted above it. An additional pneumatic gun was mounted at the rear. The boat carried three torpedoes, which were pressure sensitive to control their depth.
Holland had devised an ingenious additional wrinkle to aid in underwater navigation. Previously he had discovered that, contrary to his initial belief, steering a straight course underwater by compass alone was nearly impossible. After he leveled off from a fifteen-degree down-angle dive, the compass needle “swung around to a complete circle and vibrated a good deal before coming to rest.”5 The craft was then found to be approximately ninety degrees off course. Additional tests determined that error was constant, but the degree and direction were not. With no other means of determining direction while submerged—looking through the conning tower ports achieved nothing—a submarine commander would have either to surface often or run awash to know where he was going and thus could hardly approach an enemy with stealth.
Holland cross-section
Holland discovered that the compass error was caused by a variety of iron fittings and machine parts that changed position during and after a dive, altering the orientation of the compass’s compensating magnets, installed to correct false readings caused by that very iron machinery. To solve the problem, he created (and patented) a mechanism he called a “triangular drag,” which he positioned just above the diving planes, and which would serve as a primitive autopilot for ensuring straight-line travel while submerged. Like many Holland innovations, the triangular drag was deceptive in its simplicity. “It is necessary, when the boat is running on the surface, to put it on the exact course it is to follow just before the dive is made. The [planes] are tipped, and then this drag comes into play. If the boat veers to the right or left this drag sways to the opposite side. It is so arranged that it works a lever that at once swings the steering-rudder of the ship to the side that will bring the boat straight on its course again.”6 Holland also created a water-pressure-sensitive control device to automatically maintain the submarine’s depth, both at the end of a dive and when cruising underwater. Also lever-based, the mechanism connected directly to the diving planes, which would then be angled in either direction to compensate for any deviation from the depth set by the operator. A third device, similarly constructed, would allow the boat to be steered automatically.
These innovations were all built into the Holland, and although the May 1897 launch of the new boat did not lead to immediate sea trials, Holland, or more likely Frost, used the occasion to exert pressure on the navy. The press, willing to print any story that was fed to them about the glamorous new technological wonder, would be employed regularly in the coming years as a surrogate publicity agent. “Requests were made by the United States and other Governments for permission to have engineers on board on the trial trips,” one story revealed. “Mr. Holland will not grant the requests. After the success of the boat is shown he will accommodate all representatives of the Governments, but not before. It is said that several Governments have already bid for the boat, untried as she is. The plans upon which she was built were unofficially approved by naval officers, and are patented in this country and abroad by Mr. Holland.”7 There were at that time no bids for the boat, but for what Holland and Frost had in mind, the appearance of foreign demand would be crucial.
The idea was to swap out the Plunger for the Holland, to demonstrate to Congress that they could have the superior vessel at no additional cost. But since the navy was committed to the Plunger design, until the new boat was built, Holland had to at least give the appearance of progress on the old or risk cancellation. With Simon Lake waiting eagerly in the wings, cancellation was an untenable risk. But as long as work on the Plunger appeared to be moving forward, the navy could be kept at arm’s length until Holland and Frost could try to persuade the congressmen to amend the contract in favor of the new boat.
So, on August 7, 1897, Holland announced that the Plunger had reached a stage of completion sufficient to be given a trial at the shipyard, albeit to an audience that included no senior naval officers or members of Congress. Friendly journalists were invited, however, and from the news reports, a casual observer would have thought the test run a staggering success.
As reported in the New York Sun:
Amid a din of cheers and the shrieking of steam whistles, the Holland su
bmarine torpedo boat Plunger slid down the ways of the Columbia Iron Works at noon today. As she struck the water she rolled violently from side to side, and the men on her superstructure, who had volunteered to go with her on her first plunge clung to the masts, which bore the Stars and Stripes and Navy Jack. Several ladles screamed in fright but after a second or two the steel fish slowly righted and rested with about a third of her body above the water line. On a platform erected beside the port bow of the boat stood Miss Ernestine Wardwell and her father, Col. Wardwell. In her right hand Miss Wardwell held a bottle of champagne decorated with ribbons of the national and Maryland colors. The moment the vessel moved she shattered the bottle against the bow and said: “I christen thee Plunger.” A cheer arose from the assemblage, which for an hour previous had been pouring through the gateway of the iron works, and then everything inshore and afloat in the neighborhood that possessed a steam whistle blew it in salute to the strange new craft.8
But Holland most wanted to use the occasion to provoke interest in the boat he was building up the coast. Reporters obliged. “The Plunger is not regarded as so efficient a boat as the Holland, launched at Nixon’s ship yard in Elizabeth, N. J., last spring. She can only use torpedoes from two tubes in her bow in her warfare. The Holland not only has a torpedo tube in her bow, but an aerial gun in the bow and a submarine gun in her stern. The Plunger is simply a submarine torpedo boat. The Holland can fight most destructively, probably, when running on the surface, being capable of hurling dynamite cartridges through the air for a distance of a mile or more.”
Holland also did not resist the temptation to take shots at the navy. “The Plunger, being the first vessel of the kind authorized by the Government, was loaded down with requirements by the experts, which, it is known, were supplied by the Holland Company simply because the Government insisted upon them, and against the better judgment of the Holland Company’s naval experts. One of these requirements was the downhaul screws, to enable the vessel to remain stationary in the water when submerged. Another was the use of two torpedo tubes in the bow. It is said that only one could be used at one time and therefore an extra tube is superfluous. The use of steam for surface running and the consequent necessity of coal bunkers is also regarded as a drawback.”
The original Plunger with its unworkable three-screw design.
What the article failed to report was the performance of the Plunger, which was because the boat did not perform. It neither submerged nor cruised for any significant distance. Unlike the Holland, which had slid off the ways without fanfare in order to be fine-tuned, the Plunger did not venture out of port because there were doubts it could return. In fact, the Plunger would never cruise successfully out of Baltimore harbor.
The stage thus set, E. B. Frost made his move—he proposed to the navy that they be willing to write off the Plunger experiment if the Holland Torpedo Boat Company, which had used its own money, demonstrated that Holland was a superior craft. The company would do so in a series of official tests undertaken solely at its expense. As a further display of good faith, work on the Plunger would continue as well. If those conditions were met, Frost offered, the contract would remain in force and no one else would be allowed to submit an alternative design.
Although the navy did not immediately agree, nor did they reject the notion out of hand. Lake was livid. His opinion of the officers charged with military procurement had remained deeply negative, although his denunciations seem more appropriate to Holland’s experiences than his own. He wrote later:
It has been said that Americans invent and the Europeans develop. This statement seems to be borne out in fact, so far as our military inventions at least are concerned. From the time the Wrights first introduced the flying machine in Europe all the important countries over there have been consistently assisting inventors in improving the construction of the planes and machinery for driving them, while our own country has stood almost at a standstill. Our government gave no aid to foster this American invention so that it could be gradually developed, but rather our authorities made the first requirements so difficult to fulfill that there was no incentive to work; which is a mistake often made by men with a theoretical rather than a practical education. A practical man may evolve something radically new in the arts or sciences, but to get it introduced into the government service it must first be passed upon and approved by men who at the country’s expense have received, for the most part, a purely theoretical education; and nine times out of ten these men get some additional theories of their own which they insist must be incorporated in the machine or apparatus, and thus make it impossible of operation or delay its accomplishment. It is probably due to this cause that we are now forced to go to France for plans of our aeroplanes and their driving machinery to enable us to compete with the Germans’ machines.9
Lake accused the naval officers charged with evaluating inventions as being “too busy with the routine of their professions to give the necessary time to a through investigation of devices other than those with which they are . . . familiar,” a clear reference to Holland’s design. He further insisted that “not a single fundamental invention . . . has emanated from an army or navy officer during his service,” a statement that was blatantly false, as Lake, familiar with Zalinski’s pneumatic gun, was clearly aware. Over the course of the next decade, in fact, Lake would consistently decry the rigidity and the lack of support for inventors by Congress and military brass, while at the same time accusing Holland’s company—although not Holland himself—of using all means possible, both immoral and illegal, to obtain special treatment for its submarines and bilk the Treasury out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
But Holland was having difficulties of his own. On October 13, 1897, with his boat nearing completion, after a day of fine-tuning inside, a “careless workman,” neglected to close a small valve before he left work. The boat took on water throughout the night and when Holland arrived the next morning, he found that his boat had sunk to the bottom of the slip. It was raised eighteen hours later, but all the electrical equipment—motors, generator, wiring, and insulation—the most costly machinery in the vessel, had been damaged by the salt water and was no longer functional. Replacing the electrical system was out of the question—as it was, the company had spent its every last dollar building the Holland on speculation. Dismantling the equipment to clean each part individually was equally out of the question, as it would involve removing most of the steel plates on the upper half of the hull. In desperation, Holland and his engineers tried “every known method of drying out the motors by applying heat externally,” even keeping oil stoves burning inside the hull day and night and applying “superheaters” to the motors, but nothing worked.
In early November 1897, Holland contacted the Electro-Dynamic Company of Philadelphia, which had built the dynamos, and asked that they send “their best technician” to Elizabethport. They sent thirty-four-year-old Frank Cable.
It was a fortuitous choice. Cable was bright, clever, and inventive. After studying the equipment, he decided that “there was only one way of remedying the trouble, and if this course was adopted there was a chance of restoring the boat.” He proposed to reverse the current in the armatures of the dynamo, which, he said, would generate heat internally, within the mechanism itself. Of course, it might also burn up the equipment, removing any remaining faint hope of repair. At that point, Holland felt there was nothing to lose and he gave Cable the go-ahead. Four days later, the electrical system was again in working order. Workmen then removed battery acid from the bilges, and replaced dead battery cells, and by mid-December, Holland could resume work on completing the boat. Not surprisingly, he requested that Cable remain at Elizabethport, which Cable very much wanted to do as well. But the Electro-Dynamic Company refused to part with him, so Cable returned to Philadelphia. He would be back.
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*For Simon Lake, whose Argonaut more or less settled in the water much as had Edmo
nd Halley’s diving bell, a fixed longitudinal center of gravity was less important. For a boat rising or submerging on an even keel, there were many methods to compensate for the sloshing water problem, corrections that could be made before the orientation of the boat shifted too far from the horizontal.
CHAPTER 15
SHEDDING BALLAST
Two months later, the Holland’s construction was complete. On February 25, 1898, ten days after the Maine had been sunk in Havana Harbor and at the precise time that Simon Lake claims to have been rebuffed in his offer of service, John Holland took his boat out for the first time, into the Arthur Kill, the channel that runs between Staten Island, New York, and New Jersey. Observers watching from shore later declared, “The submarine disappeared before our very eyes.” When Frank Cable heard the news, he sent a telegram of congratulations, thrilled that the dynamo had not failed “in time of need.”1
Going Deep Page 16
