Going Deep

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Lake also suggested that the new appropriations should not simply follow along after older ones. He included a passage that stipulated that prior to any purchase, “any American inventor or owner of a submarine boat may give reasonable notice and have his, her, or its submarine boat tested before October 1, 1902, by comparison or competition, or both, with a Government submarine boat or any private competitor.” The comparative results, with recommendations, would be forwarded to the Secretary of the Navy, “who may purchase or contract for submarine boats in a manner that will best advance the interests of the United States in submarine warfare.” Lake insisted that his only goal was to ensure that “American inventors may have a fair and impartial opportunity to compete in the science of submarine warfare and thereby engender healthy competition, which will develop the highest type of submarine craft and reward American inventors.”3 While the “free and fair” competition Lake proposed applied only to new orders—and there were none proposed in that year’s naval appropriations—it could certainly be extended to existing contracts as well. If Lake won, the navy could simply then refuse to accept any Holland boats and award the existing seven boat contract to him as well.

  That three free and fair competitions had already been completed, with Holland winning each one, seemed to Lake merely an inconvenience. Still, those competitions had been judged only on the basis of plans. Lake was now proposing that they be repeated using actual boats. Congressman Hill succeeded in securing a special session of the naval affairs committee on March 28 specifically to allow Lake to press his case. For his appearance, he brought along Foster Voorhees, acting as the company’s attorney.

  Before Lake testified, Voorhees reiterated Lake’s plea for a government-sanctioned competition to break Electric Boat’s monopoly. “Believing that this type of boat is coming into use, and that the Government ought to get the very best type possible, and anticipating that those behind the type already adopted will probably make application at this session for an increased appropriation for the purchase of new submarine boats made by them, we have thought it best that this committee should first be acquainted with the merits of the Lake submarine torpedo boat.”

  Voorhees also stressed that the “respectfully submitted” clause his client wanted the committee to approve was “perfectly fair on its face.” With studied innocence, he observed, “It simply says that the Secretary of the Navy may, if he is satisfied after comparisons and tests have been made, order not more than three boats.” Lake was asking Congress to pay for neither the construction nor the equipment, but was merely saying, “We have a boat here which we desire to have tested. If you think it is worth purchasing, buy it and, if not, ours is the loss.” Then, undercutting Lake’s later assertion that he had gone to Washington only at the behest of ardent supporters of his design, Voorhees noted that “Captain Lake” had “asked for this hearing.”

  Simon Lake’s boats might not have contained torpedoes, but his testimony to Congress did. Lake’s first line of attack was to lump Holland’s boats in with all previous efforts—the Hunley, for example—recounting the many fatalities and failures of what he described as “diving type” boats. (When the committee members referred to submarines as the “Holland type,” Lake asked them to say “diving type” instead.) Of course, Holland boats had never been responsible for a serious injury, let alone a fatality. The closest call had been the gas leak, a mishap that occurred on the Argonaut as well. The danger, Lake assured the congressmen, was that if a diving boat got out of trim, became heavy in the nose from even “one ounce” of extra ballast, it could easily plunge to the bottom. “The ‘Tuck’ boat Peacemaker, experimented with some years ago in New York Bay, ran head first into the mud, and the records show that many of this type of which I have spoken have done the same thing.” Lake omitted mentioning that Holland’s boats were positively buoyant and in case of a failure of the motor, would simply bob to the surface.

  Even if they did not sink, Lake insisted, diving boats were longitudinally unstable, with a shifting center of gravity, another untruth since Holland had engineered his boats with a fixed center of gravity in order to dive and surface safely. Lake painted a far different picture. “You are like a vessel in a fog, going between the surface and the bottom. You have no guiding medium, and instead of having only two directions in which you can go, right and left, as a surface vessel has, you can go in all sorts of directions. Currents will deflect your course; every wave rolling above the vessel imparts an up-and-down motion to the particles of water beneath, so a vessel remaining stationary takes on, of course, that motion.” For a Lake vessel, crawling along the sea bottom, he stressed, longitudinal stability ceased to be an issue. This was a repetition of Admiral O’Neil’s assertion that Holland boats could operate only in calm waters, which ignored that many successful submerged voyages had occurred with storms raging overhead. Lake leveled a number of other criticisms at Holland boats, each either a distortion or an outright falsehood, for example, that Holland had not yet figured out how to maintain an accurate compass heading, or that it was impossible for a Holland boat to cruise submerged at a constant depth.

  Lake was on firmer ground describing the virtues of his own boats, of which there were many. Nonetheless, his main thrust was an attempt to undermine faith in the Holland design. The hearing was held in the manner of a grand jury procedure, with only the prosecution present. Lake’s indictments solidified the opposition of some of the committee members—who Lake and likely Ebenezer Hill were actively cultivating—and created doubt in the minds of some who had until then been supporters of Electric Boat.

  But Isaac Rice, who Lake described as a “pushing, ruthless, hard-finished millionaire,” was not about to absorb body punches without returning some of his own. Rice’s first blow was robust. As Lake recounts the story, after he testified in Washington, “I got a wire: ‘The Electric Boat Company has attached everything. They have men in possession at the dock and they have seized all our papers.’” Lake rushed home, “half sick with worry.” When he arrived at his plant, “I found one deputy sheriff loafing on the unfinished boat and another asleep on a drawing board in the office. Up to this time I had not known what it was all about. Now I discovered that I had been sued for half a million dollars on a charge of libel, the Electric Boat Company being the complainant.”4

  Lake was stunned to find his business at risk, and he soon claimed to have found out what had precipitated the lawsuit. “Some days previously I had prepared a letter to send out to my stockholders. We needed more money for construction purposes and I was appealing to them to stand for another assessment. In my effort to assure them of ultimate success I used a phrase something like this: ‘I have the authority of high officers of the Navy for the statement that the Lake boat is far superior to any other.’ I did not state the names of the officers concerned, but any one familiar with the situation could have guessed at them. Mr. Lebbeus B. Miller was then treasurer of the Lake Torpedo Boat Company and he objected to the letter when I read it at a directors’ meeting. ‘I wouldn’t send that letter out, Simon,’ said he. ‘It isn’t wise.’”

  According to Lake, he did not send the letter, “but some spy turned a copy of it over to the Electric Boat Company, and they sued us.” Under Connecticut law, the very initiation of a lawsuit could trigger an attachment. “Samuel Fessenden was the attorney for the Electric Boat Company, and promptly tied our property up hard and fast. Judge Foster told me there was but one way in which I could get the company property released and go on building the boat. That was to put up a bond of $1,500,000, as required by law.”

  Facing disaster—he did not have sufficient cash—Lake was saved when Lebbeus Miller posted the bond from his personal assets, requiring nothing more from Lake than his word. The bond would not be released for ten years. “In all that time, we could not get into court for a trial. But we were not worried any more, for Mr. Miller’s action gave us the semblance of financial stability we may have lacked before, and
no one cared to attack us recklessly.”5

  If the events transpired as Lake said, however, the letter that prompted the lawsuit would have been an internal communication, limited to Lake Company executives, and therefore could not be the basis of a libel suit. That status would not have changed if the contents had been leaked to Electric Boat by a “spy.” One cannot, in effect, steal the property of another and then sue based on illegally acquired evidence. Even if Electric Boat had become aware of the contents innocently, there were still no grounds for legal action unless the contents were more widely disseminated and by someone other than Electric Boat. One cannot libel oneself. In addition, Lake’s assertion that the letter merely stated what was already publicly known—that Admirals O’Neil and Melville favored his design—could hardly be libelous. Libel or slander is defined as publishing defamatory material that the publisher knows to be false. Finally, the seizure of assets pending the posting of a bond was not mandatory—a judge would first have been required to decide that the action had sufficient merit to justify seizure. Without that discretionary power, Connecticut would have been buried under an avalanche of frivolous lawsuits.

  That the seizure was approved meant that the contents of the letter were more than a restatement of publicly known facts and that they were made available to wide audience, in this case, those who would decide the disposition of naval appropriations allocated for submarine construction. Or, far more likely, the letter was not the precipitating agent at all, but rather it was Lake’s testimony to Congress, in which he more or less described the Holland submarine as a deathtrap, and implied that Holland Torpedo Boat Company representatives lied to the naval affairs committee to obtain their initial appropriation and then intentionally misrepresented performance results of their product. Given that both Melville and O’Neil questioned the very same performance criteria—which by then had been established before any number of witnesses—would indicate this explanation was more likely.

  Rice didn’t stop with the libel suit. He also requested a hearing of his own before the naval affairs committee, this one both to examine Lake’s accusations and to take testimony from a variety of witnesses, including naval officers, who had direct experience with the Holland boats. His request was granted and the hearing opened on May 20.

  Where Lake had relied almost solely on his own testimony and the opposition of Admirals O’Neil and Melville to the Holland boats—although neither was questioned by the committee—Rice brought with him a potent roster, beginning with Richard Wainwright, superintendent of the Naval Academy. The Holland had been anchored at Annapolis for almost two years and been run in Chesapeake Bay almost daily. Wainwright, who had commanded a warship during the Spanish-American War and had himself been aboard the Holland, was thus sufficiently authoritative to evaluate the boat’s performance.

  As to the decision whether to include submarines in the American fleet, Wainwright was unequivocal. The Holland submarine could no longer be characterized as experimental, but was rather an important, fully formed instrument of naval warfare, that, had it been deployed properly by the Spanish, would have lengthened the war and made it more costly in American lives. When asked to detail the Holland’s imperfections, Wainwright replied that he didn’t see any. “Every mechanical device can be improved,” he added, “but I could not pick out any particular line of improvement which might occur.”6 He told the congressmen that not only could the Holland fire a torpedo as accurately as any other submarine, but also as accurately as any surface torpedo boat.

  Wainwright was equally firm in emphasizing that this conclusion applied only to the Holland design. Although he had not seen the Lake boat—no one in the navy had—when asked if he had sufficient information from the plans and specifications to make a comparison, Wainwright expressed no doubt. “I have, sir. [The Lake boat] is not suitable for a naval weapon, except to raise counter-mines.”

  Soon afterward, Congressman Alston Dayton of West Virginia broke in and directed a hostile line of questions to Captain Wainwright. Dayton would take this same quasi-prosecutorial approach to any witness who spoke favorably of the Holland design. He made no mention of the virtues of the Lake boats per se, but did all he could to gain an admission that the accusations leveled by Lake two months earlier were accurate, and that these witnesses were equivocating for reasons never stated but nonetheless quite clear. Others on the committee, including the chairman, George Foss of Illinois, also tried to elicit criticisms of the Holland. What was apparent from this first witness was that the committee was sharply, and perhaps rigidly, divided.

  Wainwright, however, would not be rattled, and did not budge from his testimony. Dayton was then forced to resort to silly arguments, such as, since it did not take that long to build a submarine, why not wait until war is imminent before undertaking construction? Wainwright and other witnesses pointed out that for testing and training the crew, if for no other reason, new technology such as a submarine must be built in anticipation of future conflicts.

  The most significant exchange came when Dayton tried to press Wainwright to support Lake’s proposal that a competition be held. Dayton asked, “Do you not believe it would be wise policy on the part of Congress to experiment with all of these boats and encourage all improvement, all development, and if it is a patented article, eventually purchase the right to construct its own?” But Wainwright was ready for him. “I believe it would be a waste of money, Mr. Dayton, to experiment on a boat that was known to be of the wrong principle. As far as I am concerned, I am confident that those that you mention [the Lake boats] are on the wrong principle. The Holland is on the correct principle.”

  The next witness was Lawrence Spear. Although Spear opened by informing the committee that he had handed in his papers and was leaving the navy for a post with Electric Boat, he was questioned in his capacity as “superintendent of construction of all the vessels building at the Crescent shipyard.” He was asked the same questions as had been Captain Wainwright and gave the same answers. The Holland design was no longer experimental; the porpoise method of diving and surfacing was necessary in a submarine warship; it could launch torpedoes quickly and accurately and then dive to avoid a counterattack; an electric heater kept the crew comfortable; the Fulton carried sufficient provisions and had adequate sleeping space for an extended time at sea. Spear also dismissed Lake’s assertion that the Holland boats could keep neither a straight course nor maintain longitudinal stability as “moonlight on the lake.” It could in fact navigate perfectly under the water, and it ran with excellent stability with minimal intervention by the crew.

  Most important, however, was Spear’s explicit assertion that “the Holland boat is far superior for military purposes.” The reason was simple. “The Holland boat is designed as a submarine torpedo-boat. The Lake boat, if we allow the inventor all he claims, becomes in effect a dirigible, self supporting diving vessel, which would be useless for a torpedo-boat.”

  Spear, while certainly not impartial, nonetheless presented the best explanation of why the Lake boats would be unsuited for combat.

  Captain Lake’s preferred method is to drop down to the bottom of the water and run on the bottom—a sort of submarine automobile on wheels, as he expresses it. His preferred method is to lower the anchor-weight and then pull his boat down by those anchor-weights until he rests on the bottom, and then to run ahead. When he wants to come up again he releases the anchor-weight and blows out a little water-ballast, and rises to the surface. Now let us assume he is using his boat as a torpedo boat, and he wants to attack vessels blockading or bombarding. Whenever he wants to come to the surface—he cannot see where the enemy is; the enemy may be moving and he cannot see more than forty or fifty feet under water—he has to stop his boat. He has to absolutely change its movement, change the condition of the weight, and rise to the surface. He then takes a bearing on the enemy, and then puts his winding-gear in operation and pulls his boat down to the bottom, and then resumes operations and goes on
. While he is doing that the Holland boat would come up to the surface without any loss of speed, under way, making her full speed. Her conning tower would be out of water not exceeding five seconds, and she would go down again and be on her way perhaps half a mile before the Lake boat resumed operations.

  Although once again Congressman Dayton attempted to force an admission from Spear that the Holland had been oversold to the navy—so accusatory that he needed to be restrained by the chairman—Spear held his ground. The next two witnesses were Lieutenants Harry Caldwell and Arthur MacArthur. Each praised the Holland and each was subjected to a similar and unsuccessful cross-examination by Alston Dayton and other opponents of the boat.

  The most persuasive witness, however, was the final naval officer to be called, a twenty-five-year-old ensign named Charles Preston Nelson. Nelson, four years out of the Naval Academy, and with only two as a commissioned officer, was acknowledged by all sides as completely impartial. He had come to submarines not through either of the competitors, but rather simply because he found the technology irresistible.

  Nelson had recently returned from extended assignments in the Philippines, in China, and then Japan. When asked if he had any familiarity or knowledge as to the Holland torpedo-boat, Nelson replied, “Yes, sir. During my six weeks’ leave at Annapolis I made it a special point on account of being very much interested in them, and took every run that the Holland made. I went down just for the special purpose of learning all I could about the boat.” He added that he made “sometimes two and sometimes three runs a week.” He had also been aboard the Fulton, when it sailed from New York headed for Norfolk.