Lake had barely fifteen dollars in his pocket when he built the experimental craft and he was necessarily doing things on the cheap. However, the little Argonaut functioned adequately, and, with an air lock and a diver's compartment, the two-man crew 'had a lot of fun running around the bottom of New York Bay picking up clams and oysters.' The press made sport of the craft - 'Fun for Merry Mermen' said the New York Herald on 8 January 1895 - but any publicity is good publicity, thought Lake, and he was right. A number of wealthy citizens - Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds - bought stock in a company promoted on Lake's behalf by a certain Mr. H. who did very well for himself but very little for the inventor. After a good deal of legal wrangling the unscrupulous promoter was ousted and Lake was relieved to find that sufficient remained to build a full-size bottom-crawler. Argonaut First was launched from the cradles alongside the Plunger on 17 August 1897. The new Argonaut was 36 feet long and 9 feet broad. She displaced 59 tons submerged and was built of three-eighths inch steel plate. A 30 hp gasoline engine drove the single propeller and it could also be connected to two toothed driving wheels forward for running on the bottom: a third wheel, directed from inside or out, steered. Air for the engine was initially sucked in through a canvas hose connected to a floating buoy above but this dangerous contrivance was later replaced by two long intake and exhaust masts: if these extended for 50 feet as Lake claimed, they were a good deal longer than a modern snorkel mast and, unsupported, were a potential menace. The vessel was remodelled and enlarged at the Robbins Dry Dock Company, Brooklyn in 1899 and was finally completed with a length of 66 feet in July 1900. The Argonaut was not a warlike submarine and does not directly compare with Holland's boats but the curious commercial craft led to other designs by Lake which had a marked influence on naval designs and much valuable information was gathered. Some of it was negative, particularly with regard to the lack of visibility below water which demanded instruments for navigation. The compass was satisfactory when mounted in a bronze binnacle above the hull but it apparent that future boats would need a viewing device projecting above the water. Lake was very happy with Argonaut. One day in the log he recorded: 'the spirits of the crew appeared to improve the longer we remain below; the time was spent in catching clams, singing, trying to valse, playing cards and writing letters to wives and sweethearts.' The British Naval Attaché to the United States was certainly impressed when he accepted an invitation for a short voyage in 1900 during which Lake, reading between the lines of various surviving reports14, was determined to discomfort the Limey officer. The Attaché enquired, after the boat had dived, whether the submarine (which was vibrating heavily at the time) was actually proceeding along the bottom of the harbour. It was too dark to see anything through the glass scuttles and the electric searchlight in the bows was little help. Lake said that they were indeed on the bottom. He took his visitor through the air-lock into a chamber at the bottom of the craft with a large hatch, secured with butterfly nuts, where he equalized the pressure by means of bottled high-pressure air until it was the same as the water pressure outside. The inventor then opened the test-cock and regulated the internal pressure until water ceased to flow. Satisfied, he dropped open the hatch with sublime confidence. In effect lake had made this part of the submarine into a diving bell. Shells and starfish could be seen lying on the bottom as the intruder passed over them and the British officer no longer had any doubts about where he was. 'Mr. Lake,' said the Attaché, 'you can close the door as soon as you like; I have seen quite enough …' Unfortunately at that moment the submarine took a sharp down-angle. Mr. Lake turned very pale (according to the Attaché) and announced that they had dropped into a hole in the seabed and that they might be held down with some doubt about whether they would ever get out. The guest responded with gratifying concern. However, after some thought, Lake announced that he could release a 10,000 lb weight (it actually weighed 4000 lb) as well as blowing water from the tanks; if everybody rocked the boat at the same time the Argonaut would come to the surface. Everybody on board participated in this performance, which was almost certainly invented and quite unnecessary, and the submarine duly bobbed up above the waves. The impressionable British officer was safely and politely put ashore where he penned a full report to the Admiralty about his grim experience concluding with the remark 'we were all very thankful to land.' Lake, meanwhile, was no doubt laughing with his crew. The unimportant incident deserves its place in history as the first recorded instance of the peculiar and rather cruel sense of humor which submariners, from now on, were to develop as their trade mark. The Attaché was either too nervous or too ignorant to understand some important points which, quite apart from the wheels, made the Argonaut so different from the rest. The craft was the first to have a double hull; that is to say a light external structure, flooded on diving, was doubled around the pressure hull to give a high surface buoyancy of 40 percent. When submerged the four 'leveling valves' did exactly what their name implies: they kept the boat on a substantially level keel rather than being used to steer vertically up and down. The most usual method of diving was to lower two anchor-weights to the bottom and flood in water until buoyancy was less than their weight. The anchor cables were then wound in until Argonaut was on the bottom when more water let in to the ballast tanks and the weights were drawn up into their pockets. It was an ingenious system and enabled Argonaut to make a prolonged operation, lasting two months, during which she covered more than 1000 miles under her power on the surface and on the bottom with five men on board. From Lake's log-book dated 28 July 1898: We spent some hours with Hampton Roads as head-quarters, and made several descents in the waters adjacent thereto; we were desirous of making a search for cables that connected with the mines guarding the entrance to the harbour, but could not obtain permission from the authorities, who were afraid we might accidentally sever them, which would, of course, make their entire system of defense useless. It was therefore necessary for us, in order to demonstrate the practicability of vessels of this type for this purpose to lay a cable ourselves, which we did, across the channel leading to the Patuxent River. We then submerged and, taking our bearings by the compass, ran over the bottom, with the door in our diving compartment open, until we came across the cable, which we hauled up into the compartment with a hook only about four and a half feet long, and we could not avoid the impression that it would be a very easy thing to destroy the efficiency of the present mine system. And how many lives might have been saved and millions of dollars besides, had our Navy been provided with a craft of this type to lead the way into Santiago, Havana or San Juan, off which ports squadrons were compelled to lie for weeks and months owing to fear of mines? 15 An excellent and unique description16 of the Argonaut below water was given by Ray Stannard Baker, an American guest who was treated more seriously than the unfortunate British Attaché: Simon Lake planned an excursion on the bottom of the sea for 12 October 1898. His strange amphibian craft, the Argonaut, about which we had been hearing so many marvels, lay off the pier at Atlantic Highlands. Before we were near enough to make out her hulk, we saw a great letter A, framed of heavy gas-pipe, rising forty feet above the water. A flag rippled from its summit. As we drew nearer, we discovered that there really wasn't any hulk to make out - only a small oblong deck shouldering deep in the water and supporting a slightly larger platform, from which rose what seemed to be a squatty funnel. A moment later we saw the funnel was provided with a cap somewhat resembling a tall silk hat, the crown of which was represented by a brass binnacle. This cap was tilted back, and as we ran along-side, a man stuck his head up over the rim and sang out, 'Ahoy there!' We scrambled up on the little platform, and peered down through the open conning tower, which we had taken for a funnel, into the depths of the ship below. Wilson (the Engineer) had started his gasoline engine. Mr. Lake had taken his place at the wheel, and we were going ahead slowly, steering straight across the bay toward Sandy Hook and deeper water. The Argonaut makes about five knots an hour on the surface, but when she gets deep down on the sea bottom, where she belongs, she can spin along more rapidly. The Argonaut was slowly sinking under the water. We became momentarily more impressed with the extreme smallness of the craft to which we were trusting our lives. The little platform around the conning tower on which we stood - in reality the top of the gasoline tank - was scarcely a half-dozen feet across. Mr. Lake explained that the Argonaut was not only a submarine boat, but much besides. She not only swims either on the surface or beneath it, but she adds to this accomplishment the extraordinary power of diving deep and rolling along the bottom of the sea on wheels. No machine ever before did that. Indeed, the Argonaut is more properly a 'sea motor-cycle' than a 'boat'. We found ourselves in a long, narrow compartment, dimly illuminated by yellowish-green light from the little round glass windows. The stern was filled with Wilson's gasoline engine and the electric motor, and in front of us toward the bow we could see through the heavy steel doorway of the diver's compartment into the lookout room, where there was a single round eye of light. I climbed up the ladder of the conning tower and looked out through one of the glass ports. My eyes were just even with the surface of the water. A wave came driving and foaming entirely over the top of the vessel, and I could see the curiously beautiful sheen of the bright summit of the water above us. It was a most impressive sight. Mr. Lake told me that in very clear water it was difficult to tell just where the air left off and the water began; but in the muddy bay where we were going down the surface looked like a peculiarly clear, greenish pane of glass moving straight up and down, not forward, as the waves appear to move when looked at from above. Now we were entirely under the water. The rippling noises that the waves had made in beating against the upper structure of the boat had ceased. As I looked through the thick glass port, the water was only three inches from my eyes, and I could see thousands of dainty semi-translucent jellyfish floating about as lightly as thistledown. Jim brought the government chart, and Mr. Lake announced that we were heading directly for Sandy Hook and the open ocean. But we had not yet reached the bottom, and John was busily opening valves and letting in more water. I went forward to the little steel cuddy-hole in the extreme prow of the boat, and looked out through the watchport. The water had grown denser and yellower, and I could not see much beyond the dim outlines of the ship's spar reaching out forward. Jim said that he had often seen fishes come swimming up wonderingly to gaze into the port. They would remain quite motionless until he stirred his head, and then vanished instantly. Mr. Lake has a remarkable photograph which he took of a visiting fish, and Wilson tells of nurturing a queer flat crab for days in the crevice of one of the view holes. At that moment I felt a faint jolt, and Mr. Lake said that we were on the bottom of the sea. Here we were running as comfortably along the bottom of Sandy Hook Bay as we would ride in a Broadway car, and with quite as much safely. Wilson, who was of a musical turn, was whistling 'Down Went McGinty', and Mr. Lake, with his hands on the pilot-wheel, put in an occasional word about his marvellous invention. On the wall opposite there was a row of dials which told automatically every fact about our condition that the most nervous of men could wish to know. One of them shows the pressure of air in the main compartment of the boat, another registers vacuum, and when both are at zero, Mr. Lake knows that the pressure of air is normal, the same as it is on the surface, and he tries to maintain this condition. There are also a cyclometer, not unlike those used on bicycles, to show how far the boat travels on the wheels; a depth gauge, which keeps us accurately informed as to the depth of the boat in the water, and a declension indicator. By the long finger of the declension dial we could tell whether we were going uphill or down. Once while we were out, there was a sudden sharp shock, the pointer leaped back, and then quivered steady again. Mr. Lake said that we had probably struck a bit of wreckage or an embankment, but the Argonaut was running so lightly that she had leaped up jauntily and slid over the obstruction. We had been keeping our eyes on the depth dial, the most fascinating and interesting of any of the number. It showed that we were going down, down, down, literally down to the sea in a ship. When we had been submerged far more than an hour, and there was thirty feet of yellowish green ocean over our heads, Mr. Lake suddenly ordered the machinery stopped. The clacking noises of the dynamo ceased, and the electric lights blinked out, leaving us at once in almost absolute darkness and silence. Before this, we had found it hard to realize that we were on the bottom of the ocean; now it came upon us suddenly and not without a touch of awe. This absence of sound and light, this unchanging motionlessness and coolness, this absolute negation - that was the bottom of the sea. It lasted only a moment, but in that moment we realized acutely the meaning and joy of sunshine and moving winds, trees, and the world of men. A minute light twinkled out like a star, and then another and another, until the boat was bright again, and we knew that among the other wonders of this most astonishing of inventions there was storage electricity which would keep the boat illuminated for hours, without so much as a single turn of the dynamo. With the stopping of the engine, the air supply from above had ceased; but Mr. Lake laid his hand on the steel wall above us, where he said there was enough air compressed to last us all for two days, should anything happen. The possibility of 'something happening' had been lurking in our minds ever since we started. Every imaginable contingency, and some that were not at all imaginable to the uninitiated, had been absolutely provided against by the genius of the inventor. And everything from the gasoline engine to the hand-pump was as compact and ingenious as the mechanism of a watch. Moreover, the boat was not crowded; we had plenty of room to move around and to sleep, if we wished, to say nothing of eating. As for eating, John had brought out the kerosene stove and was making coffee, while Jim cut the pumpkin pie. 'This isn't Delmonico's.' said Jim,'but we're serving a lunch that Delmonico's couldn't serve - a submarine lunch.' By this time the novelty was wearing off and we sat there, at the bottom of the sea, drinking our coffee with as much unconcern as though we were in an uptown restaurant. For the first time since we started Mr. Lake sat down, and we had an opportunity of talking with him at leisure. He is a stout-shouldered, powerfully built man, in the prime of life - a man of cool common sense, a practical man, who is also an inventor. And he talks frankly and convincingly, and yet modestly, of his accomplishment. Having finished our lunch, Mr. Lake prepared to show us something about the practical operations of the Argonaut. It has been a good deal of mystery to us how workmen penned up in a submarine boat could expect to recover gold from the wrecks in the water outside, or to place torpedoes, or to pick up cables. 'We simply open the door, and the diver steps out on the bottom of the sea.' Mr. Lake said, quite as if he was conveying the most ordinary information. At first it seemed incredible, but Mr. Lake showed us the heavy, riveted door in the bottom of the diver's compartment. Then he invited us inside with Wilson, who, besides being an engineer, is also an expert diver. The massive steel doors of the little room were closed and barred, and then Mr. Lake turned a cock and the air rushed inward. 'Keep swallowing,' said Wilson the diver. As soon as we applied this remedy, the pain was relieved, but the general sensation of increased air pressure, while exhilarating, was still most uncomfortable. The finger on the pressure dial kept creeping up and up, until it showed that the air pressure inside the compartment was nearly equal to the water pressure without. Then Wilson opened a cock in the door. Instantly the water gushed in, and for a single instant we expected to be drowned there like rats in a trap. 'This is really very simple,' Mr. Lake was saying calmly. 'When the pressure within is the same as the pressure without, no water can enter.' With that, Wilson dropped the iron door, and there was the water and the muddy bottom of the sea within touch of a man's hand. It was all easy enough to understand, and yet it seemed impossible, even as we saw it with our own eyes. Mr. Lake stooped down, and picked up a wooden rod having a sharp hook at the end. This he pulled along the bottom. … We were now rising again to the surface, after being submerged for more than three hours. I climbed into the conning tower and watched for the first glimpse of the sunlight. There was a sudden fluff of foam, the ragged edge of a wave, and then I saw, not more than a hundred feet away, a smack bound toward New York under full sail. Her rigging was full of men, gazing curiously in our direction, no doubt wondering what strange monster of the sea was coming forth for a breath of air. Lake entertained the gentlemen of the Press lavishly and consequently enjoyed a better press than Holland. "Klondyke is nowhere,' said the New York Herald and businessmen were quick to see the merits of a bottom-crawler for commercial operations. 'You mustn't confuse the Argonaut with any other submarine boats,' said the inventor, 'she is quite different and much safer.' Much encouraged, Lake went on to build the more powerful, torpedo-armed Protector which was launched at Bridgeport, Connecticut on 1 November 1902. The multi-purpose Protector was eventually bought by Russia17 and it was not until 1911 that Lake started to influence submarine evolution in the United States Navy. Meanwhile John Philip Holland's designs maintained the lead and founded the underwater fleets in practically every navy of the world. |