A Complete Description of How to Make a Model Periscope with Working Drawings Together with a Simple Explanation of How a Real Periscope is Made And Works
CHAPTER VII
THE WONDERFUL EYE OF THE SUBMARINE
One of the gravest faults the pilots of the first submarines had to contend with was that they were not able to see where their craft was going.
But like everything else that is needed for the welfare or warfare of the human race, inventors got busy and began to scheme and to experiment, with the big idea of making an instrument which would do for the submarine what the eye does for the brain, and that is to look around with.
How the Eye of the Submarine Got Its Name.—Now, the eye of the submarine is called a periscope and before we go any further let us find out how it came to get this peculiar name for then we shall know more of what we are talking about.
The early Greeks used two words that were very common to them, and you, too, will use them, before you get through with this chapter, just as easily as they did. One of these words is peri which means around, and the other is scopeō which means to look; so peri plus scopeō means to around look, or, as we barbarians say it, look around—which sounds better to us. And there you have the roots of the word periscope.
The First Submarine Eye, or Periscope.—As in the beginning of all things, good and evil, the first attempts to make an eye for the submarine, or a periscope, were very crude, and as usual they were nearly, if not quite worthless.
But the periscope was no exception to the first law of invention, and that is that each attempt, however much of a failure it may have been in itself, had the germ of a useful device in it; and from out of all these efforts finally came that wonderful optical instrument, the periscope.