Though the automobile torpedo has been brought to so high a state of perfection, the original idea of steering from the shore has not been abandoned. The Brennan and Sims-Edison controllable torpedoes were driven and steered by electricity, receiving the current through wires trailed astern and carrying little masts and flags above the surface to guide the operator on shore. But these also served as a warning to the enemy and gave him too good a chance either to avoid the torpedo or destroy it with machine-gun fire. Then, too, the trailing wires reduced its speed and were always liable to get tangled in the propellors. Controllable torpedoes of this type were abandoned before the outbreak of the present war and will probably never be used in action.
A new and more promising sort of controllable torpedo was immediately suggested by the invention of wireless telegraphy. Many inventors have been working to perfect such a weapon, and a young American engineer, Mr. John Hays Hammond, Jr., seems to have succeeded. From his wireless station on shore, Mr. Hammond can make a small, crewless electric launch run hither and yon as he pleases about the harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The commander and many of the officers of the United States coast artillery corps have carefully inspected and tested this craft, which promises to be the forerunner of a new and most formidable species of coast defense torpedo.
CHAPTER VI
FREAKS AND FAILURES
During the half-century following the death of Fulton, scarcely a year went by without the designing or launching of a new man-power submarine. Some of these boats, notably those of the Bavarian Wilhelm Bauer, were surprisingly good, others were most amazingly bad, but none of them led to anything better. Inventor after inventor wasted his substance discovering what Van Drebel, Bushnell, and Fulton had known before him, only to die and have the same facts painfully rediscovered by some one on the other side of the earth.
A striking example of this lack of progress is Halstead’s Intelligent Whale. Built for the United States navy at New York, in the winter of 1864–5, this craft is no more modern and much less efficient than Fulton’s Nautilus of 1801. The Intelligent Whale is a fat, cigar-shaped, iron vessel propelled by a screw cranked by manpower and submerged by dropping two heavy anchors to the bottom and then warping the boat down to any desired depth. A diver can then emerge from a door in the submarine’s bottom, to place a mine under a hostile ship. It was not until 1872 that the Intelligent Whale was sent on a trial trip in Newark Bay. Manned by an utterly inexperienced and very nervous crew, the clumsy submarine got entirely out of control and had to be hauled up by a cable that had been thoughtfully attached to her before she went down. Fortunately no lives had been lost, but the wildest stories were told and printed, till the imaginary death-roll ran up to forty-nine. The Intelligent Whale was hauled up on dry land and can still be seen on exhibition at the corner of Third Street and Perry Avenue in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Lack of motive-power was the reason why man-sized submarines lagged behind their little automatic brethren, the Whitehead torpedoes. Compressed air was just the thing for a spurt, but when two Frenchmen, Captain Bourgois and M. Brun, built the Plongeur, a steel submarine 146 feet long and 12 feet in diameter, at Rochefort in 1863, and fitted it with an eighty-horse-power, compressed-air engine, they discovered that the storage-flasks emptied themselves too quickly to permit a voyage of any length.
The Plongeur also proved that while you can sink a boat to the bottom by filling her ballast-tanks or make her rise to the surface by emptying them, you cannot make her float suspended between two bodies of water except by holding her there by some mechanical means. Without anything of the kind, the Plongeur kept bouncing up and down like a rubber ball. Once her inventors navigated her horizontally for some distance, only to find that she had been sliding on her stomach along the soft muddy bottom of a canal. Better results were obtained after the Plongeur was fitted with a crude pair of diving-planes. But the inefficiency of her compressed-air engine caused her to be condemned and turned into a water tank.