The Story of the Submarine

by Farnham Bishop

Courtesy of Mr. Simon Lake.

The Argonaut Junior.

This submarine was never built, however, for the congressional appropriation was awarded to the Holland Torpedo-boat Company and Mr. Lake had at that time no means for building so elaborate a vessel by himself. What he did build was the simplest and crudest little submarine imaginable: the Argonaut Jr. She was a triangular box of yellow pine, fourteen feet long and five feet deep, mounted on three solid wooden wheels. She was trundled along the bottom of Sandy Hook Bay by one or two men cranking the axle of the two driving wheels. The boat was provided with an air-lock and diver’s compartment “so arranged that by putting an air pressure on the diver’s compartment equal to the water pressure outside, a bottom door could be opened and no water would come into the vessel. Then by putting on a pair of rubber boots the operator could walk around on the sea bottom and push the boat along with him and pick up objects, such as clams, oysters, etc., from the sea bottom.”[13]

Enough people were convinced by the performances of this simple craft of the soundness of Mr. Lake’s theories that the inventor was able to raise sufficient capital to build a larger submarine. This boat, which was designed in 1895 and built at Baltimore in 1897, was called the Argonaut. When launched, she had a cigar-shaped hull thirty-six feet long by nine in diameter, mounted on a pair of large toothed driving-wheels forward and a guiding-wheel on the rudder. The driving-wheels could be disconnected and left to revolve freely while the boat was driven by its single-screw propeller. There was a diver’s compartment in the bottom and a “lookout compartment in the extreme bow, with a powerful searchlight to light up a pathway in front of her as she moved along over the waterbed. The searchlight I later found of little value except for night work in clear water. In clear water the sunlight would permit of as good vision without the use of the light as with it, while if the water was not clear, no amount of light would permit of vision through it for any considerable distance.”

Storage batteries were carried only for working the searchlight and illuminating the interior of the boat. The Argonaut was propelled, both above and below the surface, by a thirty horse-power gasoline engine, the first one to be installed in a submarine. There was enough air to run it on, even when submerged, because the Argonaut was ventilated through a hose running to a float on the surface: a device later changed to two pipe masts long enough to let her run along the bottom at a depth of fifty feet.

Courtesy of International Marine Engineering.

Argonaut as Originally Built.

The Argonaut had no hydroplanes or horizontal rudders of any kind. She was submerged, like the Intelligent Whale, by “two anchor weights, each weighing 1000 pounds, attached to cables, and capable of being hauled up or lowered by a drum and mechanism within the boat.... When it is desired to submerge the vessel the anchor weights are first lowered to the bottom; water is then allowed to enter the water-ballast compartments until her buoyancy is less than the weight of the two anchors, say 1500 pounds; the cables connecting with the weights are then hauled in, and the vessel is thus hauled to the bottom, until she comes to rest on her three wheels. The weights are then hauled into their pockets in the keel, and it is evident that she is resting on the wheels with a weight equal to the difference between her buoyancy with the weights at the bottom, and the weights in their pockets, or 500 pounds. Now this weight may be increased or diminished, either by admitting more water into the ballast tanks or by pumping some out. Thus it will be seen that we have perfect control of the vessel in submerging her, as we may haul her down as fast or as slow as we please, and by having her rest on the bottom with sufficient weight to prevent the currents from moving her out of her course we may start up our propeller or driving-wheels and drive her at will over the bottom, the same as a tricycle is propelled on the surface of the earth in the upper air. In muddy bottoms, we rest with a weight not much over 100 pounds; while on hard bottoms, or where there are strong currents, we sometimes rest on the bottom with a weight of from 1000 to 1500 pounds....