The contest for oil is a contest for supremacy of the sea traffic and naval superiority. Naval need of oil and the need for a large merchant marine, demand that the United States Government shall adopt a new policy touching oil and other national resources. We have been so wasteful of resources as to endanger national strength. It required the World War to teach us the importance of large production of oil, and of tankers and storage in all parts of the world.
CHAPTER XXVII
EDISON—AND 100,000 MORE
FLOOD OF SUGGESTIONS AND INVENTIONS OFFERED, MOST OF THEM TO DOWN THE U-BOATS—"FIND THE SUBMARINE" WAS THE PROBLEM—BEST DETECTION DEVICES DEVELOPED IN AMERICA—NEW WEAPONS OF WAR—THE NAVAL CONSULTING BOARD AND ITS GREAT WORK—SOME AMUSING SUGGESTIONS.
One hundred thousand suggestions and inventions were offered the Navy for winning the war. Four-fifths of them were designed to down the submarine. They poured in upon the Department in floods, evidence that American genius was mobilized along with man-power. Letters came in by the thousand, plans and models by the hundred. All were examined, and those that gave promise were tested.
The creation of the Naval Consulting Board, headed by Thomas A. Edison, in 1915, made the Navy the natural center for war inventions. While many did not prove practical and others were in process, a considerable number of important inventions were completed and proved of the highest value. A notable instance was the development of means for detecting submarines. In this America led the world.
When these devices had been perfected and thoroughly tested out on this side of the water, Captain R. H. Leigh was sent to England with a staff of naval officers and civilian experts; and ten tons of apparatus, to be tried out in British waters. Three trawlers, the Andrew King, Kunishi, and James Bentole, were equipped at the Portsmouth dock yard, and on December 30, 1917, accompanied by a speedy "P" boat, they steamed out for "listening patrol" in the English channel. Mr. C. F. Scott, one of the civilian engineers who accompanied Captain Leigh, said:
The day after New Year's we received a wireless from an airship that a submarine had been sighted. We steamed over, got our devices out, but couldn't hear a thing. Another message from the airship changed the "sub's" position, so we altered our course and obtained a clear indication from the listening devices. The Hun was moving slowly up the Channel, submerged.
We gave the "P" boat a "fix" (cross bearing) on the spot where our indication showed the submarine to be. She ran over the place, dropping a "pattern" of depth charges, and soon we began to see tremendous amounts of oil rising to the surface. Evidently our first experience was to be successful. How successful we did not learn until afterward.