"Well, that's the smallest piece of business I ever heard of," he snapped. "I thought you were some Secretary, and now I believe all the mean things some newspapers have said about you."
One of my office aids figured out that this irate citizen had spent about $20 in telephone tolls. We never heard from him again, and the invention that would end the war was lost to the world.
The sturdy police that guarded the portals of the State, War and Navy building stopped at the entrance a tall, lean man who was lugging a box about as big as two suitcases. They ordered him to open it, and found inside a concern that looked as if it might go off at any moment. He wanted to see somebody in the Navy Department, and one of my aids went down to investigate. The fellow did not look like a spy or plotter, and the Navy man asked him what his contraption was.
"It's a porcupine boat," he said, "a boat that'll keep off them torpedoes that the submarines are firin'."
It was a model of a boat, its wooden sides thickly studded with long spikes.
"What's the idea?" he was asked.
"Well, you see, the torpedoes can't sink a ship unless they hit her," he explained; "and if you put these long spikes all along the side, they can't get to her. The spikes will stop 'em; the torpedoes are stuck before they hit the boat—there you are."
It was a great idea; certainly no one else had thought of it. But as the spikes would have to be about forty or fifty feet long to hold off the torpedoes, and each ship would have to have a thousand or two of them, we could not very well adopt the invention.
A Southern inventor brought forth a plan that would have brought joy to the Sunny South, if it could have been adopted. This was to sheathe all ships with an armor of thick cotton batting. He evidently got his inspiration from the battle of New Orleans, where doughty old Andrew Jackson erected a barricade of cotton bales which the British shells could not penetrate. So a century later this Jacksonian figured that a ship swathed in cotton would be immune from shell or torpedoes. The Germans could fire away, and do no more harm than if they were throwing rocks at a mattress. But unfortunately the naval experts seemed to have their doubts about the efficacy of cotton-batting armor, preferring to stick to steel.
"Lick the enemy before he lands!" was the slogan of an earnest soul who was designing a submarine that would carry from 200 to 400 torpedoes. If necessary, in the midst of a foreign fleet, he told us, they could "unload the whole 400 in from four to eight minutes, according to the number of men on duty to let them loose."