Having some legal business at that time which I thought he might be able to handle because of his experience in the Navy Department, I called upon him in regard to it. He stated that, as he was then free, he could handle it for me, and when I recalled my visit to him when he was Secretary of the Navy he said he remembered it very well. He laughingly remarked that I may have thought him a little slow in receiving me at that time; and then explained that, previous to his accepting the portfolio as assistant secretary of the navy, he had been the attorney for a rival submarine boat company; that he knew all about their boats, and the fact that they had expended large sums of money in the development of submarines; and that, although he had resigned as attorney for the company before he became acting secretary, perhaps his former association with them had led him to give less consideration to my proposition than he otherwise might have done.
As I believed the submarine to have great possibilities commercially as well as for war, I gave up my other business and came to New York, opened an office in the old Cheeseborough Building, and tried to secure capital to build a commercial submarine. I advertised in the papers and visited a number of capitalists in the effort to interest them, but usually, after obtaining an interview, as soon as I asserted that it was possible to navigate over the bottom of the ocean as readily as it was over the land, and that when on the bottom I could open a door in the boat but that no water would come in; and, further, that divers could very readily pass in and out of this open door, I observed in most cases a look of dread in their eyes and their hands would slide over and push a button. An attendant immediately came to the door and reminded Mr. "Blank," whoever he might be, that he had a very important engagement or that some other visitor was waiting to see him. Unfortunately for me, this was about the time that a madman had attempted to bomb Russell Sage in his office.
The result was, that after spending six months and all of my savings I had not raised a dollar. I then decided that it was necessary to get some engineer of national prominence to endorse my project, so I went to Charles H. Haswell, author of "Haswell's Handbook," and former chief engineer of the United States Navy, and explained to him that I wanted him to give me a professional opinion on the practicability of my boat. I offered to submit him my plans of the boat—of which I also had a model in the tank of water in the Cheeseborough Building which I would like him to see, as I thus would be better able to explain to him its method of navigating on the surface and submerging beneath the surface and on the bottom itself. And I then asked him how much he would charge me. He stated that he should want $1500 for the investigation and opinion. By this time I had expended my savings and hardly had $15—let alone $1500. I explained the situation frankly to him, and he said, "Well, I will go down and look it over and give you a report anyhow, and you can repay me at some future time when you are able." He did so, and gave me a very excellent endorsement, but I found that even his endorsement was not sufficient to induce capitalists to invest their hard-earned money in any such crazy scheme as mine appeared to them. I finally decided to build a small experimental boat myself to demonstrate the two principal features over which almost every one seemed to be sceptical. These were the ability to navigate over the bottom of the ocean and the ability to enter and leave the boat while submerged without any water coming in and foundering her. I therefore gave up my office and moved down to Atlantic Highlands, where, with the financial assistance of my uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. S. T. Champion, I was able to build the Argonaut, Jr. She was built of yellow pine planking, double thick, lined with canvas laid between the double layers of planking, the outer seams caulked and payed. She was a flat-sided affair and would not stand great external pressure. She was propelled when on the bottom by a man turning a crank on the inside. Our compressed-air reservoir was a soda-water fountain tank. The compressed-air pump was a plumber's hand-pump, by which means we were able to compress the air in the tanks to a pressure of about one hundred pounds per square inch.
My diving suit I built myself by shaping iron in the form of an open helmet, which extended down as far as my breast; this I covered with painted canvas. I used the dead-light from a yacht's cabin as my eyeglass in front of the helmet. I tied sash weights to my legs to hold me down on the bottom when walking in the vicinity of the boat. A cousin, B. F. Champion, accompanied me on my first submerged run with the Argonaut, which was in Blackfish Hole in the Shrewsbury River. We submerged the boat alongside of a dock and started across stream in the river. The first time we went under water a stream of water came through a bolt-hole which had not been plugged and struck "Bart" on the back of the neck. He said, "Ugh!" and made a dive. The Argonaut had a little port-hole in one end about six inches in diameter, and "Bart" said afterward, "I made a dive for that port-hole, but came to the conclusion that I could not get through, so I stopped." It was a simple matter, however, to drive a plug in and stop the water from coming in. On our first trip we ran across the river and back, and, although there was a strong current in the river, she "backed" right back to her starting place, having rested on the bottom firmly enough to prevent the current from carrying her down stream.
"ARGONAUT, JR.," 1894
A small experimental boat built by the author to demonstrate the practicability of wheeling over the bottom and of sending divers out from the boat without water entering the vessel. She was propelled by hand over the waterbed; she had an air lock and diver's compartment which permitted egress and ingress of a diver when submerged.
Later we took the boat up to Atlantic Highlands and had a lot of fun running around on the bottom of New York Bay picking up clams and oysters, etc. We finally decided to organize a company and build a larger boat; so one day we invited the mayor of Atlantic Highlands, the president of the bank, and a number of other prominent people of the little community to witness our trials. A number of the men wrote their names on a shingle, which was tied to a sash weight and then thrown off the end of the Atlantic Highlands pier in about sixteen feet of water. My cousin and I got into the boat, submerged her, wheeled her forward to where the sash weight had been thrown overboard, picked it up, and had it back on the dock again in five minutes.
The performance of the Argonaut, Jr., becoming known, she received no little newspaper notoriety. In looking over my old clippings I find that there was a vein of scepticism and sarcasm running through most of these early accounts of her performance. I just quote briefly from one of the papers describing her, the New York Herald, of January 8, 1895:
This Boat Crawls Along The Bottom. At Least