The few substantial persons who had witnessed the Argonaut's experiments provided the capital for the construction of the Argonaut First and enabled me to complete her, and she was launched on August 17, 1897. I had called the little experimental boat the Argonaut, Jr., because it was born before its mother, although the mother (the Argonaut First) had been conceived and designed first. I did not have sufficient capital to go ahead with her construction, and even the design of the Argonaut itself was cut down to correspond to the size of the subscriptions that we had been able to secure.
The raising of capital to most inventors is a serious problem; it has always been so with me. I have always been interested in mechanical accomplishments, but always dreaded the necessity of trying to raise capital to carry on those experiments. I have never valued money for itself or felt the need of it except when I did not have it. I think this is the case with most inventors, which is the reason why so many of them go to unscrupulous promoters who rob them of their inventions, or else often tie them up so that they themselves are incapable of continuing their development work.
Having made an initial success by my experiments, like most unsophisticated inventors I also fell into the hands of a promoter of this type. He was introduced to me by an officer of a bank, and, after an investigation of my project, claimed that he could raise all the money necessary to float a project of this kind, which in his judgment had the greatest possibilities of anything he had ever learned of. He said that his friends, the Vanderbilts, "Jack" Astor, and the Goulds, would immediately subscribe large sums upon his submitting the proposition to them. He secured possession of my plans, and took me to his house, which was a handsome brownstone structure standing in beautiful grounds. Another evidence of wealth was that he always had a smart carriage with liveried coachman waiting for him at our various conferences, held frequently in the directors' room of the bank. He had himself made the general manager, myself the president, and Hon. William T. Malster, of Baltimore, the treasurer of the company. At his suggestion we sent out a notification to our subscribers that twenty-five per cent. of their subscriptions was due and payable. Mr. Malster was president of the Columbia Dry Dock and Iron Works, Baltimore, the company with which we had placed the contract for building the Argonaut, and as he was a Baltimorean he had kindly consented to serve as treasurer of my company. Everything now looked rosy, and I gave my attention to preparing the detailed plans of the Argonaut. One day the general manager came into the room and said, "Now I have arranged for the sale of $100,000 worth of our stock." (He was to get a certain percentage of the stock for selling it to his friends, the Astors, Goulds, etc.) "So," he continued, "I want you to go to Baltimore and get Mr. Malster to sign up a lot of this stock so that we can make immediate delivery of it and get the money, and it would also be advisable for you to have Mr. Malster sign some checks in blank," the checks of the company requiring the signatures of both president and treasurer.
I visited Baltimore and explained to Mr. Malster what our general manager told me, and he said, "Well, Simon, you are a young man, and I think an honest one, and I am willing to trust you. I will sign these certificates, but don't you let them go out of your hands or sign them yourself until you have some definite written obligations on the part of those who are going to purchase this stock that they will pay for it." I returned to New York and told Mr. H—— that I had the certificates, etc., signed, and asked him when he would be ready to deliver the money and receive the stock. He stated that his friend "Jack" Astor was then out of town and he wanted him to be on the list first and would wait until he returned. He said, "I will see him at the first opportunity, but in the meantime you had better sign these certificates in blank and leave them with me, as I will have to fill out the names as he wants them, and I have had to agree to give him the biggest part of my commission to get it started." At the same time he told me that he would like to have a loan of a couple of thousand dollars for a few days (this we had on deposit there in the bank in the company's name). He said, as I had Mr. Malster's signature, I could easily make him the loan and he would return it soon, for he had a large piece of property which he had arranged the sale of, but there were some back taxes due on it which he wanted to clear off before turning over the deed. I told him that I could not make a loan of the company's money. He then became very angry and said, "Well, if I did not trust him to that extent he would not go to his friends or dispose of the stock." He was a very pompous individual, wore gold eyeglasses, and had a large acquaintance, formerly having been a business man of standing.
The fact that he had been introduced to me by an official of the bank led me to investigate him no further, but when he attempted to get the company's funds and its stock in blank I started an investigation, and found that the house that he was living in, and the horses and carriages, had been secured from another unsuspecting individual much older than myself in much the same manner. This individual had been in business for many years, nevertheless the promoter induced him to reorganize his successful business on a much larger capitalization. The promoter made an agreement with this man to sell the stock of the new company, and promised he would interest his friends, the Astors, Goulds, and Vanderbilts. As a partial consideration for this he was to receive this mans beautiful home and a certain percentage of the stock. The man's wife having died, he did not care to live longer in the house, so he agreed that the house should be given as a part consideration, and as a guarantee of his delivery of the house and stock as a part consideration on this promoter's agreement to float the stock of the much larger capitalized new company, he had placed both the controlling stock of the company and the house in escrow, and had turned the possession of the house over to this promoter, who was now our general manager, with the deeds of same to be held in escrow and not to be finally recorded until the Goulds, Vanderbilts, Astors, etc., had come into the new company. Hard times occurred about this time, so he claimed, which prevented promised capitalists from coming in, but, as Mr. H—— held the control of the company by holding the control of the stock, he had himself elected an officer of the company at a handsome salary and still held possession of this most beautiful home without ever having paid a dollar. I merely recite this as a warning to inventors to look out for the plausible New York promoter. I also discovered that Mr. H—— had made application for patents, my own patents not yet having been issued, with the idea of getting me into interference in the Patent Office, and it was necessary for us to threaten him with arrest and bring a suit against both himself and the cashier—whom we now learned had known of his previous experiences and expected to share in his profits this time—in order to get a legal release so that we could proceed with the work.
Many of the troubles of inventors can be traced originally to certain semi-professional men who call themselves patent attorneys. There are two classes of patent attorneys, one class consisting of conscientious, honorable gentlemen, who consider it their duty, when an unsophisticated inventor comes before them with an idea which the inventor considers new, to tell him the truth about his invention and to inform him whether it is really an original invention or not, or merely a slight modification of some old idea on which no protection can be secured. There is another class of attorneys who have been more properly termed patent sharks, who will get a patent on anything brought to them; for by juggling words they are able to get claims which mean nothing, except that they serve the purpose of getting the attorneys their fees. Many an inventor has an idea which is original with him but which may be as old as Bushnell's submarine or entirely impractical. The patent shark will get him a patent on this, and the inventor then thinks his fortune is made. He is very likely then to sell his farm and go to New York and advertise in the papers that he has a valuable invention, there to fall into the hands of some unscrupulous promoter who secures all of his money without letting him know that the patent is worthless; or if he happens to have a valuable invention the promoter will in all probability arrange matters so that he himself gets the cream and leaves the inventor a mere pittance.
Since the war began, and there has been the general editorial demand by the papers of the country for some means to destroy or offset the submarine menace, I have received hundreds of letters asking advice, etc., regarding various devices. I have received visits from a number of people who have come from long distances, some from the West, others from Canada and from the South, to ask my opinion regarding certain attachments to be applied to submarines or on devices to capture submarines. Many of the ideas were old and some of them pitiful in the fact that they showed such ignorance of the laws of nature and of mechanics on the part of their projectors. One man sends me a copy of his allowed patent with a letter from one of these patent sharks acknowledging the receipt of final payment of a considerable amount for his having received an allowance of his patent. I will, without betraying the name, quote in part from his letter:
I would kindly ask if you would take hearing from me and take notice of my new invention, which is called the Power Transmitting Mechanism. The machine is started by spring or batteries; the first start is the spin of the fly-wheel; the fly-wheel pumps on the handle of the jack: one revolution to the one pound on the fly-wheel drives the handle of the jack back and forth. The jack will throw the crank one revolution with ninety-seven pounds. The jack is the result of multiplying power, and the jacks can be used in the same position as any and all cylinders. This machine will nicely furnish you the power for your undersea liner. No fuel is needed....
Now anyone can see that this proposition is nothing more or less than an impractical proposition mechanically, and that it is on the perpetual-motion order, yet this patent shark mulcts the poor man of a considerable sum to secure him some kind of a worthless patent. He is likely to expend much further sums in trying to get it on the market. A patent lawyer of that stamp should be put in jail for fraud, and should not be permitted to practise in an honorable profession.
I have already recited my own difficulties in attracting the interest of the United States Government to my work, and I call attention to the fact that it required many years of persistent endeavor and the expenditure of vast sums of money furnished by patriotic individuals, and also the recognition of my devices by several foreign governments, before our own government recognized any merit in my work. That has been the experience of almost every American inventor, so far as I am aware. We have seen how Bushnell was derided and driven from his home; and that Robert Fulton received no recognition from his home government, and that the only recompense he ever received for his submarine work was from the British Government. Strangely, the money paid him was not for the purpose of enabling him to develop his invention, but rather to suppress his inventive genius. Ericsson could get no recognition or assistance from the government when he presented his design of the Monitor. She was built by private capital, and her builders assumed all the risk, and it is stated that at the time she fought the Merrimac and helped to save the United States from being divided internally, she was on a builder's trial and had not been accepted or paid for by the government. All readers of the life of Ericsson are familiar with the lack of consideration he received from the naval authorities of the United States at that time, and that his epoch-making invention was derided as a "cheese-box on a raft." It was strange that he received such little consideration, as at the time of his arrival in America he was an engineer of note and while still a young man had built the wonderful canals of Sweden. I had never really appreciated Ericsson's great engineering ability until I made a journey over these canals, which are virtually carried up over mountains, and offer one of the most interesting European trips a tourist can make. Maxim had to go to England and Hotchkiss to France to get their guns adopted. Sir Hiram Maxim told me of the heartbreaking time he spent in his native country, America—he was born in Maine—trying to get his inventions properly developed, and the lack of consideration he received here by our own government officers, while in England, on the contrary, he was received with open arms. The late King Edward visited him, and the English took up his invention and knighted him.