© U. & U.
For Anti-Aircraft Service.
He explained that the Argonaut was not only a submarine boat, but much besides. She not only swims either on the surface or beneath it, but she adds to this accomplishment the extraordinary power of diving deep and rolling along the bottom of the sea on wheels. No machine ever before did that. Indeed, the Argonaut is more properly a "sea motorcycle" than a "boat." In its invention Mr. Lake elaborated an idea which the United States Patent Office has decided to be absolutely original.
Photo by Bain News Service.
The Latest French Aircraft Gun.
We found ourselves in a long, narrow compartment, dimly illuminated by yellowish-green light from the little round, glass windows. The stern was filled with Wilson's gasoline engine and the electric motor, and in front of us toward the bow we could see through the heavy steel doorways of the diver's compartment into the lookout room, where there was a single round eye of light.
I climbed up the ladder of the conning-tower and looked out through one of the glass ports. My eyes were just even with the surface of the water. A wave came driving and foaming entirely over the top of the vessel, and I could see the curiously beautiful sheen of the bright summit of the water above us. It was a most impressive sight. Mr. Lake told me that in very clear water it was difficult to tell just where the air left off and the water began; but in the muddy bay where we were going down the surface looked like a peculiarly clear, greenish pane of glass moving straight up and down, not forward, as the waves appear to move when looked at from above.
Now we were entirely under water. The rippling noises that the waves had made in beating against the upper structure of the boat had ceased. As I looked through the thick glass port, the water was only three inches from my eyes, and I could see thousands of dainty, semi-translucent jellyfish floating about as lightly as thistledown. They gathered in the eddy behind the conning-tower in great numbers, bumping up sociably against one another and darting up and down with each gentle movement of the water. And I realized that we were in the domain of the fishes.
Jim brought the government chart, and Mr. Lake announced that we were heading directly for Sandy Hook and the open ocean. But we had not yet reached the bottom, and John was busily opening valves and letting in more water. I went forward to the little steel cuddy-hole in the extreme prow of the boat, and looked out through the watch-port. The water had grown denser and yellower, and I could not see much beyond the dim outlines of the ship's spar reaching out forward. Jim said that he had often seen fishes come swimming up wonderingly to gaze into the port. They would remain quite motionless until he stirred his head, and then they vanished instantly. Mr. Lake has a remarkable photograph which he took of a visiting fish, and Wilson tells of nurturing a queer flat crab for days in the crevice of one of the view-holes.