Today, we invent the submarine to create world
peace. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
The year is 1915. Europe has
just gone to war. We Americans still believe that
we're only bystanders. And submarine developer
Simon Lake writes an article for the Century
Lake is 49 years old and has now been building
submarines for over eleven years. He'd been
inspired by Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea. Many people had built submarines
before Lake. In fact, many built them before Verne
wrote his book. But now Lake and his major
competitor John Holland are busy developing the
military submarine, as we know it, for America.
Lake's article has the curious title, The Art
of Submarine Defense and Offense as Applied to
International Peace. As we read, a great
arsenal of existing submarines emerges. Photos show
French, American, German, and British submarines. Lake
includes one Russian
submarine, which, he points out, was his
design. At this time, he'd been having more success
with his submarines in Europe than in the United
States, although that was changing.
Yet the article begins, as it really must, with the
Hunley -- first submarine to sink a ship in
war. The Hunley
was powered by sailors turning cranks. Though it
finally sank the Union ship Housatonic, it
also sank, for unknown reasons, on three different
occasions, killing all, or most of, the crew each
Lake points out that the two times it was recovered
and refurbished, it was found with its nose in the
mud, and the crew all in the nose. It clearly had
no means for stabilizing itself underwater. Once
unbalanced, one end would turn downward, and the
crew would tumble into that end as it crash-dived.
He goes on to describe the way he and Holland
created attitude stability in a submarine. He's
polite in dealing with Holland, but firm in his
claims to a better design.
And so we read about a dramatic buildup of
submarines under Lake's title about his
Art being Applied to International
Peace. He finishes by praising the submarine
as "the most potent influence that has been
conceived to bring about a permanent peace between
maritime nations." He emphasizes the point by
quoting Holland, who noted how
invulnerable submarines are.
Well, that was in March of 1915. One month later,
Walter Schweiger, captain of a new German
diesel-powered U-20 submarine, caught up with the
British passenger liner Lusitania. He
fired a single torpedo, and only realized what he'd
done as the name on the bow came into view. Twelve
hundred civilians died, including 125 Americans.
Germany had doomed herself by giving America an
event that ultimately helped to nudge her into
joining the War.
For all his talk of world peace, when Lake formed a
new company in 1919, he named it
Housatonic. That was the name of the first ship sunk by
a submarine, so long before, and, in a fine historic irony Lake's
company was located on the Housatanoc River after which that ship
had been named. In any case it was, by then, clear
war would survive the submarine after all, and this
is what it was all about.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
S. Lake, The Art of Submarine Defense and Offense as
Applied to International Peace. The Century
Magazine, Vol. LXVII, March, 1915, pp. 724-732.
Be sure to click on the links in the page above to
see the submarine arsenal that Lake shows us.
For more on Simon lake, see:
For more on the Hunley, see: http://www.hunley.org/
And for more on the Lusitania, see:
The idea that submarines would end war was not
original. Fulton made the same claim, over a
century earlier. See http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi304.htm