Customer Reviews

Argonaut: The Submarine Legacy of Simon Lake (West Texas A&M University Series)

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For the past 80 years or so, Simon Lake has stood in the shadow cast by John P Holland, the man now generally accorded the title 'Father of the Submarine'. But in the early 1900s, Connecticut yankee Lake seemed at least as likely to earn the soubriquet. Lake was Holland's equal as an inventor, and his submarines were the only ones constructed in the US which were as good as the Holland boats. Moreover, Lake was easily the better businessman and for a long time led the Electric Boat Company (which acquired Holland's patents) in export sales. Lake boats were supplied to Russia (the Lake Co. going to great lengths to smuggle them past US customs during the Russo-Japanese war) and Austria-Hungary, and - thanks to the anti-monopolist stance of the American government - they were also purchased by the US Navy for a few years before World War I. Lake's boats were technically as successful as the Holland types which eventually eclipsed them, though built on rather different principals. Their inventor retained faith in the idea of submerging vertically, rather than diving, and persisted in fitting his craft with wheels to allow them to run along the bottom. Unlike the Irish-American John Holland, whose designs were inspired by the idea of attacking British warships, Lake also believed in submarines for commercial purposes such as wrecking and pearl-diving, and his boats were fitted with diving chambers which also made them very suitable for mine-laying and mine-clearing operations. The story of how Lake built his first experimental boats of wood and, eventually, a large shipbuilding concern in Bridgport is a fascinating one, and Poluhowich tells is competently enough, if not in any great detail. But the book is marred by the lack of anything approaching enough original material. Although the author became acquainted with Lake's son and includes some new anecdotal information from this source, there is a disappointing dearth of worthwhile material from the US archives, much less anything from Austria or Russia. With Lake's somewhat mendacious autobiography, and his book on the development of the submarine, still fairly readily available through online second-hand book services, Argonaut is not the major contribution to the literature that it could have been. Solid, but a missed opportunity nonetheless.