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Simon Lake was an American inventor and engineer. He obtained over two hundred patents for advances in naval design. He was the founder of the Lake Submarine Boat Company, the Lake Torpedo Boat Company and the Sunshine Homes Concrete Product Company.
Background
Simon Lake was born in Pleasantville, New Jersey, the only son of John Christopher and Miriam (Adams) Lake. His mother was descended from Jeremy Adams, one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut. His father was descended from John Lake, who emigrated in 1635 from Nottinghamshire, England, to Massachusetts and later moved to Gravesend, Long Island. By Revolutionary times the Lakes had settled in Atlantic County, New Jersey, where later generations founded the summer resorts of Ocean City and Atlantic Highlands. Inventive ability ran in the family: Simon's paternal grandfather, two uncles, and several cousins were inventors of sorts, and his father devised a window-shade roller which he manufactured in a foundry and machine shop in Toms River, New Jersey.
When the boy was three his mother died and his father went west for five years, leaving him in the care of a step-grandmother in Pleasantville. Thereafter Lake lived with his father, at first in Camden, New Jersey, then in Philadelphia, and finally in Toms River.
Education
He attended local public schools, but left at the age of fourteen to work as a molder in his father's shop. His only later formal education was a brief period at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Fort Plain, New York, where his father sent him to learn business methods, and a course in mechanical drawing at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Career
By 1887 Lake had taken out a patent on an improved steering device for the high-wheel bicycle--the first of some two hundred patents granted him. The following year he modified the device for use on small boats, invented a noiseless winding gear that became popular on oyster boats in Chesapeake Bay, and moved to Baltimore, where he began manufacturing and selling these appliances.
Now provided with a comfortable income, he turned his attention to designing a submarine, an interest that had begun when as a boy of ten he had read Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
He drew up plans for an even-keel submersible boat, eighty-five feet in length, with oil-burning boilers and triple-expansion steam engines, double-hull construction, a diving compartment, wheels for running on the ocean floor, and a drop keel--a design that in some ways echoed Verne's description of his imaginary craft, the Nautilus. Lake submitted his plans in 1893 to the United States government in a competition for a practical submarine, but the contract was awarded to the more experienced John P. Holland.
Lake returned to Baltimore determined to build a modest craft that would embody the principles of his design. In 1894 he completed the Argonaut Jr. , a primitive fourteen-foot pine-box submersible, which he and a cousin built by hand and tested near Sandy Hook. Encouraged by the success of these tests, he organized the Lake Submarine Boat Company and contracted for the building of the Argonaut I with the Columbian Iron Works Dry Dock Company in Baltimore, which was also constructing Holland's Plunger under government contract. The rival boats were launched in August 1897. Lake's boat was powered by a thirty-horsepower gasoline engine, to which two tubes reaching to the surface (in anticipation of the snorkel) fed air; it was thirty-six feet long and nine feet in diameter, equipped with wheels and (another Jules Verne feature) a diver's lock and exit chamber built into the bow.
Although the Plunger was quickly abandoned as a failure, the Argonaut I traveled more than 2, 000 miles and made the passage by open sea from Cape May to Sandy Hook, feats which prompted Verne to cable congratulations. The Argonaut I was sluggish in surface operations. Unable to attract enough capital to finance a new craft, Lake had to content himself with remodeling the old one, which he renamed Argonaut II. He extended her length by thirty feet and added a schooner-shaped free-flooding superstructure, both of which improved her performance on the surface.
In 1900 Lake organized the Lake Torpedo Boat Company and moved his operations to Bridgeport, Connecticut. There in 1902 he launched the Protector, and with it a whole new breed of submarines; they were equipped with hydroplanes both fore and aft to achieve his distinctive, though not original, method of submergence while maintaining an even keel.
He also invented an early form of the periscope, which he called the "omniscope. " Lake sought to interest the United States government in buying the Protector, but the navy was committed to Holland's Electric Boat Company. Lake then sold the ship to Russia, which was at war with Japan. In a cloak-and-dagger operation to evade the neutrality laws, the submarine was secretly shipped aboard a freighter to Kronstadt and, after being tested by Lake in the Baltic Sea, was transported 6, 000 miles overland on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok.
In the years following, Lake delivered eleven submarines to Russia, including the Lake X, which he had hoped to sell to the American navy. The Lake X had been constructed to compete in government trials against the Electric Boat Company's Octopus, of which Frank T. Cable was commander, but construction delays forced her withdrawal from competition.
Lake now concentrated on the European market and for some years lived abroad. He opened offices successively in St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, and Vienna, and sold Austria its first two submarines. He also received from the Krupp Works in Germany an attractive offer of 400, 000 marks a year, in addition to a percentage of its business, in return for allowing it to build and market his submarines. While he waited to have the contract approved by his board of directors, officials at Krupp, discovering that Lake had neglected to file patents in Germany, appropriated his plans and withdrew their offer.
Lake suffered a nervous breakdown, and after recovery spent some time in exploring the possibilities of using submarines to salvage sunken treasure and as commercial carriers. Not until 1911 did he at last sell a submarine to the United States: the Seal, a 161-foot vessel which, in addition to having fixed torpedo tubes in the bow, had four torpedo tubes on deck.
Lake had at last broken the Electric Boat Company's monopoly, and over the next eleven years the navy went on to buy twenty-eight more Lake submarines. After 1923 Lake's submarine enterprises gradually collapsed. Responding to disarmament sentiment, the United States scrapped a large part of its fleet. The Lake-type O-12 was decommissioned (renamed the Nautilus, she was assigned to the unsuccessful Wilkins-Ellsworth Arctic Expedition), and by 1930 most of the Seal-type vessels had been stricken from naval lists.
Lake had meanwhile invented a concrete building block and, with others, had founded the Sunshine Homes Concrete Product Company to build inexpensive homes. The project failed, however, and Lake had to sell his Torpedo Boat Company to pay off his debts. Several subsequent ventures to salvage sunken treasure were no more successful. His fortunes steadily dwindled, and in 1937 his home in Milford, Connecticut, was foreclosed.
With the outbreak of World War II, the aging inventor went to Washington to interest Congress in huge cargo-carrying submarines, but without success. Lake was a member of the Congregational Church. Lake died in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1945, at the age of seventy-eight, of arteriosclerotic heart disease. He was buried in King's Highway Cemetery, Milford, Connecticut.