John Louis Lay, the son of John and Frances (Atkins) Lay, was born in Buffalo, New York, United States. He was descended from Robert Lay who emigrated from England to America in 1635, settling first in Lynn, Massachussets, and then in Saybrook, Connecticut. Lay's father was long a prominent business man of Buffalo, New York.
He received a well-rounded education in the city schools.
Lay developed an especial interest in mechanics as he grew to manhood, and was engaged in various engineering enterprises in Buffalo when the Civil War began. In July 1861 he enlisted in the United States Navy as a second assistant engineer, becoming first assistant in 1863. His mechanical aptitude quickly attracted attention and he was given every opportunity to develop his inventive talents. He perfected a torpedo for offensive warfare and communicated his plan for its use to Lieut. William Barker Cushing. Shortly afterward (October 27, 1864), Cushing, with a Lay torpedo aboard, succeeded in blowing up the Confederate ram Albemarle by driving his boat against its bow.
Lay conducted further work on torpedoes at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and on March 14, 1865, he and W. W. W. Wood secured a series of four patents, Nos. 46, 850 to 46, 853, describing not only apparatus for operating torpedoes but the design and equipment of a picket boat from which to discharge them. The patentees assigned these patents to Donald McKay, the noted ship-builder of East Boston, Massachussets, but there is no record of the further development of the invention.
Resigning from the navy in 1865, Lay was engaged by the Peruvian government to prepare fixed mines and place suspended torpedoes in the harbor of Callao, in order to forestall the threatened attack of a Spanish fleet. After returning to the United States in 1867, he devoted considerable time, at his home in Buffalo, to the perfection of what he called the "Lay Moveable Torpedo Submarine. " He also secured a series of six patents for a steam-engine on July 23, 1867, and one for a locomotive on October 29, 1867. The Lay movable torpedo was of two lengths, sixteen and twenty-three feet respectively, and consisted of a cylindrical body with conical ends, carrying in the forward end 100 to 200 pounds of explosives. It was electrically propelled and was controlled as to both direction and time of firing through a wire within a rope attached to the torpedo and paid out from its place of launching, either the shore or a vessel. The torpedo's cruising range was one and one-half miles and its speed ten to twelve miles an hour. The inventor set forth its merits in a pamphlet entitled Submarine Warfare; Fixed Mines and Torpedos. The Lay Moveable Torpedo: Its Superiority over All other Implements of Submarine Warfare. Though the United States Navy purchased but two of his torpedoes, he received large sums of money from Russia and Turkey for the rights to his invention. He took up his residence in Europe about 1870, but subsequently lost his fortune, and after thirty years abroad returned to the United States in the hope of disposing of some later inventions. He died, however, homeless and penniless, in Bellevue Hospital, New York, survived by two children living in Europe.
