EDISON--AND 100,000 MORE
FLOOD OF SUGGESTIONS AND INVENTIONS OFFERED, MOST OF THEM TO DOWN
THE U-BOATS--"FIND THE SUBMARINE" WAS THE PROBLEM--BEST DETECTION
DEVICES DEVELOPED IN AMERICA--NEW WEAPONS OF WAR--THE NAVAL
CONSULTING BOARD AND ITS GREAT WORK--SOME AMUSING SUGGESTIONS.
One hundred thousand suggestions and inventions were offered the Navy
for winning the war. Four-fifths of them were designed to down the
submarine. They poured in upon the Department in floods, evidence that
American genius was mobilized along with man-power. Letters came in by
the thousand, plans and models by the hundred. All were examined, and
those that gave promise were tested.
The creation of the Naval Consulting Board, headed by Thomas A. Edison,
in 1915, made the Navy the natural center for war inventions. While
many did not prove practical and others were in process, a considerable
number of important inventions were completed and proved of the highest
value. A notable instance was the development of means for detecting
submarines. In this America led the world.
When these devices had been perfected and thoroughly tested out on this
side of the water, Captain R. H. Leigh was sent to England with a staff
of naval officers and civilian experts; and ten tons of apparatus, to
be tried out in British waters. Three trawlers, the _Andrew King_,
_Kunishi_, and _James Bentole_, were equipped at the Portsmouth dock
yard, and on December 30, 1917, accompanied by a speedy "P" boat, they
steamed out for "listening patrol" in the English channel. Mr. C. F.
Scott, one of the civilian engineers who accompanied Captain Leigh,
said:
The day after New Year's we received a wireless from an airship
that a submarine had been sighted. We steamed over, got our devices
out, but couldn't hear a thing. Another message from the airship
changed the "sub's" position, so we altered our course and obtained
a clear indication from the listening devices. The Hun was moving
slowly up the Channel, submerged.
We gave the "P" boat a "fix" (cross bearing) on the spot where our
indication showed the submarine to be. She ran over the place,
dropping a "pattern" of depth charges, and soon we began to see
tremendous amounts of oil rising to the surface. Evidently our
first experience was to be successful. How successful we did not
learn until afterward.
A trawling device had been developed which indicated whether
contact with a submarine had been made. After the oil came up, we
got out our trawling device and ran over the area for about an hour
and finally got an indication.
We threw over a buoy to indicate the spot and anchored for the
night, as it was getting dark. Next morning we trawled again and
got another contact within a hundred yards of the buoy. We had
destroyed a submarine in our first test, and the "sub" was given
out by the Admiralty as a "probable." [That is, probably sunk.]
Many detection devices had been tried out and proved failures, but
the American apparatus was so successful that the British ordered
them for their own vessels. Thousands were manufactured, and our
sub-chasers sent abroad were equipped with them. In December, 1917, it
was estimated that at times two to five U-boats had passed through the
English Channel in a day. After July 1, 1918, when patrol ships were
equipped with the improved listening devices, only one enemy submarine
is known to have passed through the Channel. Blocking the entrances to
Zeebrugge and Ostend, the Dover patrol and the better mine defenses are
to be credited with the larger part of this. But considerable credit
is due to these "listeners," whose ability to locate under-water craft
greatly increased the hazards of U-boats, especially in narrow waters.
The listeners also proved decidedly effective in high waters, off the
French coast, in the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, and wherever they
were used. They compelled the U-boats to change their tactics, and
remain motionless for hours, fearing that the slightest movement of
their propellers would disclose their presence.
Our submarine force began listening tests off Pensacola, Fla., in
January, 1917, using privately-invented apparatus which gave such
promise that an experimental station was established at Nahant, Mass.,
the General Electric, Submarine Signal, and Western Electric companies
coöperating with the Navy Department and Naval Consulting Board.
The Consulting Board had created a special Experimental Committee
headed by Mr. Lawrence Addicks, and on March 3 held a "Submarine
Defense Conference" at New York, which was addressed by Admiral Sims,
then president of the Naval War College; Captain J. K. Robison, of the
Newport Torpedo Station, and Commander Yates Stirling, Jr., in charge
of our submarine base at New London, Conn.
Scientists and naval officers engaged in this work held a conference
in my office in the Navy Department on May 9, and two days later I
created a Special Board on Anti-submarine Devices, with Rear Admiral A.
W. Grant as chairman, and representatives of the electrical and signal
companies, and the National Research Council as advisory members.
Extensive experiments were carried on at our submarine station at New
London, as well as at Nahant.
Magnetic, electrical and other apparatus having proved impracticable,
attention was concentrated on listening devices. The British had
been experimenting with various inventions of this nature, but none
had proved very effective. The first successful listening device
produced in America was the "C" tube, an application of the binaural
principle--that is, hearing through both ears--which was developed by
Dr. William D. Coolidge. Next was the "K" tube, developed at Nahant,
an adaptation of the rotary compensator devised by Prof. Max Mason at
New London, with microphones, enabling the device to be towed several
hundred feet astern of the listening vessel. Subsequently the combined
work at Nahant and New London resulted in production of the "Y" tube,
"Delta," "O S," and "O K" tubes, all modified forms of the "K" tube,
for installation on vessels of different types.
Submarine chasers were equipped with these tubes, the first of which
was developed by August, 1917, and a thorough test was made with
American submarines, which were easily located. But much depended on
the acuteness of the operator, and a school to train "listeners" was
established at New London. Phonograph records of the sound made by
various craft were prepared, and used in the school for listeners, who
soon became experts in determining direction, distance, type of vessel
and speed at which it was moving.
"Find the submarine," was the problem when we entered the war, and this
was the purpose of the listening devices. Once located, the "sub" could
be destroyed or damaged by the depth-bomb. Before its advent there was
no way of reaching the U-boat, once it submerged. The story is told
that a British vessel chased down a "sub," which dived and remained
stationary right under its pursuer. Down below them in the clear water,
the Britishers could see the enemy plainly. "If we only had some sort
of bomb that we could shoot down into the water, we could blow that
Fritzie to Kingdom-come," an officer remarked. The general idea of
the depth-bomb had long been known, and was then given its practical
application.
The first ones, designed by an officer in the Admiralty, were crude
affairs, metal cylinders like ash-cans. They were, at first, not very
reliable, but by development they became the most effective weapons
used against under-water craft.
The United States Navy developed depth-bomb tactics vastly superior
to any before in use. Instead of half a dozen bombs, our destroyers
carried fifty. The old method of releasing from the stern was
superseded by the "Y" gun, which hurled the huge charges with greater
accuracy and less risk to the vessel firing. Instead of dropping one
or two, the depth-charge barrage was devised, bombs being fired in
"patterns" all around the vicinity of the submerged boat, as well as
over the spot where it was believed to be. That was one reason the
destroyers proved such a terror to the "subs," which, as a rule, on
sighting one of these swift warships ducked or ran away.
[Illustration: THE NAVAL CONSULTING BOARD AND THE NAVY DEPARTMENT CHIEFS
Front row, left to right: Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt,
Hiram Maxim, Thomas A. Edison, Secretary Daniels, Peter Cooper Hewitt,
William LeRoy Emmett, Arthur Becket Lamb.]
Gunfire, tellingly effective against submarines as long as they were
on the surface, was ineffective the moment they submerged, as the
ordinary sharp-nose shells were deflected and ricocheted as they struck
the water. Our ordnance experts had already devised a non-ricochet
shell, a "flat nose" projectile which could be fired with considerable
accuracy at a target under water. The first contract for this type of
projectile was placed June 19, 1917, and deliveries began the next
month. Rapidity in firing was increased by a twin-gun produced for
destroyers, two barrels on a single mount, both aimed at one time and
firing alternately.
[Illustration: SECRETARY DANIELS AND THOMAS A. EDISON
Inset, Secretary Daniels and Mr. Edison with Mr. William L. Saunders
and Professor Max Mason, inventor of a submarine detection device, at a
test experiment at New London.]
Thus we had bombs and projectiles and quick-firing guns which would
"get" the undersea enemy, once it was located.
The paravane, an English invention, proved of great value in protecting
ships from mines. Its "wings," spread out in the water, picked up
mines; and its wires bore them away from the ships, where they could be
exploded without danger to the vessel.
Mines played a big part in naval warfare. The Germans sowed the seas
with them, and if the Allied mine-sweepers had not been so energetic
and skillful, they might have been as destructive to shipping as the
U-boats were. Our Bureau of Ordnance led in mine development, and the
new mine, called "Mark VI," which it produced in 1917, was decidedly
superior to any of its predecessors, and was the type used by us in the
North Sea Barrage.
Better guns for aeroplanes was a vital need. Machine-guns were made
more effective; but for anti-submarine warfare there was needed
something of larger caliber, with sufficient power to penetrate the
hull plating of the U-boat. An aeroplane "cannon," the Davis non-recoil
gun, was produced.
A 37-millimeter automatic cannon was being developed, as well as a
three-inch gun for the larger type of dirigibles. Aerial bombs were
improved and enlarged until they reached a weight of 550 pounds,
with 190 pounds of explosive, the largest type being 15 inches in
diameter and over 62 inches in height. Various experiments were made in
launching torpedoes from planes, and torpedo planes were designed to
accompany the fleet.
Night firing, naval experts realized, could be made much more effective
by some method of illuminating the area around enemy ships without
disclosing the position of our own. This was solved by "star" shells.
Fired at long distances and exploding high in the air, these shells
light up a considerable area, bringing out in bold relief the vessels
beneath.
Range-finding and fire-control devices were improved, increasing
the efficiency of large and medium caliber guns. "Smoke boxes" were
manufactured by the thousand and placed aboard merchant as well as
naval vessels, so that in case of attack they could make smoke screens.
So many new devices were developed that it would take volumes to
tell of them all. Though thousands of the suggestions made were
impracticable, not a few were of decided value, and the result as a
whole was fresh proof of the never-failing inventiveness and genius of
Americans.
When the Navy Department, in 1915, was planning its large program of
construction, and seeking for new weapons and new strategy to combat
the submarine, I was convinced that it would be of great assistance if
civilian scientists and inventors could be induced to give the Navy the
benefit of their experience and ability. This resulted in the creation
of the Naval Consulting Board. On July 7, I wrote Mr. Edison inviting
him to become the head of the Board, saying:
One of the imperative needs of the Navy, in my judgment, is
machinery and facilities for utilizing the natural inventive genius
of Americans to meet the new conditions of warfare as shown abroad,
and it is my intention, if a practical way can be worked out, as I
think it can be, to establish, at the earliest moment, a department
of invention and development to which all ideas and suggestions,
either from the service or from civilian inventors, can be referred
for determination as to whether they contain practical suggestions
for us to take up and perfect.
We are confronted with a new and terrible engine of warfare in the
submarine, to consider only one of the big things which I have in
mind; and I feel sure that with the practical knowledge of the
officers of the Navy, with a department composed of the keenest and
most inventive minds that we can gather together, and with your own
wonderful brain to aid us, the United States will be able, as in
the past, to meet this new danger with new devices that will assure
peace to our country by their effectiveness.
Upon Mr. Edison's acceptance--he was the first American chosen by
selective draft--each of twelve leading scientific societies was asked
to name two representatives to compose the membership of the Board.
Most of them were eminent in scientific research or the development of
useful apparatus. This was the first civilian organization of a war
character which was created. Because of the personnel of its members,
it aroused wide interest.
The Board was composed of Thomas A. Edison, president; William L.
Saunders, chairman; Benjamin B. Thayer, vice-chairman; Thomas Robins,
secretary; Lawrence Addicks, Bion J. Arnold, Dr. L. H. Baekeland,
D. W. Brunton, Howard E. Coffin, Alfred Craven, W. L. R. Emmett,
Peter Cooper Hewitt, A. M. Hunt, M. R. Hutchison, B. G. Lamme, Hudson
Maxim, Spencer Miller, J. W. Richards, A. L. Riker, M. B. Sellers,
Elmer A. Sperry, Frank J. Sprague, A. G. Webster, W. R. Whitney, and
R. S. Woodward. Admiral William Strother Smith was named as special
representative of the Navy Department. All bureau chiefs and other
naval experts worked in coöperation with the Board.
With its technical talent, the Board began at once a survey of the
industries of the country, having effected an organization in every
state, with five technical men in each as advisory members. These
field aids, giving their services free, went into industrial plants
throughout the country, listing all machinery and machine tools
suitable for war service, and the men competent to serve in shops. That
gridiron organization functioned perfectly. This information of the
manufacturing resources of the country for public service in case of
emergency was the first that had been collected. The Navy had taken a
census of the ships and the Army knew of munition plants, but it was
this survey of industrial material and services which later formed the
basis for the big production work of the two military departments and
the War Industries Board. This was real preparedness--and it was begun
in 1915. Before England went into the war, it had prepared no record
of skilled labor suitable for war work. The result was that many men
hastened to the front whose services were far more valuable in munition
plants. The inventory taken by the Naval Consulting Board, completed
in five months, enabled our country to avoid that mistake. It made it
comparatively easy, when war came, to retain skilled men where they
counted most, and enabled factories to swing from their regular line of
production to Army and Navy work.
The card indexes, prepared with thoroughness, showed the concerns
that were working on military orders for foreign governments. It was
ascertained that 35,000 concerns in the United States could manufacture
war material, and the names, location and facilities of these plants
were docketed. The Board pointed out, what afterwards became generally
recognized, that the manufacture of munitions was a parts-making
business. Parts made in Toledo, Ohio, must fit those made in Portland,
Oregon, or Augusta, Georgia, and all these parts must fit each other
to the hundredth part of an inch. Over 500 concerns manufactured
parts of the Mark VI mine. When the Council of National Defense was
established, it took over the data and organization, and requested the
Naval Consulting Board to act as the official Board of Inventions for
the country.
After the experiments at Nahant, which followed the March meeting, in
1917, in company with Mr. Edison, Mr. William L. Saunders and others
of the Consulting Board, I visited New London. We took a sea trip on a
submarine-chaser equipped with listening devices. It was a matter of
gratification to both civilians and naval men to witness personally
the success of submarine detection, and to feel that their faith and
experiments had been rewarded.
Ship protection was the subject of constant study, and various
methods--camouflage, armament, smoke-boxes, submarine and torpedo
detection, plans to prevent and withstand attack and increase
buoyancy--were studied by the Consulting Board. It was through that
board that the naval research and experimental laboratory, now under
way on the Potomac, below Washington, was established and the money
provided through Congressional appropriation.
Mr. Edison spent most of his time during the war--practically all of
it--either on board the _Sachem_, which had been fitted up for his
special use, or in his office in the Navy Department at Washington.
I was in intimate touch with him. It was a revelation to go into his
chart-room and talk to him about his study of the lanes of the sea; to
see his maps studded with pins pointing out where sinkings were most
frequent, and to obtain his advice as to the routing of ships to lessen
the probability of attack. An authority on many other subjects, he
learned much about troop transportation, the routing of merchant ships
and their quick turn-around, and avoiding U-boats by changing routes.
One of his most successful and yet least known of his experiments
was in the detection of torpedoes. The Wizard of Menlo Park was most
modest in his claims. To a lady, enthusiastic over what she called
his inspiration, Mr. Edison is reported to have said, "Madam, it is
not inspiration, but perspiration." In a letter to a sub-committee
of the Senate, when some one had attributed the success in detecting
submarines to Mr. Edison, he wrote:
I never worked or pretended to work on the detection of submarines.
All of my work in this general direction was confined to the
detection of torpedoes and to the quick turning of cargo boats
ninety degrees in order to save the boat from being torpedoed.
I was successful in both. With my listening apparatus, and while
my boat was in full speed, I could hear a torpedo the instant it
was fired nearly two miles away, and with my turning device, a
5,000-ton cargo boat, fully loaded going at full speed, was turned
at right angles to her original course in an advance of 200 feet.
Along with the hundred thousand suggestions of how to win the war,
there were not wanting incidents out of the ordinary. One day as I was
discussing department business with a bureau chief the telephone rang,
and a clerk said "long distance" was calling. He did not catch the
name clearly, but thought it was Mr. Ford. I found in a moment that it
was not the famous Detroit automobile maker, for the man at the other
end of the line began talking a blue streak, starting out with the
declaration: "I've invented a thing that will wipe out the submarines;
I've got something that positively will end the war." He seemed quite
excited about it. I asked him what it was. He said he could not tell me
over the phone, or entrust the secret to mails or telegraph.
"Send it to our Inventions Board," I suggested.
"Not on your life," he replied. "They might steal it, and I'd never get
the credit for it. It's worth millions, millions!"
He would never show it to but three people, he said, the President, Mr.
Edison and myself, and all three must give the pledge of secrecy.
"There's not a moment to be lost, and I want to bring it to Washington
myself," he exclaimed. "But I must be careful. If the Germans knew I
had this, their spies would murder me."
"All right, bring it on," I remarked, hoping to end the conversation
before he had bankrupted himself with telephone charges.
"Send me $5,000 by telegraph this afternoon, and I'll start tomorrow,"
he demanded. Used as I was to queer propositions, this did rather
startle me. "No, no," I replied emphatically; "I cannot do that."
"Do you mean to say,"--he seemed to be surprised--"that you won't send
me a measly little $5,000 when the thing I have is worth millions, and
will end the war?"
"That's correct," I said, rather sharply, I fear. "We will not send
anybody a dollar of Government money until we know what it is for."
"Well, that's the smallest piece of business I ever heard of," he
snapped. "I thought you were some Secretary, and now I believe all the
mean things some newspapers have said about you."
One of my office aids figured out that this irate citizen had spent
about $20 in telephone tolls. We never heard from him again, and the
invention that would end the war was lost to the world.
The sturdy police that guarded the portals of the State, War and Navy
building stopped at the entrance a tall, lean man who was lugging a box
about as big as two suitcases. They ordered him to open it, and found
inside a concern that looked as if it might go off at any moment. He
wanted to see somebody in the Navy Department, and one of my aids went
down to investigate. The fellow did not look like a spy or plotter, and
the Navy man asked him what his contraption was.
"It's a porcupine boat," he said, "a boat that'll keep off them
torpedoes that the submarines are firin'."
It was a model of a boat, its wooden sides thickly studded with long
spikes.
"What's the idea?" he was asked.
"Well, you see, the torpedoes can't sink a ship unless they hit her,"
he explained; "and if you put these long spikes all along the side,
they can't get to her. The spikes will stop 'em; the torpedoes are
stuck before they hit the boat--there you are."
It was a great idea; certainly no one else had thought of it. But as
the spikes would have to be about forty or fifty feet long to hold off
the torpedoes, and each ship would have to have a thousand or two of
them, we could not very well adopt the invention.
A Southern inventor brought forth a plan that would have brought joy
to the Sunny South, if it could have been adopted. This was to sheathe
all ships with an armor of thick cotton batting. He evidently got his
inspiration from the battle of New Orleans, where doughty old Andrew
Jackson erected a barricade of cotton bales which the British shells
could not penetrate. So a century later this Jacksonian figured that
a ship swathed in cotton would be immune from shell or torpedoes. The
Germans could fire away, and do no more harm than if they were throwing
rocks at a mattress. But unfortunately the naval experts seemed to have
their doubts about the efficacy of cotton-batting armor, preferring to
stick to steel.
"Lick the enemy before he lands!" was the slogan of an earnest soul who
was designing a submarine that would carry from 200 to 400 torpedoes.
If necessary, in the midst of a foreign fleet, he told us, they could
"unload the whole 400 in from four to eight minutes, according to the
number of men on duty to let them loose."
He also had "some very good ideas for warships," one of which was to
turn our old battleships into floating forts with 16-inch disappearing
guns. Attached to each vessel would be a sloping steel shelving running
into the water, a great plough that would turn the other fellow's
shells and scoop up torpedoes as if they were watermelons. "You could
just sit up on deck," he said, "and laugh at a hundred of them sending
torpedoes."
An airship that would sail from here to Germany, blow up Berlin, and
keep right on around the world, manufacturing its own fuel as it went
along, was another suggestion.
One citizen had a remarkable mine-catcher which, he said, "misses none;
it sees and feels for you and catches all, if the sea is strewed with
mines." He offered to sell his model for only $250,000.
We were offered an automatic field-gun that, placed in Washington,
could be operated by electricity from Texas. One man could operate a
thousand of them, the inventor claimed. Placing these guns all along
the German lines in France, the operator, seated at his switch-board in
Paris, could play on the keys like a typewriter, spraying the Teuton
lines with deadly missiles from Ypres to Verdun.
Another scheme was to put guns on top of all the skyscrapers in New
York to ward off aerial attack; and to build a machine that would
gather all the electricity in the metropolis, and project it by
wireless far to sea, sinking hostile vessels as if they had been struck
by lightning.
Mobilizing the dogs of America, sending them to France and "sicking"
them on the Germans was a proposition that might not have appealed to
dog-lovers so much as to the ferocious fighting men who wanted to bite
the Germans and "eat 'em up."
Mechanical soldiers capable of marching, fighting and capturing
man soldiers were proposed. You would only have to fill them with
ammunition, wind them up and let them go.
The German fleet at Kiel could have been easily destroyed, if the
floating torpedo suggested had been a success. Its originator proposed
to launch them in channels when the tide was going in, let them float
into the German harbors and blow up everything afloat.
These absurdities gave a touch of humor to the arduous task of
developing new methods and inventions--a task well performed by the
naval experts, civilian scientists and inventors who so patriotically
devoted their time and talents to the winning of the war.