JOHN P. HOLLAND
When the _Merrimac_ rammed the _Cumberland_, burned the _Congress_, and
was fought to a standstill next day by the little _Monitor_, all the
world realized that there had been a revolution in naval warfare. The
age of the wooden warship was gone forever, the day of the ironclad
had come. And a twenty-year-old Irish school-teacher began to wonder
what would be the next revolution; what new craft might be invented
that would dethrone the ironclad. This young Irishman’s name was John
P. Holland, and he decided to devote his life to the perfection of the
submarine.
Like Robert Fulton, Admiral Von Tirpitz, and the Frenchman who built
the _Rotterdam Boat_ in 1652, Holland relied on submarines to break
the power of the British fleet. Though born a British subject, in the
little village of Liscannor, County Clare in the year 1842, he had
seen too many of his fellow countrymen starved to death or driven into
exile not to hate the stupid tyranny that characterized England’s
rule of Ireland in those bitter, far-off days. He longed for the day
of Ireland’s independence, and that day seemed to be brought much
nearer by the American Civil War. Not only had many thousand brave
Irish-Americans become trained veterans but Great Britain and the
United States had been brought to the verge of war by the sinking of
American ships by the _Alabama_ and other British-built, Confederate
commerce-destroyers. When that Anglo-American war broke out, there
would be an army ready to come over and free Ireland--if only the
troublesome British navy could be put out of the way. And already the
English were launching ironclad after ironclad to replace their now
useless steam-frigates and ships-of-the-line. It is no use trying to
outbuild or outfight the British navy above water, and John P. Holland
realized this in 1862, as several kings and emperors have, before or
since.
[Illustration: The _Holland No. 1_. Designed to carry a torpedo and
fix it to the bottom of a ship, on the general principle of Bushnell’s
_Turtle_.
Drawn by Lieutenant F. M. Barber, U. S. N., in 1875.]
Though his friends in Cork kept laughing at him, Holland worked
steadily on his plans for a submarine boat, throughout the sixties.
Presently he came to America and obtained a job as school-teacher in
Paterson, New Jersey. There he built and launched his first submarine
in 1875. It was a sharp-pointed, little, cigar-shaped affair, only
sixteen feet long and two feet in diameter amidships. This craft was
designed to carry a torpedo and fix it to the bottom of a ship, on the
general principle of Bushnell’s _Turtle_. It was divided into four
compartments, with air-chambers fore and aft. Air-pipes led to where
Holland sat in the middle, with his head in a respirator shaped like a
diver’s helmet, and his feet working pedals that turned the propellor.
There was nothing revolutionary about this _Holland No. 1_. A similar
underwater bicycle is said to have been invented by Alvary Templo in
1826, and Drzewiecki used one at Odessa in 1877. But Holland used
his to teach himself how to build something better. Just as the
Wright brothers learned how to build and fly aeroplanes by coasting
down through the air from the tops of the Kitty Hawk sand-hills in
their motorless “glider,” so John P. Holland found how to make and
navigate submarines by diving under the surface of the Passaic River
and adjacent waters, and swimming around there in his _No. 1_ and her
successors.
The _Holland No. 2_ was launched in 1877 and became immediately and
prophetically stuck in the mud. She had a double hull, the space
between being used as a ballast-tank, whose contents leaked constantly
into the interior, and she was driven intermittently by a four
horse-power petroleum engine of primitive design. After a series of
trials that entertained his neighbors and taught the inventor that the
best place for a single horizontal rudder is the stern, Holland took
the engine out of the boat and sank her under the Falls Bridge, where
she lies to this day.
He then entered into negotiations with the Fenian Brotherhood, a secret
society organized for the purpose of setting up an Irish republic by
militant methods. Though not a Fenian himself, Holland was thoroughly
in sympathy with the brotherhood, and offered to show them how they
could get round, or rather under, the British navy. You may have seen a
once-familiar lithograph of a green-painted superdreadnought of strange
design flying the Crownless Harp, and named the Irish battleship
_Emerald Isle_. The only real Irish warships of modern times, however,
were the two submarines Holland persuaded the Fenians to have him build
at their expense.
Rear-Admiral Philip Hichborn, former Chief Constructor, U.S.N., said of
these two boats:
“She (the earlier one) was the first submarine since Bushnell’s time
employing water ballast and always retaining buoyancy, in which
provision was made to insure a fixed center of gravity and a fixed
absolute weight. Moreover, she was the first buoyant submarine to be
steered down and up in the vertical plane by horizontal-rudder action
as she was pushed forward by her motor, instead of being pushed up
and down by vertical-acting mechanism.[11] Her petroleum engine,
provided for motive-power and for charging her compressed-air flasks,
was inefficient, and the boat therefore failed as a practical craft;
but in her were demonstrated all the chief principles of successful,
brain-directed, submarine navigation. In 1881, Holland turned out a
larger and better boat in which he led the world far and away in the
solution of submarine problems, and for a couple of years demonstrated
that he could perfectly control his craft in the vertical plane.
Eventually, through financial complications, she was taken to New
Haven, where she now is.”
[Illustration:
Photo by Brown Bros.
The _Fenian Ram_.
(Photographed by Mr. Simon Lake, in the shed at New Haven.)]
Political as well as financial complications caused the internment of
this submarine, which a New York reporter, with picturesque inaccuracy,
called the _Fenian Ram_. The Irish at home were by this time thinking
less of fighting for independence and more for peacefully obtaining
home rule, while the arbitration and payment of the “Alabama claims” by
Great Britain had removed all danger of a war between that country and
the United States. Under these circumstances, many of the Fenians felt
that it was wasted money for their society to spend any more of its
funds on warships it could never find use for. This led to dissensions
which culminated in a party of Fenians seizing the _Ram_ and taking it
to a shed on the premises of one of their members at New Haven, where
it has remained ever since.
But the construction and performances of this submarine, and of
several others which he soon afterwards built for himself, won Holland
such a reputation that when Secretary Whitney decided in 1888 that
submarines would be a good thing for the United States navy, the great
Philadelphia ship-building firm of Cramps submitted two designs:
Holland’s and Nordenfeldt’s, and the former won the award. But after
nearly twelve months had been spent in settling preliminary details,
and when a contract for building an experimental boat was just about to
be awarded, there came a change of administration and the matter was
dropped.
This was a great disappointment for Holland, and the next four or five
years were lean ones for the inventor. He had built five boats and
designed a sixth without their having brought him a cent of profit.
It was not until March 3, 1893, that Congress appropriated the money
for the construction of an experimental submarine, and inventors were
invited to submit their designs. By this time John P. Holland had
not only spent all his own money, but all he could borrow from his
relatives and friends. To make matters worse, the country was then
passing through a financial panic, when very few people had any money
to lend or invest. And all the security Holland could offer was his
faith in the future of the submarine, which at that time was a stock
joke of the comic papers, together with those other two crack-brained
projects, the flying-machine and the horseless carriage.
“I know I can win that competition and build that boat for the
Government,” said Holland to a young lawyer whom he had met at lunch in
a downtown New York restaurant, “if I can only raise the money to pay
the fees and other expenses. I need exactly $347.19.”
“What do you want the nineteen cents for?” asked the other.
“To buy a certain kind of ruler I need for drawing my plans.”
“If you’ve figured it out as closely as all that,” replied the lawyer,
“I’ll take a chance and lend you the money.”
He did so, receiving in exchange a large block of stock in the
new-formed Holland Torpedo-boat Company. To-day his stock is worth
several million dollars.
Mr. Holland won the competition and after two years’ delay his
company began the construction of the _Plunger_. This submarine
was to be propelled by steam while running on the surface and by
storage-batteries when submerged. Double propulsion of this type had
been first installed by a Southerner named Alstitt on a submarine he
built at Mobile, Alabama, in 1863, and theoretically discussed in a
book written in 1887 by Commander Hovgaard of the Danish navy. Though
a great improvement on any type of single propulsion, this system had
many drawbacks, the chief of which was the length of time--from fifteen
to thirty minutes--that it took for the oil-burning surface engine
to cool and rid itself of hot gases before it was safe to seal the
funnel and dive. Though the _Plunger_ was launched in 1897, she was
never finished, for Mr. Holland foresaw her defects. He persuaded the
Government to let his company pay back the money already spent on the
_Plunger_ and build an entirely new boat.
_Holland No. 8_ was built accordingly, but failed to work properly.
Finally came the ninth and last of her line, the first of the modern
submarines, the world-famous _Holland_.
She was a chunky little porpoise of a boat, 10 feet 7 inches deep and
only 53 feet 10 inches long, and looking even shorter and thicker than
she was because of the narrow, comb-like superstructure running fore
and aft along the deck. But her shape and dimensions were the results
of twenty-five years’ experience. Built at Mr. Lewis Nixon’s shipyards
at Elizabethport, New Jersey, the _Holland_ was launched in the early
spring of 1898, between the blowing-up of the _Maine_ and the outbreak
of the Spanish-American War. But though John P. Holland repeatedly
begged to be allowed to take his submarine into Santiago Harbor and
torpedo Cervera’s fleet, the naval authorities at Washington were too
conservative-minded to let him try.
“United States warship goes down with all hands!” the small boys (I was
one of them) used to shout at this time, and then explain that it was
only another dive of the “Holland submarine.” Strictly speaking, the
_Holland_ was not a United States warship till October 13, 1900, when
she was formally placed in commission under the command of Lieutenant
Harry H. Caldwell, who had been on her during many of the exhaustive
series of trials in which the little undersea destroyer proved to
even the most conservative officers of our navy that the day of the
submarine had come at last.
[Illustration:
Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company
U. S. S. _Holland_, in Drydock with the Russian Battleship _Retvizan_.]
Propelled on the surface by a fifty horse-power gasoline motor, the
_Holland_ had a cruising radius of 1500 miles at a speed of seven knots
an hour. Submerged, she was driven by electric storage-batteries. This
effective combination of oil-engines with an electric motor is one of
John P. Holland’s great discoveries, and is used in every submarine
to-day. When her tanks were filled till her deck was flush with the
water, and the two horizontal rudders at the stern began to steer her
downwards, the _Holland_ could dive to a depth of twenty-eight feet
in five seconds. She had no periscope, for that instrument was then
crude and unsatisfactory. To take aim, the captain of the _Holland_
had to make a quick “porpoise dive,” up to the surface and down again,
exposing the conning-tower for the few seconds needed to take aim and
judge the distance to the target. Though by this means the _Holland_
succeeded in getting within striking-distance of the _Kearsarge_ and
the _New York_ without being detected, during the summer manœuvers of
the Atlantic fleet off Newport in 1900, it has proved fatal to the only
submarine that has tried it in actual warfare (see page 160).
Less than half the length of the _Nordenfeldt II_, the _Holland_ did
not pitch or see-saw when submerged. Each of her crew of six sat on
a low stool beside the machinery he was to operate, and there was no
moving about when below the surface. Neither did the boat stand on her
tail when a torpedo was discharged from the bow-tube, for the loss of
weight was immediately compensated by admitting an equivalent amount of
water into a tank. Originally the _Holland_ had a stern torpedo-tube as
well, besides a pneumatic gun for throwing eighty pounds of dynamite
half a mile through the air, but these were later removed.
How the _Holland_ impressed our naval officers at that time is best
shown in the oft-quoted testimony of Admiral Dewey before the naval
committee of the House of Representatives in 1900.
“Gentlemen, I saw the operation of the boat down off Mount Vernon the
other day. Several members of this committee were there. I think we
were all very much impressed with its performance. My aid, Lieutenant
Caldwell, was on board. The boat did everything that the owners
proposed to do. I said then, and I have said it since, that if they had
had two of those things at Manila, I could never have held it with the
squadron I had. The moral effect--to my mind, it is infinitely superior
to mines or torpedoes or anything of the kind. With those craft moving
under water it would wear people out. With two of those in Galveston
all the navies of the world could not blockade the place.”
[Illustration:
Photo by Brown Bros.
John P. Holland.]
The _Holland_ was purchased by the United States Government on April
11, 1900, for $150,000. She had cost her builders, exclusive of any
office expenses or salaries of officers, $236,615.43. But it had
been a profitable investment for the Holland Torpedo-boat Company,
for on August 25, the United States navy contracted with it for the
construction of six more submarines. And in the autumn of the same
year, though it was not announced to the public till March 1, 1901,
five other _Hollands_ were ordered through the agency of Vickers Sons,
and Maxim by the British admiralty. Soon every maritime nation was
either buying _Hollands_ or paying royalties on the inventor’s patents,
and building bigger, faster, better submarines every year.
The original _Holland_ had outlived her fighting value when she was
condemned by Secretary Daniels in June, 1915, to be broken up and
sold as junk. There is still room in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for that
worthless and meaningless relic, the _Intelligent Whale_, but there was
none for the _Holland_ submarine, whose place in history is with the
_Clairmont_ and the _Monitor_.
John P. Holland withdrew in 1904 from the Holland Torpedo-boat Company,
which has since become merged with the Electric Boat Company, that
builds most of the submarines for the United States navy, and many for
the navies of foreign powers. Like most other great inventive geniuses,
Holland was not a trained engineer, and it was perhaps inevitable that
disputes should have arisen between him and his associates as to the
carrying out of his ideas. His last years were embittered by the belief
that the submarines of to-day were distorted and worthless developments
of his original type. Whether or not he was mistaken, only time can
tell. That to John P. Holland, more than to any other man since David
Bushnell and Robert Fulton, the world owes the modern submarine, cannot
be denied. His death, on August 12, 1914, was but little noticed in the
turmoil and confusion of the first weeks of the great European War. But
when the naval histories of that war are written, his name will not be
forgotten.