By Rick Geffken
You won’t find Simon Lake on a Monmouth County map. Mister Simon Lake was the inventor of the submarine. If you’re familiar with his name and fame, you still might be surprised to learn that his first under water excursions were in our very own Two Rivers. In 1894 Simon Lake piloted a wheeled wooden submersible along the bottom of Shrewsbury River. Yes, you read that correctly – it was a wooden submarine on wheels!
Speaking at the Atlantic Highland Historical Society recently, video historian John Schneider told an intrigued audience how Simon Lake made undersea navigation possible. Lake’s is a story of ingenuity, persistence, disappointments, and ultimately success, tempered by delayed recognition.
If you’ve ever had a meal at the Shore Casino or commuted to New York via the Seastreak Ferry you’ve been on Simon Lake Drive in Atlantic Highlands, named for the inventor. You may have seen the replica there of Lake’s Argonaut Junior, given to the town by the Atlantic Highlands Lions Club in 1994.
Simon Lake was born in Pleasantville in 1866. His father was an inventor, as well as a developer of Atlantic City and Ocean City. But young Simon’s talents weren’t simply inherited. He developed his engineering skills working in his father’s foundry and machine shop. He was also captivated by the Nautilus submarine he read about in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.” His prototype submarine was in fact named after the scientific name for nautilus, “argonauta.”
This replica of SImon Lake’s Argonaut Junior sits in the Atlantic Highlands Harbor parking lot. It was given to the town by the Atlantic Highlands Lion Club in 1994.
After working in Baltimore making winding gears for oyster boats, Simon Lake moved to Atlantic Highlands in 1893, primarily because its waterfront afforded him a shallow water lab for his experiments. He lived with his Uncle Somers Champion’s family on Bay View Avenue while he tinkered with rudimentary submarine designs.
Thomas Alva Edison Lake – the son Simon named in homage to another New Jersey inventor – wrote that his father’s Argonaut Junior was “built of pitch pine, as an inexpensive way to demonstrate his principles of submergence that would ultimately change the development of submarine technology. When submerged to a shallow seafloor, a diver’s door could be opened and he could retrieve articles or exit and re-enter the little 14- foot submarine by maintaining a pressurized compartment. A novel feature was the use of wheels to keep the vessel from getting stuck to the bottom and to provide mobility by the use of interior hand cranks.”
In December 1894, Simon Lake and his cousin Bart Champion took the little craft to Blackfish Hole, a 20-foot deep stretch of the Shrewsbury/Navesink confluence, just off Rocky Point at Hartshorne Woods. Once submerged, the vehicle rode across the bottom of the river as the pair of, well, Argonauts, watched marine life swim past their porthole. Excited with this success, Lake was confident the United States government couldn’t help but be interested in this new technology, if he could get it to the Navy’s attention.
Lake came up with a way to generate the positive publicity he needed a few weeks later. In front of dozens of newspaper reporters and a large crowd in Atlantic Highlands, Lake took the Argonaut Junior to the bottom of the harbor and surfaced with a handful of starfish and clamshells. Skeptical observers murmured that objects had been stowed on board ahead of time.
Coming to his nephew’s rescue, Somers Champion asked the Atlantic Highlands mayor and other dignitaries to sign a shingle. He attached it to a sash weight and threw it from the pier. The Argonaut Junior dove again. When Lake held the retrieved shingle up in front of the crowd, “Huzzahs!” and loud applause signaled his triumph. Nonetheless, most of the press reports labeled it a stunt with little real value, ridiculing the entire episode.
The U.S. Navy was also not convinced Lake’s design was worthwhile. Competitor John Philip Holland was conducting submersible operations in Raritan Bay around the same time, and in 1897 his company was the first to win a government submarine contract. The thwarted Simon Lake began selling his submarines to a number of other countries in the first years of the 20th century, among them Austria, Germany, and Russia. Eventually the United States government did come around to Lake’s innovations when it bought his sub- marines during the buildup for World War I. Simon Lake’s enduring efforts won his company many Navy con- tracts over the years. In 1964, the Navy built submarine ten- ders in what was called the Simon Lake class. The USS Simon Lake serviced the fleet for an enviable 35 years, duplicating Lake’s own persistence.
After his initial fits and starts, Simon Lake became a wealthy industrialist. The innovative naval architect explored other engineering interests. For more about his life, his companies, and his other inventions, readers can visit John Schneider’s site at JerseyBayshore.com.
Video historian John Schneider demonstrating his filming techniques during his May 18th Atlantic Highlands Historical presentation on submarine inventor Simon Lake.
So, how DO you get to Simon Lake? Simon Lake moved his company’s operations to Bridgeport on Long Island Sound in 1907. When he passed away in 1945, he was laid to rest where he lived during those years in Milford, Connecticut. You can visit his unassuming gravesite in the Kings Highway Cemetery.
Simon Lake, adopted son of Atlantic Highlands, is acknowledged today as the Father of the Submarine.
