Science: Salvage

At Paterson, N. J, seven young engineering students—George Duggan, Henry Walstenholme, Richard Jenkinson, Julian and Edward Yzewyn, Tice Van Dyk and Frederick Bomelyn—have been improving their summer evenings by prowling along the shores of the Passaic River with a dip needle, the instrument used to locate subsurface metals. Last week, under a bridge, the needle dipped strenuously. The prospectors seized shovels, dug, ejaculated, waved their shovels in muddy triumph. Their buried treasure was not a cache of pirate bullion, or a mastodon’s skull, but an 18-foot iron hull designed to run under water; a submarine of primitive design.

The digging students had heard about John P. Holland, Paterson schoolteacher who, more than a half century ago, helped develop submarine navigation from an affair of iron or copper tubs driven by handscrews to a science of military importance. They had heard how he ventured down under the Passaic River’s surface in one of his first models, with a boy to steer while he himself manned the pumps. When craft failed to reappear, divers had rescued Inventor Holland and the boy from the river bottom. The imperfect submarine had been hoisted up, dragged ashore, abandoned. Inventor Holland’s late fame had obscured the failure of his first experiments. The Passaic River had changed its course, piling silt upon the abandoned hulk which, when salvaged, will now rise to the importance of a major exhibit at the Passaic County Historical Society.

John P. Holland was by no means the “father of the submarine.” As early as 1775, Inventor David Bushnell made a practical model. Robert Fulton followed Bushnell’s ideas with a Nautilus which dived down 25 feet and stayed down four hours, its crew breathing compressed air. The South used submarines in the Civil War and one sank the Federal warship Housatonic though swamped and sunk herself by her torpedo’s explosion. The French Plongeur of 1863 was 146 feet long, driven by compressed air motor. The significant features of the Holland experiments were the introduction of a gasoline engine and of internal ballast tanks to admit and lower the ship’s buoyance so that she could bs steered bottom-ward by horizontal rudders. The Holland type craft was first adopted by the British Navy.