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.

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.

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.