Simon Lake
| Simon Lake | |
|---|---|
Simon Lake
|
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| Born |
September 4, 1866 Pleasantville, New Jersey |
| Died | June 23, 1945 (aged 78) Milford, Connecticut |
| Nationality | American |
| Spouse(s) | Margaret Vogel (1873-?) |
| Children | Miriam Catherine Lake (1891-?) Thomas Alva Edison Lake (1892-?) Margaret Vogel Lake (1894-?) Elwood Lake Ford (1899-1991) |
| Engineering career | |
| Projects | Submarines |
| Significant advance | Naval design |
Simon Lake (September 4, 1866 – June 23, 1945) was a Quaker American mechanical engineer and naval architect who obtained over two hundred patents for advances in naval design and competed with John Philip Holland to build the first submarines for the United States Navy.
Born in Pleasantville, New Jersey on September 4, 1866. Lake joined his father's foundry business after attending public schools in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Lake had a strong interest in undersea travel.
He built his first submarine, Argonaut Junior, in 1894 in response to an 1893 request from the US Navy for a submarine torpedo boat. In 1898 he followed up with the 36-foot Argonaut 1, which he sailed from Norfolk, Virginia for a thousand miles to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, arriving in November, 1898. As a result of lessons learned on that journey, he rebuilt it into the 60-foot Argonaut 2.
Neither Argonaut nor Lake's following submarine, Protector, built in 1901, were accepted by the Navy. Protector was the first submarine to have diving planes mounted forward of the conning tower and a flat keel. Four diving planes allowed Protector to maintain depth without changing ballast tank levels, and to dive level without a down-angle. Level diving was a feature of several subsequent Lake designs, notably the first three US G-class submarines. Protector also had a lock-out chamber for divers to leave the submarine. Lake, lacking Holland's financial backing, was unable to continue building submarines in the United States. He sold Protector to Imperial Russia in 1904 as the Osetr and spent the next seven years in Europe designing submarines for the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Germany's Kaiserliche Marine, and the Imperial Russian Navy (Osetr- and Kaiman-class submarines).
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