THE STORY OF THE SUBMARINE [Illustration: Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company. U. S. Submarine _M-1_.] THE STORY OF THE SUBMARINE BY FARNHAM BISHOP Author of “Panama, Past and Present,” etc. _ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS AND DRAWINGS_ [Illustration] NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1916 Copyright, 1916, by THE CENTURY CO. _Published, February, 1916_ To MY MOTHER PREFACE This book has been written for the nontechnical reader--for the man or boy who is interested in submarines and torpedoes, and would like to know something about the men who invented these things and how they came to do it. Much has been omitted that I should have liked to have put in, for this is a small book and the story of the submarine is much longer than most people realize. It is perhaps astonishing to think of the launching of an underseaboat in the year the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, or George Washington watching his submarine attack the British fleet in 1776. But are these things as astonishing as the thought of European soldiers wearing steel helmets and fighting with crossbows and catapults in 1916? The chapter on “A Trip in a Modern Submarine” is purely imaginative. There is no such boat in our submarine flotilla as the _X-4_. We ought to have plenty of big, fast, sea-going submarines, with plenty of big, fast sea-planes and battle-cruisers, so that if an invading army ever starts for this country we can meet it and smash it while it is cooped up on transports somewhere in mid-ocean. There, and not in shallow, off-shore waters, cumbered with nets and mines, is the true battlefield of the submarine. The last part of this book has a broken-off and fragmentary appearance. This is almost unavoidable at a time when writing history is like trying to make a statue of a moving-picture. I have tried to do justice to both sides in the present war.