Undersea Anecdotes

SUBMARINE: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIMON LAKE--As told to Herbert Corey--Appleton-Century ($3).

Simon Lake's first submarine was a 14-foot, flat-bottomed contraption, built of yellow pine and looking vaguely like a flatiron mounted on wheels. It had a compressed-air reservoir built of an old soda-fountain tank, and motive power for both its propeller and wheels was supplied by a hand-driven crank. When the redheaded, hot-tempered Simon Lake and his cousin Bart paddled it down the Shrewsbury River in New Jersey in 1894, Bart opened the valves, the submarine sank, a stream of water squirted in through a neglected bolthole and hit him in the back of the neck. By the time they had plugged the hole with a piece of pine, the submarine was resting on the bottom of the river. They cranked it across the Shrewsbury, made it crawl obediently through the mud and, as a demonstration for skeptical townspeople, even made it scoop up old tin cans and clamshells. It was, says Simon Lake, the first submarine that really performed. Rivals have claimed the same thing for their inventions.

Inventor Simon Lake's autobiography is a sketchy, tantalizing book, evenly divided between good anecdotes about submarine building and dull tirades 'against other submarine builders. Inventor Lake's anecdotes range wide: the Lake family's inventive genius (Father invented a shade-roller, Ira a telephone, Vincent a typewriter and Uncle Jesse and Uncle Ezra an unsuccessful flying machine); experiences in Russia when Simon was selling eleven submarines to the Tsarist Government; stories about the fabulous immorality of the Russian upper classes.

Written with all the ambiguity of a book "told to" someone, Submarine is further weakened by its extravagant claims for the world-shaking importance of Simon Lake's inventions. It is good reading only when Inventor Lake forgets his grievances and talks cheerfully of mishaps at the bottom of the sea.

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