Simon lake autobiography examples

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Simon lake autobiography examples

His mother was descended from Jeremy Adams, one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut. His father was descended from John Lake, who emigrated in from Nottinghamshire, England, to Massachusetts and later moved to Gravesend, Long Island. Inventive ability ran in the family: Simon's paternal grandfather, two uncles, and several cousins were inventors of sorts, and his father devised a window-shade roller which he manufactured in a foundry and machine shop in Toms River, New Jersey.

When the boy was three his mother died and his father went west for five years, leaving him in the care of a step-grandmother in Pleasantville. He attended local public schools, but left at the age of fourteen to work as a molder in his father's shop. His only later formal education was a brief period at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Fort Plain, New York, where his father sent him to learn business methods, and a course in mechanical drawing at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

By Lake had taken out a patent on an improved steering device for the high-wheel bicycle--the first of some two hundred patents granted him. The following year he modified the device for use on small boats, invented a noiseless winding gear that became popular on oyster boats in Chesapeake Bay, and moved to Baltimore, where he began manufacturing and selling these appliances.

Now provided with a comfortable income, he turned his attention to designing a submarine, an interest that had begun when as a boy of ten he had read Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. He drew up plans for an even-keel submersible boat, eighty-five feet in length, with oil-burning boilers and triple-expansion steam engines, double-hull construction, a diving compartment, wheels for running on the ocean floor, and a drop keel--a design that in some ways echoed Verne's description of his imaginary craft, the Nautilus.

Lake submitted his plans in to the United States government in a simon lake autobiography examples for a practical submarine, but the contract was awarded to the more experienced John P. Lake returned to Baltimore determined to build a modest craft that would embody the principles of his design. In he completed the Argonaut Jr. Encouraged by the success of these tests, he organized the Lake Submarine Boat Company and contracted for the building of the Argonaut I with the Columbian Iron Works Dry Dock Company in Baltimore, which was also constructing Holland's Plunger under government contract.

The rival boats were launched in August Lake's boat was powered by a thirty-horsepower gasoline engine, to which two tubes reaching to the surface in anticipation of the snorkel fed air; it was thirty-six feet long and nine feet in diameter, equipped with wheels and another Jules Verne feature a diver's lock and exit chamber built into the bow.

Although the Plunger was quickly abandoned as a failure, the Argonaut I traveled more than 2, miles and made the passage by open sea from Cape May to Sandy Hook, feats which prompted Verne to cable congratulations. The Argonaut I was sluggish in surface operations. Unable to attract enough capital to finance a new craft, Lake had to content himself with remodeling the old one, which he renamed Argonaut II.

He extended her length by thirty feet and added a schooner-shaped free-flooding superstructure, both of which improved her performance on the surface. There in he launched the Protector, and with it a whole new breed of submarines; they were equipped with hydroplanes both fore and aft to achieve his distinctive, though not original, method of submergence while maintaining an even keel.

He also invented an early form of the periscope, which he called the "omniscope.