On the morning of July 24th, 1915, the SS Eastland rolled over at her berth in the Chicago River, killing hundreds in one of the city’s worst tragedies. On November 24th of that year, a former Eastland salvage diver named William “Frenchy” Deneau uncovered something strange in the muck of the river bottom: a 40-foot-long submarine, which he then exhibited as “the Foolkiller.”
Except: it was not a submarine, and not “the Foolkiller.” It was a prototype lifeboat—the “International Automatic Life Boat”—designed by Robert Brown of Chicago about exactly a decade earlier. It appears in photos taken between 1906 and 1908 docked near the MWRR rail bridge between Van Buren and Jackson. Between 1908 and 1915, it apparently disappeared. After the summer of 1916, it seems to have disappeared again.
The canonical teller of this story is The Constant’s Mark Chrisler, who has put together a multi-part series which you can listen to here. As such, I’m not going to recount too much that is already widely known—the podcast, and this set of episodes in particular, is eminently worth a listen so you should go ahead and do that.
The Foolkiller has been stuck in my head since I first heard about it 15 years ago. I thought the mystery would never be solved—I said “canonical” because I’d nominate Chrisler for sainthood in bringing it as far as he has.
I have spent the last six months or so trying to take up the mantle, as you know if you have ever talked to me for more than about two minutes in that time period. But that’s been scattered between website comments, Discord posts, E-mails, and Telegram conversations and I’d like to start trying to centralize it.
(All entries in this series as of October 27th, 2023):
- Introduction
- “The Recovery” (this one!)
- “The Find; or, The Theory of the Case” (fixing the date and circumstances of the salvage)
- “What If It Was Round?” (a history of the cylindrical lifeboat phenomenon)
- “Everything You Wanted to Know About the International Automatic Lifeboat (But Were Afraid to Ask)” (…)
- “The Man from the East” (covering Harry Fisher and his lifeboat)
- “The Summer of 1907” (fixing the dates of photographs of the lifeboat)
- “Step Right Up” (tracking the relationship between “the Foolkiller” and C.W. Parker’s carnival)
- “The Prestige” (Samuel Winternitz, Waterdrome, and the Foolkiller’s true owner)
- “Postcard Mania” (trying to find out when the last bridge photo was taken)
- “Blow Yourself Up” (all about William “Frenchy” Deneau)
- “Conclusion [citation needed]” (reviewing open questions)
- “The Experiment” (lessons from a model I built of the lifeboat)
- “Back from the Dead” (David B. Marks, and an update on the salvage)
So. This is the first part in a ???-part series about The Foolkiller that I am going to unoriginally call Foolkiller Friday and for which I have—at the moment—content for at least a dozen posts. I am going to try to keep this approachable, so let me know if it becomes too esoteric or you have no idea what I’m talking about and it is worth some kind of expanded recap. There are a bunch of open questions, like:
- What happened to the Foolkiller after 1916?
- What happened to the “International Automatic Life Boat” between 1908 and 1915?
- Why did nobody claim ownership of it in 1915? Who did own it at that point?
- Why did Chicagoans not recognize a boat that had been floating in the Chicago River just a few years earlier and literally appeared in postcards at the time?
- Did someone die in the Foolkiller when it sank? Who?
To be honest: as of right now, March 24th, 2023, I cannot tell you the answers. I am hoping that you might, yourself, have some ideas! The sum total of Foolkiller knowledge has expanded dramatically in the last year. One reason I’ve decided to start writing this is that, after six months, I still make some kind of interesting new progress every few weeks or so. And I am just a silly dog on the Internet!
And today, I figured I would start with a question that I think we can answer, “Where was the Foolkiller found and raised?”, because it also serves as a good introduction to the key players and key problems of this saga.
I posed some open questions in the intro to the first part of this series, but going into the second part I figured I would collect all of the ones I think are currently circulating, and also provide a quick primer with some links to other work. This is so that you know where my head is at, and also where you might have some ideas to answer them.
What we think we know:
To start with, here is a writeup of the generally agreed-upon facts of the case*
* Meaning they are the consensus of people who are not Weird Internet Dogs—chiefly the Straight Dope’s Cecil Adams, Adam Selzer, and The Constant podcast’s Mark Chrisler, who seemed to have conclusively identified the Foolkiller as the creation of Louis Gathmann in 2020, but who (with Matthew Richezza) blew it wide open again in 2022 by identifying its actual inventor and finding the older photos of an intact boat.
So here’s the high-level view:
Sometime around 1904-05, a Chicagoan inventor named Robert A. Brown patented a design for a cylindrical lifeboat, which he then had built. It appears in a January, 1906 issue of Power Boat News. He made some attempts to sell it, and it was photographed at the Van Buren Street dock of the Chicago River, a photograph which was later turned into a postcard. After those photographs, its whereabouts become unknown for about 7 years.
In November, 1915, “Frenchy” Deneau claimed to have stubbed his toe on a submarine in the Chicago River. He called it the “Foolkiller” and attributed it to Peter Nissen, an eccentric inventor who died in 1904 trying to cross Lake Michigan in an inflatable, revolving boat. At this time, a government official is also quoted as saying it is believed to have sunk around the turn of the century.
It was raised in December, and exhibited in January 1916 at 208 South State Street, with Deneau holding court. Between December and January, Deneau claimed to have found two partial skeletons—a man and a dog—inside the craft. These were apparently reported to the police, although if they did anything about it this is not known or reflected in the literature. Deneau ran ads identifying the Foolkiller as a submarine and inviting the adventurous to look inside it… if they dared.
In March or April, it was sold to the C.W. Parker amusement company, who showed it in their traveling carnival in the late spring. By the end of June, it was advertised as appearing at the Riverview amusement park in Chicago. In September, 1916 an ad appears in Billboard offering it for sale. For this period of time it was alternately known as “The Foolkiller,” the “Fool Killer,” or simply “The Submarine.”
After this, it disappears—consensus is that it was probably scrapped. The sum total of concrete evidence of what it looked like and that it existed as a physical object consists of:
- One photograph in Power Boat News, (near the top of the page here) in which the boat appears to be displayed on land.
- Three photographs taken next to the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad bridge which show the boat in the Chicago River, afloat but uncrewed.
- Five photographs taken in late December showing the “Foolkiller” being raised at the Wells Street Bridge
- A full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune saying that it is currently available for viewing, and a drawing presenting a reconstruction of the lifeboat as a submarine
- A classified ad offering it for sale in September, 1916
(I count as second-order evidence the ads saying it will be displayed at a given place and time, because I think in at least one case there’s good reason to believe this didn’t happen)
That’s it for hard evidence. And then there are a lot questions, so that takes us to...
What we gotta put question marks after:
I’d group these into three buckets.
Questions I think we know the answer to:
- Who made the Foolkiller and what was it, really?
- How well did the International Automatic Life Boat work?
- Where was the Foolkiller found?
- Where and when was the Foolkiller raised?
- What happened to the Foolkiller over the course of its exhibition in 1916?
Questions I think solid progress has been made on:
- When was the lifeboat in Chicago between 1906–1908?
- Why did nobody claim ownership of it in 1915?
- Who owned it at that point?
- When and how was the Foolkiller found?
- Why was so little written about it in 1916?
- Why did nobody recognize the lifeboat?
- Who was “Frenchy” Deneau and can we trust anything he said?
The ???? Zone:
- Is the Foolkiller still around?
- If not, what happened to it after the summer of 1916?
- If not the full boat, does anything at all survive of it?
- What happened to the lifeboat between 1908 and 1915?
- Did anyone die in the Foolkiller when it sank? Who?
- Was any reconstruction or repairwork done before it was exhibited?
- What did people who saw the exhibition think?
- Was this whole thing just a scam, like Cecil Adams originally thought?
- If it was a scam, were people in on the joke in 1916?
- What is the relationship between the major players, like:
- Robert Brown, the boat’s inventor
- The Roberts Mayo, R. Diamond and R. David, whose company Brown tried to buy
- William Deneau, who discovered and exhibited the Foolkiller
- C.W. Parker, who bought the Foolkiller for his show
- The Skee-Ball Company of Illinois
- David B. Marks, who sued Robert Brown in 1909?
?
This is a lot :P But you can see, like I said about Titanic, why this feels solvable, right? It’s pretty recent. I do keep turning up new stuff that allows for more reasonable inferences to be made. 2022 offered a huge break in this case. I still think we might be able to close a lot of the remaining questions, depending >:3
So let’s see!
What questions am I missing? What do you want to know?