The first two parts of this series focused on a mysterious thing dragged out of the Chicago River in its guise as “the Foolkiller,” allegedly one of America’s first submarines. And before all this started, I had already spoiled that bit of the ending: it was never a submarine at all. It was a motorized lifeboat designed by Robert Brown, of Chicago, towards the end of 1905. At some point between 1906 and 1908, it was photographed tied up to the Van Buren Street Dock of the Chicago Sanitary District. At some point after that, it sank.
Which should, I think, pose a sort of obvious question: how did nobody recognize it? And for that, we have to go back in time a little bit further.
(All entries in this series as of October 27th, 2023):
- Introduction
- “The Recovery” (geolocating the location of the 1915 salvage)
- “The Find; or, The Theory of the Case” (fixing the date and circumstances of the salvage)
- “What If It Was Round?” (this one!)
- “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)
SS La Bourgogne was launched on October 8th, 1885, and sailed for the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, the “CGT” or the “French Line”—a company established by the French government to transport mail to North America. The year after she was launched, she set a record for the fastest Atlantic crossing by a postal steamer—capable of 17 knots, propelled by a single screw driven by advanced quadruple-expansion steam engines.
In 1886, she rammed and sank the British steamship Ailsa. In 1890, she collided with the SS Toreador. And, early on the morning of July 4th, 1898, while steaming from New York to Le Havre, the sailing ship Cromartyshire repaid the favor. In a dense fog, south of Nova Scotia, she struck La Bourgogne on her starboard side. The ship quickly took a sharp list, and went down in just over half an hour.
Out of 726 souls aboard, 549 were lost. No children survived, and only one woman. Most of the survivors were crew, and the press was scandalized by reports that they had refused to aid passengers in the water—perhaps to the point of hitting them with oars. Most of the boats on the starboard side had been damaged, and the speed of the sinking gave little time for any others to be put off.
This was, to be honest, not a great time for shipwrecks. In 1901, SS City of Rio de Janeiro grounded off San Francisco and sank in less than ten minutes, with few lifeboats being launched. In 1906, SS Valencia did much the same near Vancouver, and although she stayed afloat much longer, only one boat made it through the treacherous conditions to shore.
So, you know. What could you do about this? Well, one thing you could do would be to design a better lifeboat.
Now, it’s important to note that, at this time, “lifeboat” still meant two different things. One kind of “lifeboat” is the kind we think of today, the kind carried by ships and intended for emergency use in the event of a catastrophe. The other kind of lifeboat is the kind owned by a shore-based lifesaving station, launched to rescue people from the surf.
The two have somewhat different purposes and somewhat different designs. At the time, the latter category still owed much to the class-leading 1845 Joseph Francis metallic life car, an enclosed metal boat sturdy enough to survive the worst conditions of the North Atlantic. It proved its mettle in 1850, rescuing numerous passengers from the grounded Ayrshire off the coast of New Jersey. Half a century later, it was still the gold standard.
More advancements were being made in the first kind of lifeboat, and one potential advancement in particular seems to have held a significant interest for both types. See, a big problem with lifeboats is that they take on water or capsize. So what if *taps side of head* the lifeboat can’t capsize or take on water. Because it’s self-righting, you ask? Because of its deep keel? Because it contains a quantity of cork or some other buoyant material?
Sorry, I mean,
*taps side of head*:
I do not know what the first cylindrical lifeboat to gain much currency was. It might have been the one patented in 1886 by Albert Shears, because that one is cited in another, later patent. Shears’ boat is sometimes described as “cigar-shaped”; it is not truly cylindrical, of course—planks serve as a gunwale circling the boat just above the waterline that offer a means of walking around it, and it has a sort of conning tower:
Still, it has the germ of the form: an enclosed, mostly cylindrical craft which could serve as a shore-launched boat or be carried aboard a larger vessel. But, as you know if you’ve listened to Mark Chrisler’s podcast on the subject, the Shears boat is still missing one important element: the inside. Shears’ design, like Paul Huebner’s in 1895 and Milton Neff’s in 1898, was basically a hollow tube. But that means it rolls, and so you roll, and who wants that?
The Roberts Mayo—Robert Diamond and his son Robert David—are among the first to have proposed having an inner mechanism, mounted on some kind of device that allowed it to rotate freely, such that the inside of the craft could be considered functionally self-leveling. The patent description for 565,769 “Life Boat” describes it as follows:
A lifeboat or float in which the cage or carriage in which the persons are seated or contained will be unaffected by the movement of the hull, enabling the hull to turn upside down or stand upon either side without carrying the cage out of the perpendicular
You can see what this would have looked like from this figure in the patent filing:
The Mayos would continue to improve upon the idea through the succeeding decade. On October 1st, 1900, the Rescue Life Boat Company was incorporated in Muskegon, Michigan, to manufacture these boats. There was early interest in the design; shortly thereafter, papers reported that the Barry Brothers Transportation Company wanted to equip their ferries with Mayo Life Boats.
The Rescue Life Boat Company has a direct connection to Robert Brown, in that Robert Brown at least attempted to acquire the remnants of the company in the summer of 1906 (at which point Robert Mayo had already left, and at which point Robert Brown’s own lifeboat—a cylindrical design with a rotating, self-leveling inner compartment—had been launched and tested).
But it is also salient because you will have, I hope, noticed something. I mentioned a lifeboat designed by Albert Shears, Milton Neff, Robert D. Mayo, Paul Huebner, and Robert Brown. Does this seem like a lot of names? Well, it did to me, so if we’re on the same page let’s return to SS La Bourgogne, and to its loss in 1898.
You see, many of those who died were first-class passengers, including Anthony and Marie Pollok. And while the press may have been merely scandalized by the whole lifeboat fiasco, the Pollok family decided to act. They inaugurated the Anthony Pollok Memorial Prize for designing a better life-saving device.
By the turn of the century, this prize was worth $50,000—between $1.5 and $2 million in 2023 dollars. For comparison, that’s not too far off from the Longitude prizes awarded in the early 18th century.
And, as you can imagine, inventors of the day leapt at the opportunity to selflessly demonstrate the value of their brilliant, unique ideas. Such as—besides Robert Mayo, Robert Brown, and the others already mentioned:
- Marius Hoy, who designed a cylindrical lifeboat in 1899
- Charles Buckel, who designed a cylindrical lifeboat in 1901, except that his had a rotating inner compartment
- John Dysart, who had the intriguing idea of a cylindrical lifeboat that contained a rotating inner compartment, also in 1901
- James Mitchell, who built a lifeboat with the curious property of being a cylinder in 1902
- August Baumgart, who tested a novel type of lifeboat in 1904 (the novel aspect is that it was cylindrical, and had a rotating inner compartment)
- Thomas King, who patented his own kind of boat in 1907, which looks from the submitted diagrams to be some kind of cylinder, containing a self-righting interior
- Samuel Green and Lewis Zwerdling, who in 1909 came to the idea of making a lifeboat cylindrical in shape, but which had an inner compartment that rotated
- Harry Fisher, a New Zealand inventor who made and sold a lifeboat starting in 1911, which I mention because it looked like a pointy cigar; this one was special because it contained a rotating compartment on the inside
- Judson Davis, written up in a Popular Mechanics article in 1913 for his idea of a cylinder-shaped lifeboat that didn’t have a rotating inner compartment (!)
- William Hazelton, whose 1917 lifeboat design stands out for its cylindrical cross-section as well as for having an inner rotating compartment
- Stephen Bodnar, also patenting a “life saving raft” in 1917, which took the form of a cylinder and contained on the inside—if you can believe it—a rotating inner section
- “De Givray of Cannes,” “Reiff,” and “I.S. Baker of Alton,” who were written up in the same article in the summer of 1910 for their separate ideas of torpedo-shaped lifeboats…
- …Also AP Lundin and William Gater, if you want, and of course
- Ole Brude, who in 1904 sailed his egg-shaped iron “Urad” across the Atlantic
And we’ll end with him because (surprise!) Brude’s is the only one that is even close to remembered today, and the only one that achieved anything like success (in that, as you can see in the linked article, the Urad wasn’t scrapped and abandoned). I judge this because you can find pictures of his boat. Some of these other inventors are worth spotlights of their own—and they’ll get them, don’t worry!
Most of them are not.
You may be wondering, at this point, why you have not heard of this idea, and why all lifeboats these days are not torpedo-shaped metal shells with a self-righting inner compartment to keep people from getting seasick, and the answer—cover the ears of any children listening—is because, in mariner parlance, they Sucked the Absolute Big One.
In 1898, the government examined Milton Neff’s boat and concluded, tersely:
The board is of the opinion that this boat is not adapted to the needs of the Life-Saving Service
But at least they didn’t say “the board strongly disapproves,” like they did that year to Paul Huebner, whose “complicated construction” and gasoline engine apparently bothered them greatly. In 1904, they tested James Mitchell’s boat, which went through a few different iterations—including one that Mitchell sent over Niagara Falls…
…Which was also, incidentally, the purpose of something called the “Foolkiller”—bizarre brainchild of an odd inventor named Peter Nissen (no need to remember those names)—a few years earlier. In any event, the Life-Saving Service was “of the opinion that this lifeboat is not adapted to the needs” of their organization.
August Baumgart’s boat was reviewed in 1905, but then dropped for lack of information. Two articles on October 13th, 1904 are of interest. One says that Baumgart’s “cigar-shaped steel lifeboat […] will revolutionize the work of rescuers on the lakes and oceans” and has “reached Chicago without mishap.” The other—again, that same day—says:
While experimenting in his new patent life boat, August Baumgart was nearly killed at Racine.
Not to be deterred, Baumgart resubmitted his boat to the government; the next year they took another look and found the model they were sent to be “incomplete in many details,” but “on careful examination” still managed to find “many objectionable features” that made it “unfit for the use of the Life-Saving Service.”
Notwithstanding, this design was popular enough that by 1905, the Steamboat Inspection Service had published special new rules describing the thickness of metal required in their construction, that they should contain watertight compartments with separate air pumps, and that their suitability should be certified by the board of supervising inspectors.
I don’t think this ever happened. Mayo’s Barry Brothers Boat Bet doesn’t seem to have panned out; the Barry company went into receivership in 1908. A boat of Ole Brude’s (mostly unrelated) design may have been deployed on the car ferry SS Ashtabula, or it might not. Mayo moved offices a few times, and the younger Mayo was still working on the design as a side project into the middle of the 20th century, according to an article published in 1948.
But by that point, nobody cared anymore.
And this is what is wild to me. There was constant reporting on the idea of a cylindrical metal lifeboat with an enclosed rotating inner compartment between about 1900 and 1915. They were written about at least three times in Popular Mechanics in that time period. Literally every time I go to write this concept up, including this very Foolkiller Friday, I find a new person who was inventing (or marketing) such a boat.
And then they were abandoned. As far as I know, I am the first person in more than a century to have plumbed the depths of “hey, do you remember that 15-year period where apparently everyone was convinced that the lifeboat of the future would be one highly specific thing, multiple companies were incorporated with what would today be 8-figure valuations, and then everyone completely forgot about it and—ignoring Ole Brude—there is perhaps one (1) surviving model out of any of these?”
They were the supersonic transports of their day—innovative and popular but designed for a use-case that apparently never materialized, or for which they proved to be unsuited. The difference is that all of you can name at least one SST, most of you can probably name two, some of you can name three or four, and none of you knew about the brief florescence of these lifeboats until a few paragraphs ago.
Which brings us back to Robert Brown, the International Automatic Lifeboat, and the way I ended the last Foolkiller Friday. The most detailed writeup of the boat, in the January 27th, 1906 issue of Power Boat News, says this:
The photo reproduced herewith does not represent a flying-ship, as may be supposed, but is a new patent life-saving power boat which is being brought out by Brown Bros., building contractors, of Chicago, Ill. The boat is built entirely of steel, is 40 ft. long, and has a breadth of 4 ft. She is expected to be adopted by the United States Government, when she shows up in demonstration that she is equal to the claims of the patentees. The boat is fitted with a 3-cylinder, 4 by 5 McDonald-Erickson 2-stroke engine. In a recent trial trip on the Chicago River she made about 5 miles per hour, but as the outfit was not completed at the time, it was not a fair test. It is expected, though, that when everything is in ship-shape she will develop at least 10 miles, in almost any kind of a sea. The hull was built by Kling Bros. of Chicago, and the power furnished by A. H. McDonald, also of that city.
And here’s the thing: I have not been able to find any evidence that this test took place. I have no reason to believe it didn’t, though. And if it did, Brown’s boat would’ve been at least the third “revolutionary cylindrical lifeboat” tested in or around Chicago in the span of 18 months, and possibly the fourth—Baumgart and Mayo, for sure, and there’s good reason to believe Brude’s “Urad” was also there, if you are willing to count that even though it’s not a pure example of the form.
Three or four in 1904–05 that I know of right now. And then, in 1906, it was written up in trade publications. In 1906–1908, it was being demonstrated and sold in Chicago. The “Foolkiller” was allegedly rediscovered by Deneau in 1915. And this is, to be clear, as if in 2023 I dragged a Tesla Model S out of a salvage yard and claimed it was some lost prototype of an eccentric genius. Steve Jobs, maybe, I dunno.
Perhaps, in 2023, you might find someone who had never seen an electric car. But you would not find enough of them for my scheme to pan out for long, absent some other complicating factor. The upshot is that it is—in my opinion—highly unlikely that the average Chicagoan ever seriously thought the Foolkiller was a submarine, and better-than-probable that most of them knew exactly what it was.
One article from November 24th, 1915 says the Foolkiller “was a cigar shaped craft, and could be submerged until an air pipe about 10 feet high was the only part that stuck out of the water.” At first I thought this was just an example of the newspapers making something up, because they like doing that. But it’s also possible they were thinking about (say) John Dysart’s design, which did have conspicuous air pipes. I don’t know. Still, the possibility is there that the reporter was extrapolating from what they knew, and just erred.
And that’s a reporter. William “Frenchy” Deneau, on the other hand?
It is absolutely, 100% impossible that Deneau did not know what the Foolkiller was. It strains any kind of credulity to think that someone in the maritime trade, working on the Great Lakes at the time Mayo and the others were trying to make a name for themselves there—someone working for a company regularly hired by the same Chicago Sanitary District that provided a home for the boat for 18 months—would not have known what a self-righting cylindrical lifeboat looked like. Deneau definitely knew that he had a lifeboat. He probably had a good idea whose lifeboat he had. There is no conceivable way around this.
Well…
Hmm. No conceivable way, unless, of course—
Oh! You know what that means. It means I’ve written far too much already, so we’ll have to cover the Strange History of the International Automatic Lifeboat next time on Foolkiller Friday.
See you then!
