This is going to be a bit shorter and self-contained than last Friday’s post, partly because I figured we could use a breather and partly because I want to tell a bit more “meta” of a story here, which dovetails a bit with the work that @absurdbird has done on the putative “tallest, smallest skyscraper” in Wichita Falls, and gets to one of the problems/opportunities/proportunities* with history as a pastime.
* Look if y’all are going to make “chost” a thing…
(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?” (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” (this one!)
- “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)
This is that it’s very easy to go down rabbitholes, some of which prove to be productive and some of which don’t. It’s not always easy to tell which one is going to be which. So I’d like to put yourself in my shoes (imagine that I am a coyote, but, like, one that wears shoes) last year, when Mark Chrisler has just reopened a Very Closed Story by revealing the “Foolkiller” as a lifeboat. I was able to determine which lifeboat it was, and the company behind it. And then the trail went cold in 1908 when—as I said last time—IAL Co. stopped paying docking fees to the Chicago Sanitary District.
And then, in 1911, they—and Robert Brown—went bankrupt. And then, 111 years later, your coyote eyes find themselves scanning this, in the January, 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics:
CYLINDRICAL MOTOR LIFEBOAT DIVES FROM SHIP
After 20 years of work and many disappointments, an inventor at present in Toronto, Canada believes he has perfected a non-sinkable, non-capsizable, motor-driven lifeboat whose launching from a ship is in the nature of a dive. The boat looks like an exceptionally corpulent cigar, and comprises a cylinder within a cylinder. The outside cylinder, which revolves freely with the action of the waves, is 24 ft. long and 7 ft. in diameter. The inner cylinder, or cradle, in which the passengers and the propelling mechanism are carried, is 6 ft. in diameter and 18 ft. long.
[…]
One of the most important features claimed for the boat as it now stands is the fact that, instead of having to be lowered over the ship’s side by tackle, where it would be in danger of being crushed by the heavy seas, it rests in a cradle from which it slides and dives into the sea when released. In the tests given at Toronto, the boat, carrying passengers, was launched into the water as shown in the illustrations.
Which, like: huh. That sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And, no, those illustrations don’t exactly look like the Foolkiller, and the dimensions don’t match, but the IAL itself might well—for all we know—have been sunk by 1911/1912. And that description of its behavior—doesn’t that sound awfully… you know… automatic to you? It sure seems like it—
SIDEBAR
I don’t really have a good place to cover this elsewhere, but: what exactly was “automatic” about the International Automatic Lifeboat? In discussions on the Constant podcast’s “Foolkiller” page there is speculation that it might refer, basically, to what’s discussed above—i.e. a lifeboat that can be launched automatically, or which can be operated by a single person.That’s definitely possible, and Brown’s patents do focus on the ease of operation and launch of the boat. That said, the early versions of the IAL still definitely involved being hoisted rather than chucked off the side of a sinking ship. I suspect, given that the name “automatic” is with it from the beginning when it did not have its later streamlined form, that it it refers to the design being “automatically” self-leveling.
At the moment it’s impossible to say for certain—helpfully, the word doesn’t appear in any of the patent filings—
—but who knows?
Here, I would like to discuss two related problems, and offer some advice for anyone who is—like me—interested in wandering off through old newspapers, which as I said can prove to be frustrating rabbitholes sometimes. The first one is simple, which is that you will hopefully have noticed that Popular Mechanics simply says “at present.” Does this mean that the test took place in January, 1912 and that Popular Mechanics was there to witness it? No, no it does not. The only thing this tells us is that the test (if it occurred at all) took place no later than January, 1912.
The second is one that I mentioned in Part II of the “Balto is a lie” essay but didn’t really go into. Newspapers of this time period are all one extremely obnoxious game of telephone. In parallel, I’ve undertaken a project to comprehensively catalogue reporting around the Foolkiller’s salvage in 1915–1916. In one case, a blurb first ran (as early as) December 29th, 1915 describing the salvage and was being run verbatim as late as April 27th, 1916.
So here is perhaps the biggest lesson you can take away from this that can be generalized:
If an article says that something happened “today” or “yesterday,” it is probably describing an event that happened within 24 to 48 hours prior to the piece’s publication date. If it gives an exact date, you can apply the usual grain of salt but assume that—all else being equal—it happened on the date specified.
If, however, it doesn’t give any phrasing that can be attached to a specific date, all bets are off. “Recently” tells you that it happened at some point in the past; I have found articles describing events that happened “recently” or “the other day” that occurred two years prior. It also generally tells you that the publication is not reporting first-hand information—“recently” or “lately” or “the other day” means the editor needed to fill space, grabbed something more or less the right size from another paper, and ran it as his or her own.
Take that as a given, and figure that I’m going to elide a week’s worth of painstakingly working backwards from January in any paper I thought would be relevant when I tell you that: the test occurred, it happened on Saturday, October 7th, 1911, and it was not Robert Brown’s invention. Several hundred words into this Foolkiller Friday, allow me to introduce today’s subject:
NEW LIFEBOAT LAUNCHED
Harry Fisher’s Craft Tested at Toronto.
Toronto, October 8.—The new Harry Fisher life boat, was successfully launched at Polson’s Iron Works on Saturday afternoon. It was dropped from two heights, and demonstrated its self-righting principle in both. The first drop was made from an iron cradle ten feet high. Although the boat was nearly upside down, it righted itself in a few feet, and fell in the water right side up. The boat was next raised 20 feet and dropped to the water. It landed right side up.
The boat is of steel, shaped like a cigar, and inside has a steel boat working on pivots, so that it is always in proper position. It is claimed that it is fireproof, non-sinkable, and no-capsizable[sic]. It has capacity for fifty persons, and, with the aid of running boards on the sides and top, could, if necessary, carry another fifty. It is propelled by a screw operated by a crank.
Mr. Fisher, who is from New Zealand, will ship the boat to New York, where an exhibition test will be made from one of the ocean liners. The boat will then be carried over to England and tested before the British Board of Trade
Harry Fisher’s test in Toronto was written about extensively. The Popular Mechanics article, for whatever reason, has drawn over photographs of the lifeboat, but the originals do exist. For example. the October 25th, 1911 issue of Motorboat (subhead: “The Pioneer, The Authority”) contains a story headlined “A Motor Lifeboat that Dives,” which begins: “Lying in the harbor of Toronto, Canada, is a roly-poly looking cylinder, without smokestack or deck or mast—to all appearances a monster steel cigar dumped helter-skelter into the lake. This phenomenon in shipbuilding may, however, meet one of the greatest needs of marine transportation, for its inventor, Harry Fisher, claims to have perfected at last a lifeboat that is absolutely non-capsizable and non-sinkable.”
So, just in case you were wondering where Popular Mechanics stole their article from, it’s probably here. This piece is fairly comprehensive, describes the loading of the boat in detail and—even better!—also includes a photograph of the interior, so you can see what it would’ve been like to be on the inside of a craft like this. We are led to believe, I think, that it would be quite comfortable indeed:
This is pretty exciting—we have, by far, the most comprehensive writeup of one of these cylindrical lifeboats being tested and of what they were like in use. And now, I’m going to reveal something even more exciting, which is that for the first time in the history of this series, when I shared “New Lifeboat Launched” back there, I was printing a news story about a boat for which—so far as I can tell—every detail is accurate. The test is described elsewhere in basically the same terms, there is documentary evidence of it occurring, and we have actual photos.
Plus we know it did go on to be shown in New York and London (sort of). By November of 1912, Fisher’s boat had indeed reached New York. The Boston Globe reported about it on December 1st, again complete with pictures (albeit ones from the earlier test). This says that, “up on the Hudson River at 149th st, hidden from view under the dressing rooms of the Manhattan Swimming Baths at that point, there is anchored at present as queer looking a craft as has been seen on the river since the Half Moon’s granddaughter proceeded up stream during the Hudson-Fulton celebration.”
It was written about, and the photos were reproduced, all the way to Honolulu. And here we come back to one of the weirder things about the Foolkiller and its recovery in 1915/16, and one of the reasons why I said that I thought it was highly unlikely that anyone was confused about what the Foolkiller actually was. There were multiple public tests, with the press in attendance, of Harry Fisher’s boat, running photos that show something that in some cases looks exactly like the ones of the Foolkiller’s salvage.
And the boat, itself, was coming closer to the last design of the IAL. I said that Fisher’s boat went on to be shown in London, “sort of.” What do I mean by that? Ah. Well, you see, in May, 1914 Popular Mechanics—apparently feeling the need to be Back On Their Bullshit™—ran the following story:
Please note the use of the phrase “recently.” A story in the Times of London on Monday, January 26th, 1914 relates that “the Fisher lifeboat, which by arrangement with the Port of London Authority, was on view at the Westminster Bridge landing stage on Saturday, is different from any type of boat hitherto carried by liners.” Once again, Popular Mechanics chooses to draw over a photograph rather than reproduce it, but an October 13th, 1913 article from Liverpool shows the boat:
PM did not bother to connect their reporting in 1914 with their reporting two years earlier. Or perhaps they did, since the 1912 article did not mention Harry Fisher by name—despite clearly being taken from sources which identified him—and the 1914 article chooses for whatever reason to omit the block print “FISHER LIFE BOAT” type down the sides of the craft.
Either way, what’s being shown is noticeably different than the one tested in Toronto. It’s longer, and it has a flat rear end rather than being conical at both sides. There are also sliding panels along the sides, presumably to admit entry. So this is not actually the same boat—it’s a new one, built by H&C Crichton of Liverpool. News about this boat was also widely reported, although—as with Robert Brown and the Mayos—government and private sector interest failed to materialize.
When I ended the last Foolkiller Friday, I described Fisher as Robert Brown’s Evil Twin. I mean this… fondly, let’s say. The “evil” part is that Fisher’s legacy is significantly less enduring, in that he didn’t have one of his creations dragged out of the river a few years later and exhibited as an early submarine that would captivate the attention of an impressionable For Real Coyote. His lifeboat was never adopted and made no impact on the wider lifesaving world. He was no more successful of an inventor.
And, yet, there is so much more information on it. There’s more written about Fisher’s boat than there is about the IAL, and more than there is written about the Mayo boat produced by the Rescue Lifeboat Company. And, maybe more problematically, I suspect Fisher was probably a more interesting person, and that you are going to read this essay and think—like I thought after immersing myself in the papers—“wait, why is this series not Fisher Friday,” because history is full of this kind of stuff.
My hope—rekindled by some new discoveries last week—is that more will eventually turn up about the Foolkiller and the IAL. But what we have, for now, is the story of Harry Fisher, a Kiwi and (like Robert Brown) a carpenter by trade. Early reporting on the Foolkiller said that it was sold to an eastern man; Mark Chrisler titled one of his episodes on the subject “the man from the east,” as a result. And, well, it’s harder to get much further east than Christchurch, ain’t it?
Harry Fisher might’ve been Harry Percy Fisher, and he might’ve been born in 1865. That, we don’t know. I do know that he married in 1895, had four kids, and moved sometime around 1910 to London. He might possibly have died in 1941, or maybe 1943, or maybe 1955. Some details about Harry Fisher make a portrait of the man somewhat confusing, to be sure. And some details of the Fisher Boat are also a little ambiguous. For example, in 1911, the claim is made that he has been working on it for 20 years; if so, that would mean that his design predates Mayo’s 1896 patent by five years.
I think this is unlikely; I can’t find any patent filings before 1909. By 1916, patent 1,265,186 looked significantly more conventional:
This is in line with the direction that lifeboats would eventually go—AP Lundin’s contemporary design is somewhat similar. So I think it is more likely that, at best, Fisher had been working on some kind of vessel for a couple of decades by the time he got to Toronto and started exhibiting the Fisher Boat, and more likely than that to be simple hyperbole. When he talked it up, he said things like:
[the lifeboat] cannot be sunk unless it is cut in half […] I have had experimental models crash into heavy ships in the roughest seas, have rammed gaping holes in the outer protection of the boat, and have put it through every test that a lifeboat would be likely to encounter, and the result is complete confidence in its ability to withstand anything.
I have in my notes that he used the Titanic sinking to sell the greater safety and ease-of-use of his lifeboat*. Is this just overconfident boasting? Is it the sincere belief of an inventor who was trying to sell his revolutionary design everywhere he could and genuinely believed in its merits? Is he another swindler? I suspect I have an answer there—we’ll get to that one towards the end. But it’s undeniable that there are some problems with the Fisher Boat story.
* I say “I have in my notes” because I cannot find the newspaper clipping those notes refer to. So I am putting this disclaimer here because I don’t think it’s out of character for Fisher to use the tragedy to pitch his boat, but I can’t find the context anymore.
Out of the lifeboat inventors I listed on Foolkiller Friday, Part 3, some of them are known about only through patents or newspaper descriptions of their ideas. Only Robert Mayo, James Mitchell, August Baumgart, Robert Brown, and Harry Fisher clearly built boats. Fisher’s, in 1911, is the last of these by a significant margin. His 1909 patent comes 13 years after Mayo patent 565,769, and four years after the IAL was built.
And, okay: he was from New Zealand. But his 1913 patent (which shows a boat identical to the one first depicted in Popular Mechanics) was filed from London, and took place after the 1911 test. And yet, as—besides the Roberts Mayo—perhaps the most clearly legitimate of these inventors, he doesn’t seem to have acknowledged at any point that what he was describing was basically just a copy of the IAL. And then… ah, yes.
And then, there is his partner in crime.
A month before the Toronto test, the Windsor Star reported: “Windsorite Forms Partnership With New Zealand Inventor”:
While on a business trip to England, L.J. Lafontaine, 87 Pitt Street East, who has just returned to Windsor, accidentally ran across a man in London, by the name of Harry Fisher. It appears that Fisher is an inventor whose accomplishments so far have not incurred sufficient notoriety to render him conceited, and he, perchance, was looking for a partner to assist him financially in floating a patented invention which, it is anticipated, will revolutionize the marine world. He casually met Mr. Lafontaine, who was most favorably impressed with Mr. Fisher’s proposition, and at once entered into an agreement with him, and a partnership was formed.
L.J. would be Leopold Joseph Lafontaine, who was born in 1881, and was not a mariner. He was a trader whose contemporary ads promised “high-class furs” although they also described him as a “practical furrier,” whatever that means. He ran LaFontaine Furs with his brother, Leon; their three-story house was a six-sided landmark in Windsor, Ontario until it burned down in 1984. That page describes L.J. Lafontaine as “one of Windsor’s more colorful characters, having made a fortune, regained his equilibrium, and delved into a variety of interested activities, from taxidermy, to construction, to gambling of one sort or another.”
So it should probably not be too surprising that, in 1911, the Lafontaines decided it was as good a time as any to start a new company. Which, naturally, they decided to call…
…the International Lifeboat Company. International Lifeboat Company, Ltd. was incorporated on November 4th, 1911, with stock of $1,000,000 that Leon—not Leopold Joseph—Lafontaine immediately began trying to sell. Just as immediately, he seems to have run into trouble with it. By February, 1912, the Windsor Star was reporting that one:
William C. Bullock was going to be tried for “obtaining $1,500 by false pretenses from Leon LaFontaine, in connection with the promotion of a company to sell a non-capsizable lifeboat […] Bullock told him he was a director in the Union Bank and the daddy of the Canadian Foundry, and on the strength of that persuaded him to advance $1,500 towards promoting a company. LaFontaine is known in Windsor.
One can just imagine that he was Known In Windsor, indeed. Lafontaine comes off somewhat more mercenary than William Deneau—I think it helps that he’s selling a lifeboat that doesn’t work, instead of making up a submarine for funsies—and as slick, quick-talking get-rich-quick types go I’ll stand by Leon as Frenchy’s evil twin, for the brief duration of his Boat Time before he decided to get into wine and then died of a heart attack in 1923.
The company, for instance, never went anywhere. It filed no returns, and was dissolved—so far as I can tell—as quickly as it started. Something must have happened with Fisher and the Lafontaines. For one, there’s that gap of more than a year between a planned demonstration of Fisher’s boat in New York and the time it actually shows up in the Hudson River. Two, though, the second boat—the one shown off in Liverpool and London—was patented, but not by Fisher. The patents are assigned to Leon Lafontaine, who claims them as his own invention.
One might reasonably, I think, be suspicious here. The same year as the International Automatic Lifeboat Company goes bust and Robert Brown files for bankruptcy, a new boat with an extremely similar design is tested and a new International Automatic Lifeboat Company is formed? I was definitely suspicious. But, as I said, this week’s Foolkiller Friday is really meant to be more of an instructive story about the research process itself.
You know, like... this bit about Fisher coming onto the scene just after Brown exited it? And how I said that tracking down the tests was made more difficult by the use of words like “recently”—that Popular Mechanics stole its photos from a 6-month-old article and then traced over them? Well, earlier this week, I found this:
That’s right: all the photos associated with the Toronto test are actually from more than two years earlier. The ship you can see it being launched from is SS Tutanekai, and the test took place in Wellington, New Zealand. To be clear, I have no reason to think that a test didn’t also take place in Toronto—it was reported on at the time, the descriptions are consistent, and Polson Iron Works must’ve built something because the boat went on to New York City. But our photos come from Wellington and London, even though Toronto is where Fisher broke onto the scene with Lafontaine’s help.
Next time on Foolkiller Friday, we’ll return from this tangent to talk about the documentary evidence for the IAL, and examine both some intriguing and very helpful background clues in the photographic record, and a rather puzzling aspect to the timeline that they introduce.
But, closing this one out, I also said I had an inclination about whether or not Harry Fisher was for real. Here, I think, we can be more confident than we could with Robert Brown. He built at least three lifeboats (Wellington, Toronto, Liverpool) over the span of a few years, and when he saw that the wind was changing, he revised the design again to drop the most distinctive—but also most objectionable—design element, the cylindrical hull.
Remember how I said, way back at the start of this series, that everyone is some kind of character? Harry Fisher is no exception. I gather this was not easy on the Fishers; between 1896 and 1908 he and his wife moved at least six times; they are never listed at the same address twice. After 1909, they’re never listed together; Annie Frances Fisher née Medcalf remarried in 1920 and seems to have had a more sedate life thereafter.
So I think it’s more plausible to view him as a restless soul, a sincere but eccentric inventor. Partly because of his dedication, and partly because lifeboats were not his only passion. The Poverty Bay Herald in October, 1909, credited Harry as “the inventor of the Fisher lifeboat,” and then said that he has “turned his attention to aeronautics, and has invented and patented a type of flying machine which it is claimed excels in basic principles all other machines are designed for might.”
Uh, and it looked like this:
See you next week!
