Hello! Welcome to Foolkiller Friday, the series where we’ve covered, in exhaustive detail, a lifeboat, a submarine, a series of probable-swindlers, and the confounding difficulty of researching an extremely minor event 107 years after it happened.
Unless it wasn’t minor? We’ll get to that. This was originally going to be the start of my conclusion to the series, and we’ll get to that, too. But for now, let’s see how far we’ve come, and go through the questions that we still have on the table.
(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” (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]” (this one!)
- “The Experiment” (lessons from a model I built of the lifeboat)
- “Back from the Dead” (David B. Marks, and an update on the salvage)
Some of them are pretty basic. Like: how big was the Foolkiller? It’s described as 40 feet long and either 4 or 5 feet in beam. But, when I was trying to figure out how much floorspace the Foolkiller would’ve taken up when displayed, I realized this doesn’t fit with any of the patent drawings. If the patent drawings show a 40-foot boat, the actual beam is closer to 6.5 feet, which also seems closer to what it looks like when people are standing next to it.
That’s what’s shown in the Sanborn overlay, above, and what I’m working from in the 3D model I’m building. I think the result is pretty close to what is shown in the Power Boat News photo and the bridge shots, and I suspect the 4-foot number was provided by Kling Brothers and refers to the inner cylinder. But I never really sat down to go over it until today.
There’s still a lot of work to do, is what I’m saying. But let’s take stock. As I’ve done before, I’m going to start by recounting the Foolkiller story as it was conventionally understood, and it goes like this:
Eccentric inventor Peter Nissen built a submarine called the “Foolkiller,” which was lost in the Chicago River sometime towards the very end of the 19th century, drowning the sailor to whom Nissen had sold the boat. In 1915, while working for Commonwealth Edison, salvage diver William “Frenchy” Deneau discovered the (mostly intact) submarine.
Deneau then exhibited it to the wonder of thousands of Chicagoans, playing up the submarine’s mystique as well as the skeletal remains found aboard. The attraction was then sold to C.W Parker’s Greatest Shows and toured the Midwest before returning to Chicago, appearing at the Riverview amusement park, and then being scrapped sometime in 1916.
And now, having—I hope—earned this, let me present the version I’d tell you if you asked me at a bar. That is: not the one I can absolutely support with references and footnotes, but the one I consider to be the most likely to be true:
Following the sinking of SS La Bourgogne in 1898, with little time to successfully launch lifeboats, the family of one of the victims introduced a prize for an improved lifesaving device that would, today, be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chicago carpenter Robert Andrew Brown, one of dozens of hopeful aspirants, adapted an earlier cylindrical design by Robert Mayo, which he dubbed the “International Automatic Lifeboat.”
Brown, neither a metalworker nor a shipwright, commissioned the Kling Brothers to build a steel-hulled prototype, an initial version of which was finished in 1905. By 1906, Brown felt confident enough to solicit investors in earnest, selling stock in the International Automatic Lifeboat Company and trialing the ship on the Chicago River in the fall of 1906. However, interest was slow to emerge; Mayo’s lifeboat had also failed to secure paying customers, and the cylindrical design proved to have intractable problems in testing.
For about 18 months, Brown kept the boat tied up in the Chicago River, occasionally testing it and making iterative changes to the design. In the end, though, the International Automatic Lifeboat was no more successful than any other version of the concept. Brown was able to win neither the prize nor any hoped-for contracts; he was eventually forced to declare bankruptcy, and the lifeboat prototype was sold to cover his debts.
Without value as a lifeboat and even less suitable as a pleasure craft, the IAL languished and was eventually disposed of the way many things were disposed of in the 1900s: somebody chucked it into the river near the Wells Street bridge. It remained there, like the One Ring, until a dredging operation in October, 1915 turned it back up. And, like the One Ring, it exerted a corrupting influence on a certain kind of scheming mind.
Specifically, it caught the attention of master auctioneer Samuel Winternitz. He had a more than passing interest in carnivals, and had invested heavily in an expensive production that left him thousands of dollars in the red. Looking for a quick win, he decided it might plug the hole created by his increasingly troubled “Waterdrome” exhibition. Winternitz knew a submarine would be interesting—playing cheekily to Chicago lore—and came up with the idea of a lost Peter Nissen invention, referencing another bit of local history.
To add a degree of verisimilitude, he needed an accomplice. Young, desperate, and generally untroubled by scruples, Frenchy Deneau was a perfect fit. He was charismatic, he had street cred, and—more importantly—he was willing to say just about anything with a smile. Deneau “found” the “Foolkiller” that November, and Winternitz ensured it was hauled up with appropriate fanfare and then displayed in an arcade he owned on State Street.
The exhibition ran for a few months, with a degree of success best described as somewhere between “moderate” and “tepid.” It was obviously not a submarine—the Brown Bros’ shop was only a few blocks away, for that matter. Then again, they were also only charging the equivalent of a few bucks in today’s money to gawk at it. The two of them milked it for a few months, but Winternitz’s finances continued to worsen, and in April he struck a deal to sell “The Submarine” to C.W. Parker’s carnival company.
But outside the Windy City, the Foolkiller was a dud. It was heavy, difficult to move, and uninspiring. In Chicago, you could get some mileage out of “you know how we’ve always said there’s a submarine in the river? Well, here it is”—even if “it” was a rusted piece of junk. In Kansas, all people saw was the junk, and none of the irony. Parker quickly stopped bothering, and the Foolkiller came back to Chicago, where Winternitz tried to exhibit it in the building intended for his expensive Waterdrome production.
And where, after it fell through the floor, Samuel Winternitz decided to cut his losses. By July, the submarine was up for sale. After September, it was gone. If somebody bought it, they never showed it again. Perhaps the most likely answer is they simply tossed it back into the river from whence it came. And after that, nothing was ever heard about it until a writer fished up the story in the 1970s.
Which brings us to today.
What I’d like to do now is to go over where we’ve gotten to, patch up a few things that I’ve left dangling, and what I see as the questions that are open, but plausibly still solvable. And I think we can do so via the version of that story I just told.
Let’s start from somewhere near the top. In “What if it was round?” I listed a number of similar lifeboat inventors in making the case that the International Automatic Lifeboat could not have been mysterious to anyone—that it was, in effect, part of a short-lived fad.
Open question: How sincere was Robert Brown?
Some of the lifeboat inventors were just eccentrics—anyone who intends to go over Niagara Falls counts, in my opinion. On the other hand, Robert Mayo was definitely serious about his ideas, even after the failure of the initial Rescue Lifeboat Company. His son continued working on the design up through the 1940s—long, long after everyone else had given up. The father-son team had started work well before the La Bourgogne sinking, and continued well after it. I feel comfortable saying that they were on the up and up.
The others, though? I don’t think they’re necessarily grifters, but I do think it’s fair to conclude that most of them were interested primarily in the prize money. Perhaps incidentally they were genuinely passionate about saving lives, but not in the way that the Mayos were. In the era where X-Prize level money could still be nabbed by someone with a shed and an abundance of sheet metal, that must’ve been very tempting.
With Robert Brown, it’s hard for me to say. He approached the International Automatic Lifeboat Company as a business, first and foremost. He started working on his designs after the prize was announced, and after a number of people had already developed similar concepts. More than that, he tried, perhaps successfully, to acquire Mayo’s company. This leads us to a followup open question: were Brown’s later patents genuinely meant as iterative improvements to the IAL, or was he looking for something marketable after failing to get the Mayo intellectual property?
I noted a commonality of lifeboat designs in “What if it was round?,” with the implication that none of them were unique. And, beyond that, the implication that most of them were simply copying existing ideas. At some level, this is taking it too far. After all, there’s a logical sequence here. If you want your boat to be non-capsizeable and unsinkable, one option would be to make it enclosed and cylindrical. But once you’ve done that, keeping the people inside from being rock-tumbled into goo is an obvious problem, and “enclose a rotating compartment” is kind of the only obvious way to solve it.
That is to say, in some sense “cylindrical lifeboat” almost necessitates “…with some kind of rotating inner compartment,” so perhaps it’s all just convergent evolution. On the other hand, the fundamental idea is also so bad—so immediately and obviously unworkable—that, like… why would you converge on such a catastrophe?
I will get back to the Robert Brown question towards the end, because it’s one that continues to gnaw at me.
A somewhat related question is: what happened to the IAL?
Fundamentally, that the boat was thrown into the river to dispose of it seems pretty likely. Like, reading the inquest for the SS Eastland disaster there’s this exchange between Secretary Redfield and Lieutenant Colonel W.V. Judson, district US engineer in Chicago with the Army Corps of Engineers:
Judson: This morning, when I came by the scene of the Eastland disaster, I noticed that the Department of Justice, or some of its agents, had a diver there going over this area between the dock line and the vessel, and I told him I would cooperate with him and send a man down, the same man that made [an earlier survey entered into the record], to locate exactly the depth on any spot that might be found, that was not found when these soundings were taken. And I will say that the diver told me, or rather the man who was in charge of the diver told me that he had picked up an old truck in that area which had been placed upon the dock, that truck having been evidently an old abandoned one that some one had thrown off a vessel to get rid of.
Secretary Redfield: Did you see it, Col. Judson?
Judson: I saw it; yes. I looked at it to see whether it had any marks on it, and it had none. I saw it and it doesn’t look as though anything had touched it. And I unfortunately do not know what depth it came from or anything, and this is the reason I asked him to let me send my man down, so, for anything he had found, we would take the depth of it.
The Chicago River was just an obvious place to dump your junk. Maybe the IAL sank accidentally, but I kind of doubt it. But I don’t know when, or where exactly, this happened. I think this might yet prove to be an answerable question, although it’s a long shot. It would come from any paperwork surrounding the bankruptcy of Robert Brown and the IAL Co., I think—an indication of who took possession of the boat after 1908 or so.
This would also help firmly lock down when the IAL disappeared, beyond simple inference, and why. Was it not worth salvaging in some other fashion? How much of the original equipment—the winch, the apparatus for rotating the inner cylinder, and so on—was left? Was it stripped before it went to the bottom?
In other words, open question: what kind of shape was the IAL in when it was recovered?
To be clear, none of the newspaper reporting is trustworthy, so I’m not echoing what they say as fact. But, reading between the lines, the Times Herald article I opened last week’s episode with—the one that assigns the Foolkiller a crew of eight—says, quote:
the submarine was shaped like a boiler and was hand propelled
Which tracks—when Brown was trying to sell the IAL to the US Lifesaving Service, their report also said it was hand-propelled. But the Power Boat News article specifically mentions an engine, and specifically mentions a powered trial. And a January 15th, 1916 description of the salvage says:
The bones of a man and his dog were found in the engine room of the “fool killer” a submarine which disappeared mysteriously twenty-five years ago
Now, the IAL was quite small; the “engine room” here would be a tiny compartment at the stern where somebody sits with the throttle. And I doubt anyone within three degrees of that story saw where the bones were supposed to have come from, so maybe they made that detail up.
But I would like to know if Robert Brown removed the engine from the boat before selling it and, if so, when. Was the whole idea of motorizing it so unworkable that it had already been removed by the time it’s photographed at the dock, and that’s why the Lifesaving Service thought it was hand powered?
The rear of the boat, where the engine compartment would be, is badly damaged in the salvage photos. None of those photos show the underside of the stern, either, where the propellers and rudder would be if they still existed. Judging what kind of shape it was in, which could tell us a lot about what happened to it after the dock, would greatly benefit from more and better images.
Which gets us to a real biggie of an open question: are there more photos of the boat in 1915/1916?
I’ve mentioned on several occasions that what we have of the salvage are 5 photos taken from the Wells Street Bridge. Two months ago, I found a sixth, which seems to have been shot from the barge. So there was more than one news agency taking pictures of the recovery.
Sorry, did I say “taking pictures”? I mean filming. From the plot summary of Hearst-Selig News Pictorial No. 102, we see:
Chicago: "Foolkiller" diving craft which was built but never successfully operated, is discovered by diver on bed of river. Two attempts were made before the strange submarine, which has been lost 20 years, was brought to the surface.
And from British Pathé’s “News No. 102,” shot by a competing service, is:
Chicago, Ill: A submarine, forty years old, which sank with its inventor on its trial trip, is discovered by a diver in the riverbed. Subtitles: The curious twenty-ton craft is raised from its resting place
When I conjectured that Winternitz “ensured it was hauled up with appropriate fanfare,” this is what I meant. Those news pictorials ran in theaters across the country. At least hundreds of thousands of Americans saw the Foolkiller being hauled out of the river. It might not have been a big deal—there was a war on, after all—but it was, in a very real sense, nationwide news.
So if you had phrased the question as “were other photos taken of the salvage,” the answer is an unqualified “yes.” Definitely there were. Are there more pictures? I think the answer is still “yes”; I found a new Foolkiller-adjacent photo just a few days ago. But I don’t know where to find them, or when they’ll turn up.
As I said in “Postcard Mania,” discovering them is going to be a matter of luck, I expect. Some new archive will be digitized that contains the photos taken by a competing wire service. Or, perhaps, somebody turned one of them into a real-photo postcard that will show up on eBay or at an antiques store.
I believe everything that is known to exist of the British Pathé archives is online, and almost none of the news survives. Nothing of the Hearst-Selig News Pictorials survive either, so far as I can tell. But again, that’s: that we know of. Lost films also continue to be rediscovered, so I hold out hope that this is still a major aspect of the story to be broken.
A fainter hope is for photos to have been taken of its exhibition, which would also be cool, but so far I’ve had absolutely zero leads on that.
That said, one of the things that keeps me interested in this—and I hope keeps you invested as well—is that, while Foolkiller Studies feels like it has matured as a field, the entire book has definitely yet to be written. I know it’s not as if y’all check eagerly for this article when you wake up Friday morning, but if you’re noticing that I’ve posted it later than I usually do, that’s correct :P
Yesterday, while I was writing up what I expected to be a fairly straightforward summary and sort-of-conclusion to this series, my attempt to answer a simple question turned into what I consider at the moment to be a fairly significant revision of a key part of the 2022/2023 Foolkiller story. Not “blows it all open,” but definitely “so much for winding this down,” because I know what next week’s topic will be.
I’m listing these unsolved-but-solvable questions because I know that I will, inevitably, get to the point Mark Chrisler did—the point where I feel like I can’t make any more progress and ask you to take it from here. So, this isn’t the last Foolkiller Friday, but I am going to end this the way that I was originally planning to, which is to give you what is, for me, the big open question.
That is to say, it is both the singular thing that most sent me down the rabbithole of doing all this research, and it is the one question I have not been able to make any progress on in the last six months of trying.
Okay.
So.
Like I said: the Foolkiller basically drops out of the collective consciousness by the summer of 1916. It’s never mentioned what I would consider to be “organically” in relation to C.W. Parker’s shows, because it doesn’t seem to have sparked any interest outside of Chicago. But even inside Chicago, there’s basically nothing about it after the spring. There’s the classified ad and the writeup from Riverview that hint at the boat’s final disposition, but that’s it.
And when I say “that’s it,” I mean it. Frenchy Deneau mentions the Foolkiller offhandedly when he’s being drafted in 1917, and his hometown paper again credits him with its recovery that year. After that, though? Nothing until the 1970s, long after most of the principle characters had died, when the Eastland itself was just memory.
Except in the Chicago Tribune, on June 9th, 1921, which says this:
30 DAYS FOR STEALING “SUB” MODEL.
Anton Sekowski, 666 Fay street, was sentenced to thirty days in the house of correction yesterday by Judge Bernard P. Barasa on a charge of having stolen the model of a submarine found in the Chicago river by divers following the Eastland disaster.
And the open question is a flat: what.
Six lines. 49 words. Everything about this is maddening. It was maddening when I found it last year. It has only become more inexplicable since.
It is maddening on the practical level. Who did he steal it from? Samuel Winternitz was dead by this point, and Frenchy Deneau was back to work as a salvager. Where was it being shown? Why? Does 30 days mean it was seen as valuable? If so, by whom? What happened to the model after that?
But, as I’ve come to uncover more about both the IAL and the Foolkiller, everything has made those questions murkier. There’s no other mention, anywhere, of a “model” of the Foolkiller, and why would you need one? It was a steel trashcan with some bones in it. What would a model be? Another trashcan? What would the point be?
The Tribune doesn’t even call it “the Foolkiller,” or “The Submarine,” which was its other name. Conceivably this was intended as a local color piece, a “hey, remember that time we all pretended that one wacky French-Canadian pulled a submarine out of the river?” But if so, why doesn’t it mention Deneau? Or the submarine’s name? Or the traveling carnival? Or anything?
And—no—argh. Argh. If it’s intended as a “local color” fluff piece, why? Nobody in Chicago cared about the Foolkiller after April, 1916. Why, five years later, bring it up again as if folks will intuitively remember “a submarine found in the Chicago river” but provide zero context that is not dry and practical? Why is “sub” in quotes? Are those scare quotes? If it obviously wasn’t a submarine model, why go on to describe it that way in the article body?
ARGH.
Robert Brown probably had at least one model of the IAL, since when it was submitted to the Lifesaving Service it was with a note that a representative of the company could appear with a model to demonstrate how it all was supposed to work. So is that what was stolen? But… but if that’s what was stolen, why pretend it’s anything else?
Because presumably, whoever wanted it recovered would’ve accurately described it—right? They would’ve said “Mr. Anton Sekowski took the model boat I was going to use to try and sell my design to the War Department next week.”
In 1921, there are no good contenders* for who would have a model lifeboat, let alone a model Foolkiller. There are no good reasons why this model would be stolen. There are no good reasons why the model, if stolen, would be worth doing more than fining someone the price of admission to 208 South State Street and saying “now don’t you do that again.” There are no good reasons for any of this to have made the news.
And yet it did, somehow.
I do not know who Anton Sekowski (Sikowski? Sakowski? Anthony? Antone?) is, or was. I can find nothing else about his arrest or release or when this crime even took place. Who the hell was he? What did he steal?
* Oh. Right. It’s not that there are “no good contenders for who would have a model lifeboat,” but that’s not true, is it? In fact, you already know who would be—
Except that photo was from 1901, before the failure of their first company, so who knows whether or not they would’ve still had any kind of models to be stolen ten years later? Or what they’d look like if—wait, didn’t I say Robert David Mayo was working on it into the 1940s?
He definitely had at least one model at that point, so it might’ve been stolen in 1921. Or something like it might’ve been stolen in 1921. Right? Right? I have no idea. But finding that photo was also something I felt like sharing, and it lets me end this post on more than just the empty void of having learned nothing about this supposed theft in six months of trying.
But!
Have no fear, even the things we learn can be swiftly undone! Which is what we’re going to talk about next time on Foolkiller Friday, when we try to figure out whether it’s possible to die twice, in two different states. And, if so, how, and if it has something to do with all these inexplicable Canadians?
Trains will also make a reappearance!