Hello, all you beautiful people, and welcome back to Foolkiller Friday, the ongoing series where I say things very authoritatively and then later go: “Hmm. Wait a second.”
Last week, I said that there had been some new developments in Deep Foolkiller Lore. I continue to believe that this is the case. However, I’m still trying to figure out what I believe about it, and I’ve been a little distracted, so instead I’m going to talk about boats again.
(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]” (reviewing open questions)
- “The Experiment” (this one!)
- “Back from the Dead” (David B. Marks, and an update on the salvage)
I wrote a fantasy novel once, the plot of which is more or less: what if the Apollo Program, but instead of going to the moon it’s a group of scientists trying to figure out how to get through the magical boundary that surrounds their continent. It’s a steampunk novel, and most of it takes place on a new, experimental steamship.
The ship was mostly designed along “rule of cool” principles, but since it was originally intended as a warship it had a ram bow. And since I had, at the time, undiagnosed ADHD I wound up creating a 3D version of it for fun. And since I had, at the time, undiagnosed ADHD I also wound up learning how to use a 3D printer and creating a physical model. And since I had, at the time, undiagnosed ADHD I then put it in some water…
Where it immediately capsized.
At this point, you can appreciate, I had three options:
- I could simply say “well, the ship in the novel is designed differently.”
- I could simply say “well, the ship in the novel is stabilized by magic.”
- I could redesign the ship, over and over again, including a version with hollow compartments where I could adjust the ballast, until I had something that floated as I intended, had an appreciable degree of freeboard, and self-righted in an appropriate fashion rather than coming to rest on its side, and then raingutter-regatta-ing it to see how well it behaved as a ship.
Once I got to that point, I noticed something interesting. Ships with an inverted bow have a proportionally longer length at the waterline than ships with a conventional bow, which makes them (comparatively) more efficient and therefore faster, which worked with what I wanted to portray in the novel.
But I also saw that if there were disturbances in the water, the boat didn’t ride over them, it plowed straight through them. This turns out to be another aspect of ships so-designed: they are “wet,” and tend to take water over the deck. And so I wrote that into the story, with a scene where one of the engineers—having also not anticipated this—is likewise surprised, and not entirely happy.
I’ve used this as an example when doing panels about worldbuilding at conventions before—the idea that “worldbuilding” can be much more expansive than just drawing maps or writing up character biographies.
Anyway, so I modeled and then printed out a version of the International Automatic Lifeboat.
“Why?”
Well. I’ve posted overlays a couple of times in this series, once showing the size of the Foolkiller relative to the Wells Street Bridge and once showing it relative to the 208 South State Street arcade where it was displayed. For the first one, I literally just drew a 40x5 foot box. For the second, I traced a rough model I’d been working on.
Also, I figured it might be helpful to have a model I could use for… whatever?
So here’s my process. The boat is generally described as 40 feet long. It is described as 4 feet wide in some places, and 5 feet wide in others. What we have as documentary evidence are the photos of the Foolkiller’s salvage, and the Power Boat News article which shows people resting on the hull of the International Automatic Lifeboat.
Also, there are drawings from two patents: 812,815 (dating from before the IAL was built) and 870,928 (dating from after). The second of those includes a complete side view of the boat; both include cross-sectional profiles, because the point of the patents is the rotating inner compartment, but the earlier one matches the distinctive hatch visible in the Bridge Photos.
Straightaway, this allows us to draw some conclusions. If the 870,928 boat is 40 feet long, then the rungs of the ladders depicted are exactly 1 foot across. If the beam is 4 feet, as specified in the Power Boat News article, then the side profile depicts a boat that is only 23 feet long, with 7-inch ladder rungs. Of course, being cylindrical, that means the inner compartment would also be smaller than 4 feet across.
(What is this, a lifeboat for ants?)
Taking the 40-foot length as canonical and scaling the cross-sectional profile, we come up with a boat that is about 6.5 feet in beam, plus the lateral stringers that run along the waterline and give it some extra width. The end result looks like this:
The second patent has redesigned the turret of the boat, so the one in my model is slightly taller and wider than it’s shown in that patent. Also, there are no pictures of the boat that clearly show the underside of its stern, so I’ve had to extrapolate the keel, rudder, and screw assemblies. That said, here’s a comparison of the most detailed bridge photo with a render where I’ve tried to match up the angles as best as I can:
I am, in general, pretty happy with the results. That is to say, I am willing to conclude that the boat’s aspect ratio is correct, and that the version that was produced matches, within a reasonable degree, the patent drawings.
As with modeling fictional steamships, this has already helped me with a few things. For one, in the salvage photos, you can see that there’s some kind of opening along the top of the boat. It was never exactly clear to me what this was—I sort of assumed that the lifeboat had, perhaps, been damaged:
In actuality, this is the aftmost of two identical hatches, which are hinged along the top supports and which open from the center outwards, permitting entry to the boat. And this is interesting for another reason, which is that that’s not how the boat is supposed to work.
Patent 812,815 says:
Access to the interior of the boat is had through a water-tight door in the stern and through a hatch in the top of the turret.
These hatches are also not visible in the Power Boat News article. Between that image, and the boat as photographed in 1907, the forward ladders have shifted further aft, creating space for the forward hatch more or less directly above the first portholes. This must represent a later change to the design—and indeed patent 870,928 does include another hatch on the top side of the boat.
Okay. So, creating a model has helped me to answer a couple of questions, just like when I was writing about steampunk aeronauts. Let’s park the hatches for a moment, though, and return to the novel, because the next thing I did—chiefly because it didn’t take any additional time—was to send the model over to my 3D printer.
I shared the results here, but what I did not say—other than describing the Foolkiller as “my idiot son”—was that since I have, at the moment, diagnosed and treated ADHD I… no, I didn’t even get to the point of putting it in the water. In that photo, it is resting in the very specific configuration of keys that allows it to sit more or less upright without falling over.
But just in case, and for the purposes of satisfying my curiosity, I did then put it in some water…
Where it immediately capsized.
So: once more, we discover something new and interesting about a boat design we’ve only read about by seeing how it behaves as a boat. The difference is that instead of learning about hull speed, we learn that the International Automatic Lifeboat was a piece of junk.
Really, this was probably obvious all the way back in “What If It Was Round?” That was literally part three of this whole series, and I made a point then of noting that these lifeboats were a commercial failure, repeatedly rejected by the government, and in at least one case nearly drowned their inventor.
But that’s all academic. I will say that holding the model in your hand, and feeling how unwieldy it is, really drives it home.
The issue here is that cylindrical boats are not, in general, very stable platforms—post-Albacore submarines, with their characteristic teardrop-shaped hulls, are notoriously unpleasant on the surface, and do not spend much time there. Robert Brown’s patents describe additional stabilizing mechanisms for the boat, and I now understand why this would’ve been necessary even if that were the only reason.
And it isn’t. There are two big problems with the design, one of which is fixable, one of which is not, and both of which suggest maybe Anton Sekowski stole whatever model he ganked before Robert Brown had a chance to really study it, and he just decided to build a full-scale version on the off chance that physics might be different by the time Kling Brothers was done.
Fixable thing first: the IAL is not a cylindrical boat. It is narrower below its midline than it is above, where there is also the “turret” to contend with. Accordingly, and this is the reason why the first model I printed rolls over like a loyal dog, the center of gravity is a little over a foot higher than it would be for a cylinder of the same diameter. In other words, it’s about 30% higher than it should be.
This is, no doubt, why the post-IAL patent has a different profile with a more “tumblehome” design that narrows above the waterline, and also why it’s abundantly provisioned with ballast and air pockets. Nor is this an intrinsically fatal flaw; a second printed model, with the keel shown in the patent drawings, floats competently if not happily:
Then we get to The Big Catch, which comes from what is, I guess, a logical question because it’s one that I was asked at least twice with regards to the model: what about ballasting it and seeing how it would’ve worked in practice? The model shown above came from a thought I had, that I could put a cylinder in the boat and see how the self-righting, non-capsizable nature of the boat would’ve worked in practice.
I did not get that far.
Recall that the core idea of the International Automatic Lifeboat is that its cylindrical profile conceals another, internal compartment that is designed to automatically self-level with the movement of the ship, so that everyone inside stays comfortable. Like this:
Does this remind you of anything? Because, as I started to model it, it sure as hell reminded me of something. It looks like the rotor of an automatic winding wristwatch, which is similarly drawn by gravity into the same orientation, no matter what. A wristwatch, though, has a method to its madness—converting this movement into stored energy in its mainspring.
The lifeboat does not. What the lifeboat does is contain a mechanism that ensures any list means the passenger compartment, rotating out of position, further shifts the center of gravity in the direction of the list. In theory, in a conventional lifeboat, you could shift your weight against the rocking of the boat. Or the lifeboat captain could move people around to counteract the list.
Or, if nothing else, they don’t automatically move along with it. In contrast, the International Automatic Lifeboat’s party piece turns out to be a patented method for using passengers to produce a mechanically enhanced free surface effect.
What I wound up doing is 3D-printing not an entire boat, but a cross-section of the center hull. In between, I placed a small cylinder that I could weight to replicate the effect of having passengers aboard, and which rotates freely. Here, we have an example of an unweighted and a weighted cross-section, beginning in the same orientation:
Whatever off-balancing impulse is initially felt, the rotating compartment immediately magnifies it. The compartment does stay upright, which is nice! But the best case scenario is that the weight counteracts whatever stabilizing moment the boat has (hint: none) to keep it in its preferred sideways position.
What actually happens—and you can feel this happening as you twist and move the test contraption—is that there is always some static friction, producing a slight bit of lag which means that, when the boat wants to stop rolling, it experiences a torque from the mass of the passenger compartment continuing to rotate. Where an unweighted cross-section comes to relatively quick rest, the weighted one drunkenly lurches about until it ends, invariably, on its side.
The upshot of this is that, for all intents and purposes, Robert Brown would’ve had a more stable boat if he’d left out the inner compartment entirely and just given people normal seats and handholds. I joked about the model being stolen, but he does seem to have understood—at least a little bit—the problem he was creating. “13,” in the cross-section profile I posted above, is an air pocket whose sole function is to keep the ship from rolling over completely.
Now, back to those hatches.
Back in “Everything You Wanted to Know About the International Automatic Lifeboat” I said:
If whatever Frenchy Deneau pulled out of the river was complete—rotating inner carriage and all—there’s absolutely no way it could’ve been mistaken for anything else. If, on the other hand, what existed was an empty shell with a motor in it… well, I mean, in that case it was still obviously not a submarine. It had no submarine accoutrements—no ballast tanks or pressure hull—but did have ladders, and a door in the stern, and a shape that we now know was somewhat more conventionally hulled than it’s depicted in the “Fool Killer” advertisement.
But maybe it would’ve been less clear what it actually was.
The patent drawings seem to suggest that the internal compartments run substantially forward and aft, to basically just behind the turret. It is also not entirely clear whether or not the internal compartments are themselves cylindrical. They are drawn that way in the earlier patent 776,641, but not explicitly so in the later patents.
There is some reason to believe that they’re not—the portholes, for example. How would they admit light into an enclosed inner cylinder? Perhaps Brown originally intended them to be complete cylinders, but then reverted to the Mayo design when he realized it would also complicate loading if there were only two points of ingress and egress, and therefore also added the hatches along the top to make it easier for people to get in and out of the boat.
We can’t know for sure. But, within the confines of what is known about the Foolkiller, we do have two key pieces of information, and putting them together tells us something else that’s interesting.
The first piece of information is about what it was made of. From the very beginning, everyone agrees that the thing was built out of steel. Over the course of its lifetime, when it shifted from being a lifeboat to a submarine, picking up first one and then multiple skeletons, there was never any disagreement about this point. So I’m going to take that one as a given.
The second is that we have one picture of the boat—the postcard photo—in which it is, unambiguously, afloat and in which all of it can be seen. Since these photos came to light, it’s been noted that the boat seems to be riding fairly high. But now, with a better understanding of its shape, we can try to quantify just how high.
The waterline appears to be, more or less, one porthole length beneath the stern of the boat. In other words, about like so:
From that, we can calculate the volume of water being displaced, which is about 6.65 cubic meters. All things being equal, perhaps it’s a little less and perhaps it’s a little more, but it gives us a pretty decent starting figure. That is to say, the boat must weigh about 6.65 metric tons—around 14,660 pounds.
I don’t know much about building boats, but the Internet tells me that for a 40-foot boat, the hull should be made of no thinner than 3/8” steel. And, knowing the general shape of the boat, we can also calculate its surface area. If the boat is made of 3/8” steel, then we can also determine the volume of the steel used.
The Internet suggests a density of 7.85 grams per cubic centimeter. Plugging that in, and assuming the stringers are not hollow, the weight of the hull comes to: 6.61 metric tons, or about 14,570 pounds.
To be clear, this is a rough approximation. It’s totally fair, for example, to assume the top of the ship was made of thinner steel—the turret especially, since it seems to have been badly damaged in the course of the salvage. There are probably some internal structures, although the boat appears to have been made of roughly three pieces (the center hull, the cone, and the stern cap).
But those two numbers are suspiciously close to me. If the hull was made of 1/4” steel instead, the total mass is still 4.72 metric tons (10,400 pounds). I don’t think the boat, as it’s depicted floating at the Van Buren Street dock, can be carrying much on the inside. There just doesn’t seem, to me, to be wiggle room that would let me assume a complex internal structure with the passenger cars called for in the design.
Maybe at one point it was. Perhaps it was fully equipped in 1906 at the time of the Power Boat News article, but by 1907—when it was clear that the idea was fundamentally unworkable—Brown removed as much as he could to keep the boat relatively manageable while it was tied up.
Perhaps he dispensed with the journaled passenger car, adding in the hatches at the top to make access easier, and pitched it as a shore-launched boat to the Life-Saving Service under the assumption that the air compartments and additional stabilizers would make it self-righting without concern, per se, for passenger comfort (to my reading, the Life-Saving Service writeup doesn’t mention anything about the internal carriages).
Arguing against this, though, is that his final patent (870,928) was filed in March, 1907 and continues to reference a rotating inner compartment—implying either that he hadn’t concluded this was a dead end by 1907, that he acknowledged the problems of the first prototype but assumed a redesigned hull would alleviate them, or that the “plans and specifications” submitted to the Life-Saving Service were unrelated to the 1907 patent.
I’m not certain. I do suspect that, if it was equipped and that equipment removed, it was never reinstalled, and the boat was probably more or less empty when it sank and at the time of its recovery. There would still have been some things on the inside—the air compartments used for ballasting it, for example, and probably the bulkheads separating the engine room from the passenger compartment—but not the mechanisms for rotating the passenger carriage.
Now, there is a catch to all this. The Leavenworth Times, on April 18, 1916 says that the boat “weighs an even ten ton.” This is not impossible; that would be about the displacement of a 40-foot IAL loaded down to its gunwales. I see a few possibilities.
- The boat was not completely cleaned and some of that weight is river mud and other crap.
- The boat is significantly longer than 40 feet, although it can’t be too much longer given the size of its exhibition area
- Extra things were added by Winternitz and Deneau to make it seem more believable and the reconstruction came with significant weight
- At the time the boat sank, it had been reconfigured into something else other than a lifeboat, which likewise came with significant weight
- The Leavenworth Times is exaggerating the same way they’re exaggerating when they say “skeletons of the crew were found when it was raised,” and it did actually weigh closer to 7 or 8 tons, within the margin of error for the Van Buren Street dock boat.
And of course, all things being equal, it is probably that last one. So what does all this tell us about the overall Foolkiller story?
Here, I don’t know. I still contend it’s basically impossible that Deneau, or anyone, thought it was a submarine. A submarine would not have hinged, loosely dogged entry hatches on its topside. A submarine ought to have had weights, or ballast tanks, or some means for changing its depth. Even externally, the boat design looked like any number of other cylindrical lifeboats.
I am now more understanding of the hostility displayed by the US government to the design, and related designs, and I get why the IAL proved to be a difficult “sell” to the public at large. Stepping onto it, feeling it lurch and sway as it contemplated rolling over—while, all around you, conventionally shaped boats bobbed docilely at harbor—must’ve been immediately unsettling.
Was the IAL tested with a McDonald-Erickson 2-stroke gasoline engine? Did it make 5 miles per hour? I don’t know. I can’t really imagine it would’ve felt safe at those speeds, but with enough ballast to have shifted the center of gravity lower and without a passenger compartment swinging like a pendulum… maybe?
I also don’t know what this tells us about Robert Brown. And if you thought this episode involved a lot of me reaching well beyond the reasonable, just you wait until we circle back to that guy.
…Next week!
