NO DECK TO STRUT UPON

[Music] foreign [Music] ah [Music] distinguished guest it is an honor and a privilege you know if you look hard enough you can see me at every luncheon my name's john phillip holland you could say now that the story of that submarine there and every submarine for that matter is in a way my story too [Music] bye [Applause] [Music] liscanor in county clare a typical irish village near the sea john holland was born here in this cottage in 1841 he longed to be a sailor but with my fuzzy eyes no one would trust me to row a two-hard boat much less navigate a ship he became a teacher instead and that might have been the end of it but one day he read a news story which fired his imagination in the american civil war a strange-looking cheese box on a raft the monitor had bested the confederate virginia an ironclad rebuilt from the damaged hall merrimack it was her low freeboard that made monitor so hard to hit now why didn't they go all the way thought i and make her a submarine in the first place the idea of a submarine boat of war never left holland in all the unsettled years that followed but he got nowhere and finally he left teaching in ireland to join his mother and brothers in america fate sometimes moves in strange ways a slip on the ice in boston put me flat on me back with a broken leg it was a blessing in disguise for it gave me a chance to carefully review all i'd ever learned and thought about submarines a dutchman cornelius vandrebel had made the first practical effort at submarine navigation in 1620 the americans got into the picture during the revolution with david bushnell's turtle a remarkably complete boat but its attempt to sink a british warship failed robert fulton developed his nautilus in 1800 behind the craft a bomb was towed which he called a torpedo after a fish that kills its prey by electrocution but fulton's potential customer the french would not buy it the confederates had an underwater vessel the hundley propelled by eight men and with a long weapon spar forward they loaded explosives on the head of the spar and shoved it into the side of a union blockade ship housatonic in charleston harbor it blew her apart but hundley went down also it had become obvious that to fight underwater and survive your torpedo had to be a free and self-propelled missile in 1868 an english engineer robert whitehead developed just such a weapon powered by compressed air now at last the submarine had its teeth for battle that is if one could be developed which the authorities would accept oh i itch to get to work on the project a few months later holland sent his proposition to the navy department and he did so with a measure of satisfaction he knew his approach to the submarine was the right one the captain who answered advised me to drop the matter to get something done in washington he wrote his uphill work uphill work was it very well then there were other [Music] mr ways i'm john breslin sit down please thank you mr president now then your brother's been telling me about this boat of yours that swims underwater you know of course whom i represent the finnian society you want a free ireland right yeah john phillip holland and this boat of yours if it works can help us to get it now then what can you do to convince me that it'll work i have a small model i can demonstrate it for you this sunday ah you're right to the point mr holland and i'll tell you this if she does work the finian society is prepared to back in building a full-scale boat for the greater glory of a free island she'll work all right mr bress if she does we can use her she did work that sunday beautifully and pretty soon we were in the submarine business by may 22nd 1878 all was ready for the launching of john holland's boat number one a group of mill hands heading home that afternoon gathered on the spruce street bridge over the passaic river in paterson new jersey to watch what would happen with holland's wrecking boat one of the onlookers remarked that the professor as they called him had built a coffin for himself when the two and a quarter ton submarine slid into the water and floated free at the end of her tow line the people on the bridge saw what they had expected suddenly something went wrong the boat settled rapidly in the water and disappeared [Applause] holland discovered the cause as faulty riveting and in a month boat number one was functioning so well that breslin's group authorized the construction of a second and larger boat and this time the skeptics thought the professor had built his new coffin for three men instead of one when we went down all you could see was a dark green blur then there was a jar and we knew we'd hit bottom after a while i blew the ballast slowly as it gathered boy and see we rose until it fair to dazzle me [Music] the fenian ram they called her because of her shape she could swim underwater as fast as on the surface and i'd left the bric-a-brac off her top site in fact there wasn't even the semblance of a deck even an iron fish has to have the clean lines of a fish brethren and his bunch were so excited they put holland to work on a third sub while the ram was still being tested soon the two ships were docked side by side but the fenians began to think the professor's submarines were costing them too much [Music] undercover of one new jersey night the fenians appeared with tugboat at the dock [Music] there a dubious night watchman let himself be convinced an order had come from holland in short breslin stole both boats [Music] oh i was mad when i found out about it terrible mad the fools left the hatch open on the new boat and lost her in long island sound and as for the ram not a man of them knew how to sail her i should have known better than to trust an irishman holland then put together a concern which built a fourth and unsuccessful submarine the sign of the company went down as quickly as it went up but john holland went on trying he did so in the only way he knew long hours poured into design detail it came to know the joys of the innovator well he had always found he had to couple them with the curses of the perfectionist he won a navy competition but in a change of administrations funds were reallocated and cut off then a close friend of his from the ram days charlie morris introduced him to elio frost with frost's financial backing the three of them formed a new company and set out to win the navy competition all over again when it was reopened in 1893 we didn't have too much trouble our only real competition was a fella from baltimore named simon lake and he lost out in the end but he was a clever chap and we heard plenty from him in the next few years in fact the sub we were building the plunger was being put together side by side with lakes model the argonaut in a baltimore shipyard the difference was we had the navy contract holland soon found that that meant problems he had to put on two extra propellers and the boiler the navy wanted was a monstrosity that would roast the crew alive holland convinced frost they had to build another boat on their own the plunger promised to be a disaster so while everyone else watched the plunger in baltimore i'll put another yard in new jersey we worked on the real sub we hoped to sell the navy the holland six um not everyone at the yard though had my faith on may 17 1897 they were all proved wrong [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] the launch was a success what remained were the navy trials but the stern showed when she dived hadn't he ever watched a sea bird there's stern show too when they dive on behalf of the board i must point out mr holland that at the last trial we couldn't tell what you were doing down there can't you put longer flagstaffs on that that ship of yours the board you know what a board is don't you something long and wooden and narrow [Applause] let's face it john the navy brash would feel a lot more comfortable if you had more superstructure on that boat i will not give them a deck to strut upon this is a diving vessel not a surface ship what will they require next did my boat climb a tree relax john relax you're the authority if you don't want it that's that authority is it go down to washington plenty of people there i'll tell you i know nothing about submarines nothing at all [Music] john holland had a right to be disturbed the problems had been many and time was racing on now everything hinged on the last trial on the potomac well what do you think of that craft admiral dewey think sir if the spanish had two of those things in manila i never could have held the place that's what i think sir finally purchased the holland six for 150 000 in april 1900 three years after they'd launched her six more boats were ordered it was the beginning of the submarine force of the united states navy [Music] but for john holland it was the beginning of the end he and frost quarreled constantly over how the business should be run charlie morris had already resigned and holland soon joined him it called holland to think that in all the time he worked with frost he'd never made more than 90 a week [Music] dear sir as my contract expires on the 31st instance and as it is proper that i should then withdraw from my directorship i beg to offer my resignation the success of your company can never be as great as what i ardently desired for it yours very sincerely john p holland [Music] in the next few years i tried to form my own company but i had no head for business i was just a cantankerous old man whom the world had passed by in 1914 war clouds were on the horizon again this time the germans would see to it that the submarine was not idle holland was sick with pneumonia but somebody had to warn their lies he wrote the british admiralty imagine me an irishman helping the british i was 73 and all age must really have been catching up with me [Music] september 22nd 1914 40 days after john holland died the german u9 sang three british cruisers off the dutch coast hundred men went to their deaths submarines had come a long way from the confederate hundley they had become a specialized battle force in every respectable navy in the world and yet they continue to improve with their diesel engines for surface running and battery charging electric motors for underwater running periscopes and accurate torpedoes the boats were amazingly efficient engines of destruction especially in the hands of a skillful commander but as time went on radar and sonar began forcing subs to dive quicker and deeper and stay under longer what was then needed was a true submersible that would stay under permanently not one that had to surface periodically [Music] 1945 brought the means but means in themselves are not enough you need a man to put them to use such a man had graduated from annapolis in 1922 his name was hyman george rickover and he was a hard driver stubborn single-minded and demanding not only of those about him but of himself as well no wonder i like him in 1946 it was ex-submariner captain rickover who represented the navy at the building of our first atomic reactor at oak ridge tennessee the progression of logic is not hard to follow if atomic power was going to be harnessed then by all means put harness and all into a warship and if you're going to do that then put it in the ship which will return the best dividends as a weapon system the submarine another man not calculated to miss the logic was fleet admiral chester nimitz then chief of naval operations a battery of reports and letters designed to persuade followed eventually to involve the top decision makers of the land with the assignment of captain rickover to work with the atomic energy commission the nuclear-propelled submarine nautilus began to take shape and with an excitement known only once before by holland himself nautilus first sailed in 1955 nine years after work began on the oak ridge reactor it was more than half a century since john holland's efforts but now the age of the true submarine was finally upon us the nuclear fact of nautilus was a revolution of the first magnitude now with unlimited power without the air requirement for combustion many new things could be had one of these was great underwater speed designers found to their amazement that the ideal shape for high speed the length beam height ratio was you guessed it like my own holland six they apply this principle when they built the albacore which tested the shape although albacore had conventional diesel engines a marriage was performed her shape and the power of nautilus the result of this union was called the skipjack she was commissioned in april of 1959 somehow i felt at ease at last soon records everywhere were being broken by atomic submarines nautilus went under the north pole skates surfaced at it and the triton spent two months taking an around-the-world cruise entirely under water true submersibles all of them and all verifying in one way or another the versatility of nuclear propulsion but the biggest dividend of all was just around the corner the polaris missile has now given that strange new fish the nuclear submarine immense stature in the world of strategic nuclear weapons and here again the iron determination of one man made the difference in 1955 admiral william f rayburn was told to develop a missile that could be fired from underwater to hit a target 1500 miles away in july of 1960 after one of america's greatest technological achievements the bird left its nuclear propelled cage on target and five years ahead of schedule the george washington became the first of our current fleet of 41 polaris submarines the missile's range has gone from 1500 to 2800 miles this means there isn't a potential enemy on the map it can't hit and the new poseidon missile going into these subs is even more powerful at the same time the polaris poseidon submarine is not the ultimate underwater weapon from our standpoint someday our subs will be capable of delivering a missile to any spot on the globe from any spot in the oceans this is because such a sub will carry a true intercontinental ballistic missile in it it will be the most invulnerable of systems at sea and it will not attract fire to the homeland small wonder then that some naval authorities feel the icbm submarine may become the most important element of all should we ever get nuclear war thrust upon us but the navy's not just interested in attack submarines and missile submarines disasters like the loss of thresher and scorpion have increased the interest in deep water search vessels like the two-man alvin which cruises at six thousand feet and illuminate whose aluminum hull lets it operate to depths of fifteen thousand feet and there are oceanographic research vessels like the mizar which was able to spot the lost scorpion with special electronic equipment she carries to detect steel objects and when the h-bomb was lost off spain the cable-controlled underwater research vessel curve managed to recover it after its position had been fixed by alvin nr1 is unique among all these research vessels it alone is nuclear powered and its seven-man crew can stay down indefinitely mapping the ocean floor and conducting other important marine studies the us navy's pioneering exploration and study of the ocean depths from its first acceptance of john holland's oddball boat with no deck to strut upon to today's sophisticated missile subs and underwater research stations has provided the point of departure for thousands of civilian scientists engineers and planners for a new major industry that may well be the salvation of mankind it's something the little professor from paterson never dreamed of when he went down in his first floating coffin [Music] it's true you know i never did simon lake he was the one he never thought of the submarine as a weapon the way i did he was the one who had an inkling of some of the other things it could lead to now if simon lake and john holland had been one man ah there would have been a real genius for well even if i did think of the submarine basically as a weapon even if i didn't realize all the applications that technology after me has brought on they're still my boats every one of them since i passed on i've seen many a luncheon and i intend to see many another one which reminds me that's what i really came here for so with your kind permission i'll be saying so long and getting to the work at hand [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] the next time you're at a luncheon of a submarine look for me i'll be there [Music] you