Simon Lake

Simon Lake (1866 to 1945) was a Quaker American mechanical engineer and naval architect, born in Pleasantville, New Jersey, who obtained over two hundred patents for advances in naval design and competed with John Philip Holland to build the first submarines for the United States Navy. He built his first submarine, Argonaut Junior, in 1894, and in 1898 sailed the 36-foot Argonaut 1 about a thousand miles from Norfolk to Sandy Hook before rebuilding it as Argonaut 2. His 1901 Protector was the first submarine with diving planes forward of the conning tower and a flat keel, allowing level diving, and it had a lock-out chamber for divers. The Navy accepted none of these boats, so he sold Protector to Russia in 1904 and spent seven years designing submarines for Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. In 1912 he founded the Lake Torpedo Boat Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which built 26 submarines for the Navy, and later he worked on salvage systems and refitted the submarine Nautilus used in Hubert Wilkins's 1931 Arctic expedition. The Navy named a submarine tender class for him.