I’d like to be able to tell you how it happened, but I can’t. And I spent far too much time searching the internet for the answer.
I guess I should just tell you the thing and be done with it. One of the entries in today’s historical look, goes as follows:
1898 — First telephone message from a submerged submarine, by Simon Lake.
So, somewhere, Simon Lake (great name for a submarine guy, by the way), was in a submarine, underwater, and he picked up the telephone and called someone. That’s it.
Did he call his Mom? Was he in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of Nova Scotia? Do the telephone poles have to be mounted on the submarine, and the wires follow along everywhere it goes? I don’t know.
First, let me say a few words about submarines. They’ve been around a long time, and the first person to think them up, must have really been a sneaky kind of person.
This had an early start. There are pictures of men using reeds to breathe underwater, dating all the way back to 415 BC. We would have to fast forward through history to the Middle Ages when there were many plans for submarines or some version of them. But it was the Englishman William Bourne who designed one of the first submarines in 1578. This creation was to be a completely enclosed boat that could go underwater and rowed beneath the surface.
But I’m sure it didn’t have a phone.
Communications underwater can be tricky since the properties of seawater make it difficult to use it as a communications medium. I’ve found information on underwater “phones” — one was a thing called the Gertrude. But this didn’t come until later. Like during WWII.
The first land telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell, didn’t come around until 1876. So I am not sure about the phone on the sub in 1898.
I should say a few things about submarines here. To start out with, they were not very large. I’ve been on a military submarine, one of the versions used in WWII. I didn’t go underwater in the thing, no. I just took a tour through it. Small, small. I am not claustrophobic by any means, but I think I’d go a little crazy if I were confined to that space for long periods of time. Even I would need a phone, so I see where they might be important.
These days, the United States only has 65 submarines in its fleet. That doesn’t seem like very many to me because the ocean is a big dang place. Nonetheless, we don’t need any more money pumped into our military budget, what with people homeless and starving in our streets.
Anyway. I took the measures to look up Simon Lake. He lived from 1866 to 1945. He was born in Pleasantville, New Jersey, and married a sweet girl named Margaret Vogel. He named one of his sons Thomas Alva Edison Lake. His daughters were just Miriam and Margaret. I guess he didn’t have hopes for the girls to be inventors. And for a living, it seems Simon built submarines for the U.S. Navy back before the turn of the century and all the way through WWI. But no mention of phones.
The whole submarine thing is a mystery. The Beatles didn’t help either. I’ve always wondered if they were saying that just “they” — the Beatles — lived on a Yellow Submarine, or if they meant it cosmically, that “we all” live on a Yellow Submarine. Like you and me. And were there phones?
Phones or not, here’s the thing I do know about subs. As I mentioned, there is a level of discomfort that comes from being on a submarine. But that tight space is necessary for that vessel to dive deep below the surface, to do what it needs to do.
That can be humans, too — our spiritual selves. Sometimes when we look at ourselves or our life situations, we really have to go down deep to see what we need to see. To the murky depths. And as we know, that can be quite uncomfortable. But when we resurface, when we come back up for air, we are all the better for it.
Maybe we do all live on a submarine.
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“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
― George Bernard Shaw
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“So the whole war is because we can’t talk to each other.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
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“How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess
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When telephone poles meet submarines, or not.
