To recover the treasures of the deep, expeditions have been organised, ships have sailed, divers have descended, and crews have braved great dangers.  Many great wrecking companies have been formed which accomplish wonders in the saving of wrecked vessels and cargoes.  But in certain places all the time and at others part of the time, wreckers have had to leave valuable wrecks a prey to the merciless sea because the ocean is too angry and the waves too high to permit of the safe handling of the air-hose and life-line of the divers who are depended upon to do all the under-water work, rigging of hoisting-tackle, placing of buoys, etc.  Indeed, it is often impossible for a vessel to stay in one place long enough to accomplish anything, or, in fact, to venture to the spot at all.

It was an American boy who, after reading Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” said to himself, “Why not?” and from that time set out to put into practice what the French writer had imagined.

Simon Lake set to work to invent a way by which a wrecked vessel or a precious cargo could be got at from below the surface.  Though the waves may be tossing their whitecaps high in air and the strong wind may turn the watery plain into rolling hills of angry seas, the water twenty or thirty feet below hardly feels any surface motion.  So he set to work to build a vessel that should be able to sail on the surface or travel on the bottom, and provide a shelter from which divers could go at will, undisturbed by the most tempestuous sea.  People laughed at his idea, and so he found great difficulty in getting enough capital to carry out his plan, and his first boat, built largely with his own hands, had little in its appearance to inspire confidence in his scheme.  Built of wood, fourteen feet long and five feet deep, fitted with three wheels, Argonaut Junior looked not unlike a large go-cart such as boys make out of a soap-box and a set of wooden wheels.  The boat, however, made actual trips, navigated by its inventor, proving that his plan was feasible. Argonaut Junior, having served its purpose, was abandoned, and now lies neglected on one of the beaches of New York Bay.

The Argonaut, Mr. Lake’s second vessel, had the regular submarine look, except that she was equipped with two great, rough tread-wheels forward, and to the underside of her rudder was pivoted another.  She was really an under-water tricycle, a diving-bell, a wrecking-craft, and a surface gasoline-boat all rolled into one.  When floating on the surface she looked not unlike an ordinary sailing craft; two long spars, each about thirty feet above the deck, forming the letter A—­these were the pipes that admitted fresh air and discharged the burnt gases of the gasoline motor and the vitiated air that had been breathed.  A low deck gave a ship-shape appearance when floating, but below she was shaped like a very fat cigar.  Under the deck and outside of the hull proper were placed her gasoline tanks, safe from any possible danger of ignition from the interior.  From her nose protruded a spar that looked like a bowsprit but which was in reality a derrick; below the derrick-boom were several glazed openings that resembled eyes and a mouth:  these were the lookout windows for the under-water observer and the submarine searchlight.