 Good day to you. You know, if you look hard enough, you can see me at every luncheon. My name's John Philip 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. In County Clair, 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-hour 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 iron clad, rebuilt from the damaged hull Merrimack. It was her low freeboard that made monitors 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 my 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 van Drebbel had made the first practical effort to get 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 Hunley, 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 Chawston Harbor. It blew her apart, but Hunley 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. Up hill work, was it? Very well then. There were other ways. I'm John Breslin. Sit down, please. Thank you, Mr. Breslin. Now then, your brother's been telling me about this boat of yours that swims underwater. You know, of course, whom I represent. The Finney and Society. You want a free Ireland. Right you are, 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. You're right to the point, Mr. Holland. And I'll tell you this, if she does work, the Finney and Society is prepared to back you and build in a full-scale boat for the greater glory of a free Ireland. She'll work all right, Mr. Breslin. 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 millhands 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. 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 buoyancy, we rose until it fair to dazzled me. 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 brick-a-brack off her topside. In fact, there wasn't even the semblance of a deck. Even an iron fish has to have the clean lines of a fish. Breslin 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. Under cover of one New Jersey night, the Fenians appeared with tugboat at the dock. There, a dubious night watchman let himself be convinced an order had come from Holland. In short, Breslin stole both boats. 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 him 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. He came to know the joys of the innovator well. Yet 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 L.E.U. 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 Lake's 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 6. Not everyone at the yard, though, had my faith. On May 17th, 1897, they were all proved wrong. The launch was a success. What remained were the Navy trials. But the stern showed when she dived. Hadn't he ever watched a seabird? 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? It comes in long and wooden and narrow. Let's face it, John. The Navy brass would feel a lot more comfortable if you had more superstructure on that boat. Give them a deck to strut upon. This is a diving vessel, not a surface ship. What will they require next? Sit in a 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 will tell you, I know nothing about submarines. Nothing at all. 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. Fantastic. Well, what do you think of that craft, Admiral Dewey? Think, sir. If the Spanish had had two of those things in Manila, I never could have held a place. That's what I think, sir. The Navy finally purchased the Holland 6 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. 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. 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 V. Holland. In the next few years, I'd try to form my own company, but I had no head for business. I was just a cantegous 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 the Allies. 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. September 22nd, 1914. 40 days after John Holland died, the German U-9 sang three British cruisers off the Dutch coast. 1,400 men went to their deaths. Submarines had come a long way from the Confederate Hunle. They had become a specialized battle force in every respectable navy in the world. And yet they continued 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. 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 the 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 6. They apply this principle when they built the Albuquer which tested the shape. Although Albuquer 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 underwater. 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, a men's 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 6000 feet. And Aluminot, whose aluminum hull lets it operate to depths of 15,000 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-POM was lost off Spain, the cable-controlled underwater research vessel Curve managed to recover it after its position had been fixed by Alvin. NR-1 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 U.S. Navy's pioneering exploration and study of the ocean depths, from its first acceptance of John Holland's odd-ball 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 Patterson never dreamed of when he went down in his first floating coffin. 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 any inkling or some of the other things that could lead to. Now, if Simon Lake and John Holland had been one man, ah, there would have been a real genius for you. 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, it's still my boats, every one of them. Since I passed on, I've seen many a launcheon 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 and have a submarine look for me. I'll be there.