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fund’s assets, a few of the Fenian leaders decided to save their investment. Armed with a pass bearing Holland’s forged signature, they entered the docks at the Canal Basin and towed the
Ram
off into the night to New Haven, Connecticut. There Holland’s invention fell quickly into dereliction. The Fenians tried a few times to take her out under her own power but were so inept that the harbormaster declared the boat a menace to navigation and forbid any more trials. The boat was then moved up the Mill River and stored in a lumber shed at a brass foundry owned by one of the Fenians; her engine was later stripped to power a forge at the foundry. In 1916 the
Fenian Ram
was carted back to New York City and exhibited at Madison Square Garden to raise money for victims of the Irish Easter Week rebellion earlier that year, her only actual service in the cause of Irish independence. 11
    Holland was furious over the theft of the boat (“I’ll let her rot on theirhands,” he declared) but the experience he had gained from $60,000 worth of the Fenians’ support, as well as the ensuing publicity he had garnered, at last attracted the U.S. Navy’s attention. Lieutenant William W. Kimball, who had followed press reports of Holland’s work, came to New York, took him to dinner, and listened raptly as Holland explained the principles of stability, dynamic diving, and maneuverability behind his design. Kimball was promptly sold, and spent the next two decades wrangling with the navy bureaucracy and Washington politics as he tried to get the navy to acquire its first submarine. “Give me six Holland submarine boats, the officers and crews to be selected by me, and I will pledge my life to stand off the entire British flying squadron ten miles from Sandy Hook without any aid from our fleet,” Kimball declared at one hearing before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs in 1896. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, the grand old man of sea power strategy, added his support in a letter to the committee chairman, stating that in his view the submarine boat would be “a decisive factor in defending our coasts” in any future conflict. 12
    Holland added two final refinements to the design that the U.S. Navy would eventually acquire. First, an auxiliary electric motor, powered by a battery of sixty wet cells, now provided the power to propel the submarine while submerged. The batteries could be recharged by clutching the electric motor to run backward, thus acting as a generator, when the boat was surfaced and its drive shaft was being turned by the boat’s 45-horsepower gasoline engine.
    The other new feature was a single torpedo tube that could fire a self-running, or “locomotive,” torpedo. The modern torpedo had its genesis in 1864 when a British engineer named Robert Whitehead, who was manager of a small factory in the port town of Fiume in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Rijeka, Croatia), was approached by an Austrian naval officer with the basic idea. By 1868 Whitehead had perfected a mechanism to keep the torpedo running at a preset depth: a pendulum automatically kept the torpedo on an even keel by adjusting a tail fin to swing up or down if the nose pitched down or up; a hydrostatic valve, actuated on one side by the external water pressure and on the other by a spring adjusted to a preset tension, was similarly linked to the fin to make the torpedo rise or fall if it deviated from a predetermined depth. A chamber of compressed air drove a motor that spun a propeller, and a pistol on the nose set off a charge of 100 pounds of guncotton on impact with a target. Early models had a range of 300 yards and traveled at 6 knots; by 1900, after the British governmenthad bought an interest in Whitehead’s invention and a series of improved designs were developed, torpedoes were routinely achieving speeds of 30 knots and ranges of 800 yards or more. 13
    Deployed at first on small fast warships—torpedo boats—the weapons caused serious