That prophetic dream started to take form in 1876 in Pleasantville, New jersey, when Simon Lake, a red-haired, freckle-faced boy of ten, avidly read Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The youth, overwhelmed by the ingenuity of Verne's Nautilus, vowed to design an even more fantastic boat one day and build it, piece by piece, with his own hands. He even chose a perfect name for it, the Argonaut, another name for the versatile Portuguese man-of-war, a fascinating sea creature which can creep stealthily along the ocean floor, swim swiftly in the in-between depths, and skim along the surface of the water by raising its built-in sail. Argonauts, too, were the romantic heroes who sailed with Jason in quest of the Golden Fleece. How bittersweet to visualize that precocious, motherless youth, who (by' Lake's own autobiographical ad-mission) was a "savage little figure of fun in school," burying himself in Verne's classic and conjuring up a vision of his own Argonaut—hunting for sunken ships, discovering under-sea mineral and other deposits, and harvesting the natural riches of the ocean's depths. For most ten-year-olds, such a dream might have seemed exciting or a fragile, fleeting moment. But not for Simon, who had inherited a prolific imagination from a long line of creative Lakes. His father, John Christopher Lake, had invented a shade-roller for windows; his Grand-father Lake had devised a successful seed-planting machine; an uncle, Jesse Lake, had designed the precursor of the present-day caterpillar tractor, a whistling buoy, and a steam-
driven tractor locomotive. Among other Lake relatives were those who developed an offset device for color printing, a shoe-lasting machine, and parts of the Calligraph typewriter. Simon Lake had also inherited a pioneering spirit, perhaps. from Jeremy Adams, one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut, of whom he was a descendant.

Reprinted with permission from YANKEE magazine, Publication Date: April, 1974
by Dorothy Needham, pictures courtesy of Simon Lake School.