(Reprinted with permission from YANKEE magazine, Publication Date: April, 1974
by Dorothy Needham, pictures courtesy of Simon Lake School.)
The Article is entitled "The Dream that had Fins" and is posted book style to page through on this website.

A STRANGE IRON HULK LIES Partially submerged and quietly rusting just a stone's throw from the wet-lands bordering a busy little harbor in Milford, Connecticut. Now an anonymous iron skeleton, scantily clothed in seaweed and riddled with holes by time and tides, it offers no hint of identity, no whisper of a romantic past, and no singular sign to stamp it as a product of genius. Hidden from land-view by tall marsh grasses, it rests in mute oblivion like a common castoff, there in the brackish water where it was dumped 35 years ago. And yet this castoff is not common at all. It is a one-of-a-kind diving chamber which once held the lifelong dreams of Simon Lake, the illustrious marine engineer and submarine inventor who lived and worked in this bustling shore community for almost half a century. The discarded ovate diving chamber, among the last of a thousand or so Lake inventions, was part of a more intricate device with which the underwater genius hoped to salvage sunken treasures. The chamber was fitted originally with a 100-foot-long, steel salvage tube, containing a ladder, which was connected to a mother-ship and through which crew members entered or left the sub-merged bell. The enormous tube, dumped in the harbor with its companion piece, was salvaged for scrap metal about two decades ago. Initial plans for this treasure hunting device were developed by Lake in his Milford laboratory in 1933, when he was 67 but still remarkably energetic in mind, body and spirit. He had by then also compiled a long master list of fortune-laden ships which reputedly had been lost at sea, and he decided to zero in on the famed Hussar, a British frigate which went down in Hell Gate, New York, in 1780.