Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/858

 Gathering Oysters by Submarine

A peaceful occupation at which the submarine is so efficient that it promises to revolutionize the entire shellfish industry

���When traversing a good bed the submarine will suck up five thousand bushels of oysters in an hour, leaving the bed clean-swept. It is not diverted from its course by wind or tide

��THE submarine is primarily a destroyer. For the most part its inventors thought only of blowing up ships, notwithstanding the dramatically success- ful trip of the Deutschland. Probably the only inventor who believed in its peaceful, industrial possibilities from the very be- ginning was Simon Lake. He has sug- gested the use of the submarine for polar exploration, for ferrying supplies across ice- bound rivers, for seeking sunken treasure, and for digging oysters. We have already pictured his transatlantic submarine freight carrier — an older invention than the Deutsch-

��land — and on this page we illustrate his submarine oyster gatherer.

Preliminary experiments have demon- strated to Mr. Lake's satisfaction that when the submarine is at the bottom of the ocean, the oysters can be sucked up into it on the vacuum cleaner principle. When traversing good ground, the submarine will suck up five thousand bushels of oys- ters in an hour. This means that in one hour a mass of oysters will be collected which, if compactly piled in a cylinder one foot in diameter, would require a cylinder one and three-quarters mile long to hold it.

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