The ingenious designer in New York evidently did not realise that the average naval officer has only two eyes and two hands; the little conning tower was simply plastered with wheels, levers, valves and gauges, with which some superman was to fire torpedoes, dive and steer at the same time, and the inside of the boat was stuffed with wonderful automatic boxes".
The first 'periscope'
As designed, the Holland boat had no periscope, so Captain Bacon invented a basic optical tube design which, taken to the Dublin optician Howard Grub, was made into a viable, albeit basic, periscope on a long mast, attached by ball and socket joint to the casing.
Alterations were made, and whilst the boat was being made shipshape and less like a box of conjuring tricks, those with artistic ideas tried their hands at painting the long periscope tubes in various ways to make them invisible. One was striped like a barber's pole painted in rainbow colours which, when whizzed round by a small electric motor, might appear invisible like a raindrop. It didn't and the painting craze died a death.
The launch of Submarine Boat Number One (Holland 1)
According to the Naval and Military Record, HM Submarine Boat No. 1 (which only later became known as Holland 1) was launched on October 2nd 1901 without any ceremony, the Admiralty having stated that they "regard these boats as wholly in the nature of an experiment and, like all other experiments carried out from time to time, this one will be carried out with every privacy".
