The Kansas City sun. (Kansas City, Mo.) 1908-1924, 1916-09-16

- across the ocean from Bremen,
her avoidance of the English and French war
vessels and her theatrical disclosure of her
identity at Cape Charles constituted the sem
sation of q century.
Mr.. Charles ?. Tower of the New York
Tribune has written an article comparing the
Deutschland with the Nautilus, the submarine
boat of Imagination which Jules Verne, the
great French novelist, described in "Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea-" published
about 40 years ago. No doubt many of you
have read the story. 1t is a great boys book, like
"Tom Sawyer" or Fenimore Cooper's Leather
Stocking Tales"
Mr.. Tower assumes that the Nautilus was never
destroyed, and that the Deutschland is the old
boat of fiction rebuilt. He says:
"But the sensation will be the greater when it
becomes generally known that the boat is not Of
German design or build; that she is really the
original submarine boat Nautilus, designed by
that wonderfully skillful naval architect, engineer
and scientist-at-large, Jules Verne, built and navi-
gated over and under many seas by Captain
Memo, and for many years supposed to have
been engulfed in the whirlpool between the
islands of Farce and Lofoten, off the coast of
Norway, in June, 1868; the same vessel, rebuilt
in some degree and reftted in q German ship
yard, but the Nautilus, as truly as she was the
Nautilus when she was launched, in 1865 or 1866.
at has been only a superstition that the boat
was lost in the whirlpool, based on the fact that
no survivors of her crew, excepting MIR. AronnaX,
who wrote the log on board the vessel on her
sensational and mewha erratic voyage of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea- and
his two personal associates, Conseil and Ned
Land, never appeared in public or ever told any
thing to the contrary. But it will be
that Mr.. Aronnax declared in his edition of the
log, which was published in 1873, that he did not
positively know whether the boat was lost or
not. What has become of the NautilusT he asks.
Did 1t resist the pressure of the maelstrom2
Does Captain Memo still live?
Don't believe it'll Why, it is so thoroughly
true as to be automatic. Read such a description
of the boat that arrived at Baltimore on a Sunday
evening; then eread Mr.. AronnaX's logbook
make careful comparison of the description of the
Nautilus which is contained therein with that Of
the socalled Deutschland-and dare to say that
they are not one and the same vessel. The power
plant is new in part, and in part renewed. Mr.,
Verne designed the Nautilus to be driven by
electric power generated by primary batteries,
something that would be out of the question to-
day, but possible in the case of the Nautilus, be-
cause her owner was a man of enormous wealth
and becnNse he had discovered an inexhaustible
source of supply Of the materials required to
renew his batteries.
1.-THE primary battery was the only available
means of providing power for underwater pro-
pulsion, as the Diesel motor, now in use on all
submarine vessels as a power plant for use on
the surface and for generating electricity for
power to be used under water, had not been de-
veloped. In fact, neither the Germans nor any
one else made any considerable use of the Diesel
principle of motor construction until the Diesel
patents had expired. Besides, Mr.. Verne had no
dynamos with which to translate the power pro-
duced by motors into electricity, although he had
the essential principle In the electric motors with
which he turned his propeller.
"And the vessel is now fitted with perlscopes,