The performance of the _Argonaut, Jr._, becoming known, she received no little newspaper notoriety. In looking over my old clippings I find that there was a vein of scepticism and sarcasm running through most of these early accounts of her performance. I just quote briefly from one of the papers describing her, the _New York Herald_, of January 8, 1895:
THIS BOAT CRAWLS ALONG THE BOTTOM. AT LEAST THAT'S WHAT IT WAS TO DO, BUT IT ESCAPES AND ASTONISHES FOLKS IN OCEANIC, N. J.
IT WILL CRAWL FIVE MILES WITHOUT COMING UP TO BREATHE WHEN INVENTOR LAKE COMPLETES IT. FUN FOR MERRY MERMEN.
"RED BANK, N. J., Jan. 8, 1895.--Strange things come in with the tide in the ungodly hours of the night, and in the stillness of the night strange things follow them, but the strange thing which came up the North Shrewsbury a day or two ago, and which lies high and dry on Barley Point, is a 'new one' on the good folk of Oceanic. Now that they have fairly discovered it, they are sorry that it didn't wobble ashore in the summer, when Normandie-by-the-Sea below the Point is crowded with curious persons from the city. Any enterprising Oceanic man might have fenced in the queer thing and charged every one a quarter to see it."
The few substantial persons who had witnessed the _Argonaut's_ experiments provided the capital for the construction of the _Argonaut First_ and enabled me to complete her, and she was launched on August 17, 1897. I had called the little experimental boat the _Argonaut, Jr._, because it was born before its mother, although the mother (the _Argonaut First_) had been conceived and designed first. I did not have sufficient capital to go ahead with her construction, and even the design of the _Argonaut_ itself was cut down to correspond to the size of the subscriptions that we had been able to secure.
The raising of capital to most inventors is a serious problem; it has always been so with me. I have always been interested in mechanical accomplishments, but always dreaded the necessity of trying to raise capital to carry on those experiments. I have never valued money for itself or felt the need of it except when I did not have it. I think this is the case with most inventors, which is the reason why so many of them go to unscrupulous promoters who rob them of their inventions, or else often tie them up so that they themselves are incapable of continuing their development work.