Even here, in the Submarine Capital of the World, not many know that the periscope was invented by submarine builder Simon Lake, owner of the Lake Torpedo Boat Company in Bridgeport and an early competitor with John P. Holland, whom I referred to in a previous column as the father of Electric Boat.

Lake was a dynamic American inventor, a man comfortable with rubbing elbows with steel welders and Russian czars alike. “We’d go to hell for him,” an American mechanic once told an Austrian government official: He was hands-on, tireless in his pursuit of success.

Walking through downtown Bridgeport one day in the early 1900s, Lake spied a box of jumbled lenses in a shop window. He bought them all, and hurried back to his office to build the periscope he knew would help make U.S. Navy submarines a formidable global force, and his beloved country safer.

Lake said at the time: “A blind submarine would no more frighten an enemy than a blind hawk would worry a hen yard.”

He studied optics, talking to every optics professional he could find. Lake later recalled that every one of them “joined the very considerable body of good citizens who thought Simon Lake was crazy.”

For weeks he struggled with lens configurations in a tube, knowing little about the laws of optics.

With each new configuration, he would poke the device out of his office window to test it.

Lake knew the possible combination of lenses was astronomical, yet the stubborn inventor soldiered on until, finally, he held a particular combination of lenses out the window and, “Miracle of miracles, I could see!”

He saw Bridgeport streets, people walking, and horses pulling wagons toward the harbor. “I had succeeded in doing what everyone said could not be done.”

At that precise moment, a draftsman called for his assistance with a problem in an adjoining office.

Before responding, Lake set the fragile periscope on the open window sill. A rain began to fall and an office boy passing through the office noticed the device was getting wet.

Lake says the boy, “overcome with efficiency,” moved the contraption to his drawing board, where the precarious arrangement promptly fell apart.

After many more days spent wrestling with lenses, Lake was once again getting nowhere.

He later wrote that he “could not recapture that first brilliant view of a crowded Bridgeport street which for a brief part of a minute had been the most satisfying sight of my whole life.”

Then he heard that the best optics man in the country was a faculty member of Johns Hopkins University. Lake packed his lenses and headed to Baltimore.

At first, the professor joined those who said it couldn’t be done. “But I’ve done it!” Lake insisted. They set to work, eventually solving the problem.

Their success led Lake to develop the “omniscope,” meaning “to see everything.” He installed it on his new submarine Protector, launched in 1902 and sold to Russia. Unimaginative bureaucrats and backroom deals drove many American inventors to Europe at the time.

The omniscope, affording an all around view of the horizon, was capable of rotating, and incorporated horizontal lines on the lens that served as a rudimentary rangefinder.

Lake knew his design was far from perfect. Later patents provide a paper trail documenting his continuing periscope improvements, culminating in a much-improved design, capable of being raised and lowered. His design set the standard for decades.

Submarine periscopes have been replaced by high-tech photonics masts today, but it was Connecticut’s own Simon Lake who first gave the precious gift of sight to the submarine, elevating them to fearsome weapons of war.

John Steward lives in Waterford. He can be reached at tossinglines@gmail.com.