Morgan Robertson

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Morgan Robertson (September 30, 1861 - March 24, 1915) was a well-known American author of short stories and novels, and the possible inventor of the periscope.

Nowadays he is best known for the short fictional novel Futility, first published in 1898. This story features an enormous British passenger liner called the Titan, which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, the Titan hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic with the loss of almost everyone on board.

The similarities between the fictional sinking of the Titan and the real-life sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 attract attention even today although there are significant differences: for example, the fictional Titan capsized and sank almost immediately (rendering the number of lifeboats moot), and the Titan was on its third return trip from New York, not her maiden voyage to New York. After the Titanic disaster, Robertson re-published the novel as Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan with the size of the ship increased from its original 45,000 tons to 75,000 tons, closer to the 66,000 tons of the Titanic. The book has been accused of anti-semitism because of his negative portrayal of the one Jewish character^{[citation needed]}.

In 1905 Robertson's book The Submarine Destroyer was released. It described a submarine that used a device called a periscope. When the story was first published, officials of the Holland Submarine Company sent for Robertson and asked him whether he considered the idea of a periscope to be practical. In response, Robertson showed the officials a model of one that he claimed to have already patented. Officials of the company were so impressed that they purchased the invention for $50,000.

In 1914 (in a volume that also contained the new version of Futility) Robertson included a short story called Beyond the Spectrum, which described a future war between the United States and Japan, a popular subject at the time. Like The Wreck of the Titan, Beyond the Spectrum bore some similarities with actual events. Japan does not declare war but instead launches sneak attacks on United States ships en route to the Philippines and Hawaii; an invasion fleet about to conduct a surprise attack on San Francisco is stopped by the hero using the weapon from a captured Japanese vessel. The title refers to an ultraviolet searchlight used by the Japanese (but invented by the Americans) to blind American crews. Some readers have compared the searchlight's effects (blindness, intense heat, and facial burns) to those of the atomic bomb. Despite claims to the contrary, airplanes do not play a role in the 1914 short story, nor does the United States use "sun bombs" on Japan, so except for the sneak attack (which anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese military history could have predicted), the novel's resemblance to the Pearl Harbor attack is remote. If anything, the short story bears a closer resemblance to the Japanese disaster at the Battle of Midway and Japanese projects during World War Two to build "death rays" (ku-go) or "blind rays" (ki-go).

On March 24, 1915, Robertson was found dead in his room at the Alamac Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was 53 years of age. It is believed that he died of an overdose of protiodide.