Elihu Brintnal Frost (S&B 1883)
Lawyer. Involvement in submarine industry. Peekskill Military Academy. Yale University. Skull and Bones. Delta Kappa Epsilon. Delta Kappa. Columbia Law School.
Retired from active practice, 5 years before his death.[4]
Spanish-American War, 10 Apr 1898 (U.S.S. Maine exploded on the 15 Feb 1898. War started 21 Apr 1898), “My dear Mr. Secretary: I think that the Holland submarine should be purchased. Evidently she has great possibilities in her for harbor defense. Sometimes she doesn’t work perfectly, but often she does, and I don’t think in the present emergency we can afford to let her slip. I recommend that you authorize me to enter into negotiations for her, or that you authorize the Burea of Construction to do so, which would be just as well. Very sincerely yours, T. Roosevelt”[7]
1899, When Isaac Rice formed the Electric Boat Company (the predecessor of General Dynamics) to build Holland’s submarine designs, Frost became the company’s vice-president, secretary, and chief financial office.[7]
1893, United States Congress funded a $200,000 prize for submarine construction, and Front lent John Philip Holland the funds he needed to participate in this prize contest. Frost and Holland were awarded the prize money in 1895. Frost became secretary-treasurer and later president of Holland’s firm, which was first named the John P. Holland Torpedo Boat Company and later the Holland Submarine Company.[7]
1892 - Frost, encouraged by the political shift in Washington [President Grover Cleveland back in Whitehouse], told Charles Morris on 28 Feb 1893, that he was ready to consider forming a company to provide Holland with the necessary capital to contine his experiements with submarine torpefo boats.[7]
Vice President Electric Boat and Holland Torpedo Boat Companies.[4]
Associated with his father for everal years and, after a period was associated with his father for several years and, after a period of indepdent practice, with Frost and Johnson.[4]
Joined Lord Day & Lord in NYC.[4]
1984 to 1985 - Columbia Law School.[4]
1883 - Graduated Yale, Skull and Bones Patriarch.[1]
Died 22 Aug 1925, from Paresis. Age 65. St. Peters Epsicopal Church, Peekskill.[4]
Note: Regarding Holland…[7,p132]
The problems of flight may have served as a diversion for the failing inventor; at any rate he continued to labor with his dreams. His work on the submarine now belonged to the past, but not so his visions of its potential. Those who berated him by declaring that “the Holland submarine had far outgrown the conceptions of its inventor” spoke either from an exaggerated view of their own contributions to the science or from a calculated refusal to recognize the greatness of his vision.
It was natural that the public would not leave Holland alone entirely; and when asked to comment on submarine developments or disasters, his anwers now often came as bitter denunciations of old acquaintances and of events that were irretrievably relegated to history. “I did not graduate from Annapolis,” he irritably commented in 1909, “I am not disloyal or without patriotism, but I am ashamed of the boasted efficiency of our bureaus of construction. … When I review the supposed improvements in submarine work by our youthful naval architects, graduates of Annapolis, I am severely arrigned by these selfame youngsters. They presume to known more about submarines than I do. They favor nothing but what comes from England. Uncle Sam will have nothing to do with me, and I sam sure I have as little respect for English Naval constructors as they have for me.[7,132/133]
…
Two rumours persist that are extremely difficult to document, but are nonetheless both intriguing and possible. First, it is said that the Emporer of Japan conferred on John Holland the Order of the Rising Sun in 1910 in honor of the American inventor’s contributions to submarine development.[7,p133]
[Note: The Holland 1-class submarine purchased by Japan during the Russo Japanese War on 12 Dec 1904. Japanese naval victory which created political turmoil for Nicholas II of Russia (Shot with his family) ]
Was this the Emperor’s answer to the final plea, in the same year, of the dying Lieutenant Sakuma ? The second story is that Holland wished to go to England in the closing days of his life to warn the British Admirality of the submarine menance should England be drawn into conflict with Germany. Ill health, supposedly prevented the aged inventor from making this journey.[7,p133]
Community life also occupied John Holland’s attention. He founded the Entre Nous Club of Newark, taught Sunday School in the local parish, and supported a dramatic society of which he was an original director….[7,p133]
Unhappily, Holland was not to be spared additional sorrow. His friend William Nindemann [Electric Boat Company and Polaris and Jeannette Expeditions], died following the loss of his only child. Then, in November, 1913, Holland was stunned by the death of his nineteen-year-old daughter, Julia [note the age and timing pre-WW1].
These events were enough to shock the old man into complete resignation, but he lived on into the new year. Within less than three months, on 8 Mar 1914, he also lost his old friend, Charles Morris, whose loyalty had not faltered since the days of Holland’s second submarine, the Fenian Ram. By late summer, the inventor himself lay ill at his home in Newark. And there, on 12 Aug, John Philip Holland, aged seventy-three, succumbed to pneumonia.[7,p133/134]
“He was a fair fighter, a most interesting and amusing companion, the staunchest of friends,” declared Rear Admiral William Wirt Kimball. “God rest his soul.”. [Kimball, commanded the Atlantic torpedo-boat fleet in the Spanish-American War.]
Seventeen years before — on 17 May 1897 — the late edition of The New York Times had carried a cautiously expressed account of a ship launching earlier that day:
“… the Holland, the little cigar-shaped vessel owned by her inventor, which may or may not play an important part in the navies of the world in the years to come, was launched from Lewis Nixon’s shipyard this morning.”
Forty days after Holland died, the German Navy’s U-9 torpedoed the British cruisers Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue off the Dutch coast. A submarine of only four hundred and fifty tons, manned by twenty-six men, had sunk thrity-six thosand tons of the enemy’s ships and had sent some fourteen hundred men to their deaths in the waters or the North Sea.
By September 1914, there was no longer any doubt about the part which the submarine would play “in the navies of the world”.[7,p134]
[Research RMS Lusitania]
[3] - Skull and Bones Membership List by David Luhrssen
[4] - S&B Obituaries - Elihu Brintnal Frost (S&B 1883)
[5] - FYI - Wiki - Elihu Brintnal Frost (S&B 1883)
[6] - Yale Obituary - Page 113 / on the page 112
[7] - John P. Holland, 1841-1914 : inventor of the modern submarine
[8] - Simon Lake - Submarine competitor
[9] - Rear Admiral and Holland’s funeral.
[10] - Friend, Electric Boat Colleague and Artict Explorer
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