Profile of Morgan Robertson on Famous Like Me

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

Nowadays he is best known for the short fictional novel Futility or The Wreck of the Titan, first published in 1898. This story is about an enormous British passenger liner called the Titan, which, deemed to be unsinkable, carries insufficient lifeboats. On a voyage in the month of April, it hits an iceberg and sinks in the North Atlantic. The similarities between the fictional sinking of the Titan and the real-life sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 attract attention even today. After the Titanic disaster, Robertson re-published Futility with a few changes that made the circumstances described in the novel even more similar to those of the Titanic disaster.

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 Robertson also wrote a novel called "Beyond the Spectrum". This told of a war between the United States and Japan. It was eerily similar to events of WW2 in that the December attack on Hawaii was a sneak attack and only ended when sun bombs were used to win the war. Was he a visionary or did he have some psychic powers after all?

On March 24, 1915, Robertson was found dead in his room at the Alamac Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was 65 years of age. It is believed that he died of an overdose of protiodide.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Morgan Robertson