Greetings family, friends and neighbors. Inspiration for Playland's Diving Bell, and Disneyland's Submarine Voyage can be traced back to a one hundred and thirty five year old attraction "26 Miles Across the Sea". Today's Historic Snippet takes a look at Santa Catalina Island's iconic Glass Bottom Boats.....Bill
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Historic Snippets
GLASS BOTTOM BOATS
“Twenty-six miles across the sea Santa Catalina is a-waiting for me. Santa Catalina, the island of romance”
Although Hullam Jones is credited for “inventing” the glass bottom boat by installing a glass pane in a dugout canoe at Silver Springs tourist park in Florida, West Coast abalone harvester Charley Feige had been using a hand held wooden and glass viewing box to locate desirable mollusks in Avalon Bay since 1890. Realizing the potential, with an increasing number of tourists to Santa Catalina Island, he installed a glass window in one of his row boats and began giving tours of the bay’s submarine gardens and nautical wildlife. Feige’s small enterprise got the attention of E.”Pard” Mathewson in 1902 who introduced the Mon Ami, a thirty foot long, gas powered ,side wheel glass bottom boat capable of carrying up to fifteen passengers. Glass bottomed boats became wildly popular at Santa Catalina Island during the early 1900’s with increasing competition between vendors and the debut of a half dozen additional water craft with improved features and increased capacity. Tourism to the isle, just twenty six miles off the coast of Southern California, took a major leap beginning in 1919 when William Wrigley of chewing gum fame purchased controlling interest in the Santa Catalina Island Company and over the next five decades devoted his efforts in preserving and promoting the island by investing millions of dollars into infrastructure and attractions. Wrigley’s initial priority was to increase tourism with the purchase of additional steamships to ferry guests between the mainland and the island, and to construct the Casino, an Art Deco style ballroom and theatre attracting many of the biggest names in entertainment at the time. He also staged highly promoted events, used the island for his Chicago Cubs baseball spring training camp, established his own airline flying between Los Angeles and a seaplane base near Avalon, and in the 1930’s commissioned three glass bottomed boats, the Emperor, Phoenix, and Princess. After more than a century marine viewing is still big business at Catalina with a range of options including tours aboard “semi-submarines”, a far cry from the widow pane Charley Feige’s rowboat. Bill 7/25
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