April 1 8, 19 1 8 
Land & Watei 
15 
German Plots Exposed 
Fay and the Bombs 
By French StrOther, Managing Editor, "The World's Work," New York 
In this picture of infernal imagining the true character of German 
plottings in America stands revealed. Ingenuity of conception 
characterised them, method and patience and painstaking made 
them perfect. Flawless logic, flawless mechanism! But on the 
human side, only the blackest passions and an utter disregard of 
human life; no thought of honour, no trace of human pity. 
ROBERT FAY 
landed in New 
York on April 
23rd.1915.He 
landed in jail 
just six months and one 
day later — on October 
24th. In those six months he slowly perfected one of 
the most infernal devices that ever emerged from the 
mind of man. He painfully had it manufactured piece by 
piece. With true German thoroughness he covered his trail 
at every point — excepting one. And five days after he had 
aroused suspicion at that point, he and his entire group of 
fellow-conspirators were in jail. The agents of American 
justice who put him there had unravelled his whole ingenious 
scheme and had evidence enough to have sent him to the 
penitentiary for life if laws since passed had then been in 
force. 
Only the mind thaf conceived the sinking of the Lusitania 
could have improved upon the devilish device which Robert 
Fay invented and had ready for use when he was arrested. 
It was a box containing forty pounds of trinitrotoluol, to be 
fastened to the rudder post of a vessel, and so geared to the 
rudder itself that its oscillations would slowly release the 
catch of a spring, wliich would then drive home the firing-pin 
and cause an explosion that would instantly tear off the 
whole stem of the ship, sinking it in mid-ocean in a few 
minutes. Experts in mechanics and experts in explosives 
and experts in shipbuilding all tested the machine, and all 
agreed that it was perfect for the work which Fay had planned 
that it should do. 
Fay had three of these machines completed, he had others 
in course of construction, he had bought and tested the 
explosive to go into them, he had cruised New York harbour 
in a motor-boat, and proved by experience that he could 
attach them undetected where he wished, and he had the 
names and sailing dates of the vessels that he meant to 
sink without a trace. Only one little link that broke — and 
the quick and thorough work of American justice — robbed 
him of another Iron Cross besides the one he wore. That 
link — but that comes later in the story. 
Fay and his device came straight from the heart of the 
German Army, with the approval and the money of his 
Government behind him. He, hke Werner Horn, came 
.originally from Cologne ; but they were veq^ different men. 
Where Horn was almost childishly simple. Fay's mind was 
subtle and quick to an extraordinary degree. Where Horn 
had been humane to the point of risking his life to save 
others. Fay had spent months in a cold-blooded solution of 
a complex problem in destruction that he knew certainly 
involved a horrible death for dozens, and more likely hun- 
dreds, of helpless human beings. Horn refused to swear to 
a lie even where the lie was a matter of no great moment. 
Fay told at his trial a story so ingenious that it would have 
done credit to a noveUst, and would have been wholly con- 
vincing if other evidence had not disproved the substance 
of it. The truth of the case runs like this : 
Fay was in Germany when the war broke out, and was 
sent to the Vosges Mountains in the early days of the con- 
flict. Soon men were needed in the Champagne sector, and 
Fay was transferred to that front. Here he saw some of the 
bitterest fighting of the war, and here he led a detachment of 
Germans in a surprise attack on a trench full of Frenchmen 
in superior force. His success in this dangerous business 
won him an Iron Cross of the second class. During these 
days the superiority of the Allied artillery over the German 
caused the Germans great distress, and they became very 
bitter when they realised, from a study of the shells that 
exploded around them, how much of this superiority was 
• due to the material that came from the United States for 
use by the French and British guns, t'ay's ingenious mind 
formed a scheme to stop this supply, and he put his plan 
before his superior officers. The result was that, in a few 
weeks, he left the army and left Germany, armed with pass- 
ports and £700 in American money, bound for the United 
States on the steamer Rotterdam. He reached New York 
on April 23rd, 1915. 
One of Fay's qualifications for the task he had set for 
himself was his familiarity with the English language and 
with the United States. 
He had gone to America 
in 1902, spending a few 
months on a farm in 
Manitoba and then going 
on to Chicago, where he 
had worked for several 
years for the J. I. Case Machinery Company, makers of 
agricultural implements. During these years, Fay was taking 
an extended correspondence school course in electrical and 
steam engineering, so that altogether he had a good technical 
background for the events of 1915. jIn 1908 he went back 
to Germany. '- 
What he may have lacked in technical equipment. Fay 
made up by the first connection he made when he reached 
New York in 1915. The first man he looked up was Walter 
Scholz, his brother-in-law, who had been in America for 
four years, and who was a civil engineer who had worked 
there chiefly as. a draftsman — part of the time^for the Lacka- 
wanna Railroad — and who had studied mechanical engineer- 
ing in his spare time. When Fay arrived, Scholz had been 
out of a ^ob in his own profession and was working on a 
rich man's estate in Connecticut. Fay, armed with' plenty 
of money and his big idea, got Scholz to go into the scheme 
with him, and the two were soon living together in a- boarding- 
house at 28 Fourth Street, Weehawken, across the river 
from up-town New York. 
To conceal the true nature of their operations, they hired 
a small building on Main Street, and put a sign over the 
door announcing themselves in business as "The Riverside 
Garage." They added verisimilitude to this scheme by 
buying a second-hand car in bad condition and dismantling 
it, scattering the parts around the room so that it would 
look as if they were engaged in making repairs. Every 
once in a while they would shift these parts about so as to 
alter the appearance of the place. However, they did not 
accept any business; whenever a man took the sign at its 
face value and came in asking to have work done. Fay or 
Scholz would take him to a neighbouring saloon and buy 
him a few drinks, and pass him along by referring him to 
some other garage. 
The most of their time they spent about the real business 
in hand. They took care to have the windows of their 
room in the boarding-house heavily curtained to keep out 
prying eyes, and here, under a student lamp, they spent 
hours over mechanical drawings which were afterwards 
produced in evidence at the trial of their case. The mechanism 
that Fay had conceived was carefully perfected on paper, 
and then they confronted the task of getting the machinery 
assembled. Some of the parts were standard — that is, they 
could be bought at any hardware store. Others, however, 
were peculiar to this device, and had to be made to order 
from the drawings. They had the tanks made by a sheet- 
metal worker named Ignatz Schiering, at 344 West 42nd 
Street, New York. Scholz went to him with a drawing, 
telling him that it was for a gasolene tank for a motor-boat. 
Scholz made several trips to the shop to supervise some of 
the details of the construction, and once to order more tanks 
of a new size and shape. 
At the same time, Scholz went to Bernard McMiUan 
— doing business under the name of McMillan & Werner, 
81 Centre Street, New York — to have him make a special 
kind of wheels and gears for the internal mechanism of the 
bomb, from sketches which Scholz supplied. At odd times 
between June loth and October aoth McMillan was working 
on these things, and dehvered the last of them to ScholJ 
just a few days before he was arrested. 
In the meanwhile Fay was taking care of the other neces- 
sary elements of his scheme. Besides the mechanism of the 
bomb, he had to become famiUar with the shipping in the 
port of New York, and he had to get the explosive with 
which to charge the bomb. For the former purpose he and 
Scholz bought a motor-boat — a 28-footer — and in this they 
cruised about New York harbour at odd times, studying the 
docks at which ships were being loaded with supplies for the 
AUies and calculating the best means and time for placing 
the bombs on the rudder-posts of these ships. Fay finally 
detennined by experience that between two and three 
o'clock in the morning was the best time. The watchmen 
