A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [135]
In the mid-1920s, on a trip to the Galápagos Islands, he discovered “the delights of dangling,” as he described deep-sea diving. Soon afterward he teamed up with Barton, who came from an even wealthier family, had also attended Columbia, and also longed for adventure. Although Beebe nearly always gets the credit, it was in fact Barton who designed the first bathysphere (from the Greek word for “deep”) and funded the $12,000 cost of its construction. It was a tiny and necessarily robust chamber, made of cast iron 1.5 inches thick and with two small portholes containing quartz blocks three inches thick. It held two men, but only if they were prepared to become extremely well acquainted. Even by the standards of the age, the technology was unsophisticated. The sphere had no maneuverability—it simply hung on the end of a long cable—and only the most primitive breathing system: to neutralize their own carbon dioxide they set out open cans of soda lime, and to absorb moisture they opened a small tub of calcium chloride, over which they sometimes waved palm fronds to encourage chemical reactions.
But the nameless little bathysphere did the job it was intended to do. On the first dive, in June 1930 in the Bahamas, Barton and Beebe set a world record by descending to 600 feet. By 1934, they had pushed the record to 3,028 feet, where it would stay until after the war. Barton was confident the device was safe to a depth of 4,500 feet, though the strain on every bolt and rivet was audibly evident with each fathom they descended. At any depth, it was brave and risky work. At 3,000 feet, their little porthole was subjected to nineteen tons of pressure per square inch. Death at such a depth would have been instantaneous, as Beebe never failed to observe in his many books, articles, and radio broadcasts. Their main concern, however, was that the shipboard winch, straining to hold on to a metal ball and two tons of steel cable, would snap and send the two men plunging to the seafloor. In such an event, nothing could have saved them.
The one thing their descents didn't produce was a great deal of worthwhile science. Although they encountered many creatures that had not been seen before, the limits of visibility and the fact that neither of the intrepid aquanauts was a trained oceanographer meant they often weren't able to describe their findings in the kind of detail that real scientists craved. The sphere didn't carry an external light, merely a 250-watt bulb they could hold up to the window, but the water below five hundred feet was practically impenetrable anyway, and they were peering into it through three inches of quartz, so anything they hoped to view would have to be nearly as interested in them as they were in it. About all they could report, in consequence, was that there were a lot of strange things down there. On one dive in 1934, Beebe was startled to spy a giant serpent “more than twenty feet long and very wide.” It passed too swiftly to be more than a shadow. Whatever it was, nothing like it has been seen by anyone since. Because of such vagueness their reports were generally ignored by academics.
After their record-breaking descent of 1934, Beebe lost interest in diving and moved on to other adventures, but Barton persevered. To his credit, Beebe always told anyone who asked that Barton was the real brains behind the enterprise, but Barton seemed unable to step from the shadows. He, too, wrote thrilling accounts of their underwater adventures and even starred in a Hollywood movie called Titans of the Deep, featuring a bathysphere and many exciting and largely fictionalized encounters