99% Invisible - 179- Bathysphere

Episode Date: September 2, 2015

In 1860, a chance find at sea forever changed our understanding of marine habitats, sparking an unprecedented push to explore a new world of possibilities far below the surface of our planet’s oceans. Deep sea life, previously thought possible down … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The ocean is not our place. We can't breathe under there, we can't really see, we can learn to swim, but it doesn't come naturally. Apes don't swim. They want nothing to do with putting their bodies into water. It's only human kinds incessant need to explore that drives us into such an unwelcoming environment. And since our bodies aren't built for it, we must design things that allow us to explore this foreign place. And we have. That's our own Katie Mangle. Alexander the Great is said to have descended into the ocean more than 2,000 years ago in a

glass barrel. There are various paintings of this event. In one, the great is being lowered into the ocean by a couple of men in a wooden boat. He's hunched inside his little barrel, still wearing his crown and robe. The guys in the boat look to me like they are used to humoring his every whim. In some versions of the story, Alexander the Great was not in a barrel, but in a diving bell. Diving bells have been around for a long time. Aristotle wrote about them around 300 BC. And they were often actual bells, like from churches.

To understand how one uses such a thing to aid in an ocean dive, try this quick experiment. Fill up your sink with water and push a cup open and down into the water. You'll notice that the cup doesn't fill up all the way. There will be a pocket of breathable air on the inside. Amazingly, this works using giant church bells and the ocean too. Divers could lower a belt into the ocean and use it as a kind of home base, swimming out and around, searching for sunken treasure, and then popping back into the bell

for a few gasps of air. But it wasn't a good solution. The air didn't last long. The bells were cumbersome, and the divers still couldn't go down very far because of the pressure. The main obstacle to exploring the depths of the ocean has always been the pressure. Well, at 200 feet, your lungs collapse and you die. That's Jim Gould telling it like it is.

I'm Jim Gould. I'm a professor of biology at Princeton. And he's married to Carol Gold, who will also be talking to you today. I'm Carol Gold. I'm a science writer. She and Jim have written ten books together. They've been married for 45 years. This is how Jim talks about the first time he met Carol. And there she was, the person I've been looking for all my life. And it didn't take long from then.

It's true. It's very sweet. Again. Backed to oceans. In the mid-1800s, a natural is named Edward Forbes, hypothesized that below 300 fathoms or about 1800 feet no life could exist in the ocean and people pretty much believed him. Well the general thought was that it was just common sense that nothing could live down there

because the deeper you get the pressure increases on the living tissues and it gets darker and darker and it just made sense to people, you know, the way we are. So anthropocentric, if people can't live down there well, probably nothing else can. But these anthropocentric naysayers would soon be proven wrong. The continents were about to be strung together with telegraph wires. Starting in 1858, nations were connected with extremely long wires. Messages would travel great distances through cables that lay on the ocean floor. And in 1860, as the Mediterranean cable was raised for repair from about 6,000 feet. Loan behold, attached to the cable were critters,

mostly dead critters, but critters that were once alive. This discovery was much talked about in the press. There was life in the depths of the ocean and everyone wanted to know more about it. In 1872, the British Royal Navy sent a modified worship called the HMS Challenger out on one of the first scientific expeditions. It was this big, beautiful ship with sails. It looked like the kind of ship people hang paintings of, and old rustic pubs, or get tattooed on their bicep.

The scientists and sailors spent four years on this ship, studying the Earth's oceans, trying especially to understand the deepest depths. And they did things like put down nets very deep into the water and go along hoping that the nets would catch something that was down there. But just like our bodies can't survive the pressure at great depths, fish that live at the bottom of the ocean aren't made to live at the top. So as they come up, they basically crystallize and fracture. So every cell explodes, rather than the whole animal, every cell explodes, and what you

have is a bag of goo. The scientists and sailors were pulling up giant nets of exploded fish goo. Still, they managed to gather a bunch of specimens that they saved in jars full of pickling alcohol as they sailed around the world. In the end, they traveled almost 70,000 nautical miles, dredging in pickling. It was hard work. But it was really an arduous trip because they started out with how many sailors, Jim? They started with with how many sailors, Jim. They started with 214 and ended with 144.

Two men went insane, two drowned, one committed suicide and several deserted. But the Challenger expedition did catalog around 4,000 new species and took depth measurements at hundreds of locations all over the ocean using a weighted string. On March 23rd, 1875, at station number 225, located in the southwest Pacific Ocean between Guam and Palau, the Ledzman cast their weighted string over the side of the ship, and it just kept dropping and dropping and dropping. A thousand feet, 10 thousand feet. Twenty thousand. Thirty thousand.

Right, we're gonna run out of strength! They had dropped their weight into the Mariana Trench and discovered what is still the deepest known place on the ocean floor. But despite the challenges many accomplishments, still, no one had actually been very deep in the ocean, been among the living creatures to see them alive in their natural habitats. There were various attempts at diving suits over the years. To picture the aesthetic range of these suits, start with

Guy and a barrel with armholes and get to giant ridiculous Space Man robot suit. If you look back at these old suits, if you've seen the Lovie forbidden planet, you've seen these suits. Robbie the robot looks exactly like one of these suits. The Michelin Man looks a lot like these suits. They were incredibly heavy and cumbersome. You couldn't swim in them.

You had to get dragged up to the surface by a boat. And they all had tubes that stretched up to the surface for oxygen. and they all had tubes that stretched up to the surface for oxygen. Using one of these suits, the Navy had sent a man 563 feet under the surface of a freshwater lake. Windowless submarines had been as deep as 383 feet in the ocean, but as of the 1920s, no one had gone further than that. And then came a scientist named William Beebe. William Beebe was a respected ornithologist and an exceedingly charming character who got

around by bicycle and spent his time gazing into the skies and writing about birds. Titles of his books include The Bird, Its Form and Function,, two bird lovers in Mexico and a monograph of fessence. He really loved birds. And then in the 1920s, while working near the coast, William Beebe turned his attention to the ocean. He would look down in the water and just spend hours wondering what was down there. And so then he started trying to think and plan a way that could get him down there. But his baby platted ways to go deep, he couldn't seem to think outside the cylinder, which was the shape of pre-existing submarines.

By baby's time of submarines could go down about 200 feet. If you went down further, they collapsed. They were crushed, the pressure outside, flattened everything inside. The result is you had a metal pancake and a lot of blood. And then in 1928 a young engineer named Otis Barton got in touch with BB and told him that to go as deep as he wanted to go, a cylinder was never going to work, but design had to be in the shape of a sphere. Even though the ocean depth brings on more and more pressure, the deeper you go, that pressure, if you're in a sphere, is pressing equally on every square inch of the sphere. Otis Barton told BB he'd help him design and engineer this new submersible, as long as he was allowed to accompany BB on all of the trips the sphere made into the sea.

Which was a pretty crazy thing for Barton to want, considering what a tiny, uncomfortable submersible he was about to make. The final design was about four and a half feet in diameter, and there wasn't a bench or even a level floor inside the bathosphere. They sat on this horrible cold wet concave floor that kind of pushed them together and they weren't really great friends either. This fear was made of steel and had two windows of thick fused quartz which provided an extremely clear view into the water. It also had a small

hatch to enter through. They called it the Bathosphere, Bathus being the Greek word for deep. William Beebe set up a sign station on non-such island in Bermuda, and they began doing dives in the Bathosphere. The submersible couldn't move on its own, so it had to be lowered on a cable off of a boat, and then kind of dragged around. In retrospect, the whole thing seems extremely low-tech. Well, it was 1930, and their high-tech is now our very, very low-tech.

Inside the sphere were some canisters of oxygen and some trace of chemicals that soaked up the CO2 they were breathing out. It was cramped and humid in there. Condensation pooled on the floor, and Otis Barton was often seasick. They circulated the air with fans. Pomely fans, yes. Pomely fans back and forth. And that was the height of comfort.

They were literally just fanning themselves with palm trees. Yep. It wasn't comfortable, but the sphere did completely shield them from the outside pressure. They didn't have to worry about the bends or decompression sickness that divers can experience when ascending too quickly. The thing that really scared them was the idea of a leak. Because if there were even a pinhole leak at those deep pressures, a jet of water would come in at such a high rate of pressure and speed that it would just be like being shot with a bullet.

If the two men could make it safely into the ocean steps, they would be able to see out into the dark ocean using a spotlight. The vessel also had a telephone that they could use to talk to the people in the boat above them. Their first dive on May 27, 1930, was just 45 feet down. But over time, BB and Barton started doing deeper and deeper dives in the bathosphere. When they sealed them in, it was incredibly noisy,

because they had to hammer those big steel bolts in and that just drove BB crazy. Then you went to the surface and it was sloshing around and then it just got very very quiet. And you'd hear the sound of the oxygen coming in maybe very quiet, wish. the oxygen coming in maybe very quiet, wish. And then you hear the voice of Gloria who is on the other end of the telephone talking to BB. Gloria, to the back of the sphere. You're now at 285 feet over. The Lysotania is resting at this level.

525 feet. The deepest point that a live human has ever reached. You're now at 600 feet. The only dead men have sunk below this. 1,426 feet. We are still alive in one quarter of a mile down. As they descended deeper, baby became obsessed with the changing light and color inside the bathosphere. In his memoir, a half mile down, he dedicates pages upon pages to this subject. The blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to mass materially through the eye, to our very beams

an indefinable translucent blue, quite unlike anything I've ever seen in the upper world. As the bathosphere is some lower and lower, the light is attenuated more and more and more. Until finally they would have been floating in complete darkness, though bebe and Barton both swore there was somehow still an aura of blueness to the blackness. It's as if the blue had seeped so thoroughly into their eyeballs

that they still saw it, even in the dark. And BB comments on this and many people have been down, comment on this. When he wasn't having his mind blown by the varying shades of blue, BB was tripping out on the fish. After the sunlight disappeared, the only fish they'd be able to see without their spotlight were the ones that provided their own light. That is, fish with bioluminescence, so they spent a lot of time turning the spotlight on and on and off. running the spotlight on and off and on and off. 1900 feet, bathesides is pentagrass, the five line consolation fish. A fish almost round with long water behind.

The ocean was teeming with strange looking creatures at all depths. Beebe would describe these creatures in great detail over the telephone line that went up to the boat above. Along the sides of the body were five unbelievably beautiful lines of light. One equatorial with two curved ones above and two below. Each line was composed of a series of them. And then Elsa Bostelman, who was an amazing artist, was there on board as well, and she would make sketches. And then when Baby finally came up, he would look them over and say, yes, that's right, and she would make sketches. And then when Beebe finally came up, he would look them over and say, yes, that's right. No, that's wrong.

Straighten it all out. Everyone was surrounded by a semi-circle, a very small but intensely purple photo-force. Many of Baselman's sketches were published in National Geographic, and the creatures they portrayed were so strange, so otherworldly that readers couldn't believe they were real. A lot of people actually accuse BB of making stuff up.

And that hurt BB. Poor BB. But almost everything that he described that so many people thought could not possibly exist has since been discovered. Only two or three still haven't been found. Over the course of four years, BB and Barton made dozens of dives and catalog several new species of fish. They made it to 3,028 feet deep, six times deeper than anyone had ever been. On one of his final dives in the bathosphere, William BB saw something he'd never seen before.

He saw this enormous seasnake on the bottom of the ocean. It was long and black, the longest creature he'd ever seen. And tracked it for a while before he realized that it was the Atlantic cable. It was one of the transatlantic telegraph wires that had gotten the whole world interested in understanding the bottom of the ocean. By 1934, the Bathosphere Project had lost funding and BB was on to other adventures. He really felt that he'd done everything he could do with the bathosphere. The main problem being it wasn't self-propelled, that you just hung there wherever, you know, you happened to drop and you couldn't, for instance, move it to follow an interesting fish or turn it around at will.

Eventually, people would figure out how to make a submersible that could move on its own. Two of these subs, the Trieste in 1966 and the Deep Sea Challenger in 2012, actually made it all the way to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The bathosphere is now on display in the New York Aquarium at Coney Island. You can peer inside of it and marvel at the idea that two men once sat squeezed together on its concave steel floor, fanning themselves with palm fronds, in awe of the shifting shades of blue, the creatures beneath the sea, and their place in all of it. I shall never experience such a feeling of complete isolation from the surface of planet

Earth, as when I first dangled in a hollow pea on a swaying cobweb, a quarter of a mile below the The Bathosphere is just one chapter in William BB's life. Carol Gould wrote a book about the rest of it, it's called The Remarkable Life of William BB. Special thanks to Ron Allem who designed the deep sea challenger and Captain Don Walsh Gold wrote a book about the rest of it, it's called The Remarkable Life of William Beebe. Special thanks to Ron Allem who designed the deep sea challenger and Captain Don Walsh who descended into the Mariana Trench on the Trieste. They both spent time talking to us about this story. Thank you to the 99 PI players, Avery, Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Pat Masidi Miller for doing the sound design this week.

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