Life Below The Galapagos, Part 1

Technologist Dan Dubno On Diving Well Below The Ocean's Surface

(CBS)  Instead, we headed back to find a monument to exploration that has woefully been out of the public eye: the Bathysphere. The steel sphere, once the star attraction of the 1939 World's Fair, has been hidden from view for a decade. Dr. William Beebe and Otis Barton, two courageous scientist-madmen, set the world's record for undersea exploration in 1932 in this hand-cast tribute to claustrophobia; they volunteered to drop by cable 3,028 feet below the waves. What they saw (or claimed to have seen) is still debated by oceanographers and ichthyologists to this day. Some of the strange deep-sea creatures have been identified (black anglerfish with glowing nose lures, for example.) Other fish Barton claimed to have discovered still remain unidentified to this day.

The Bathysphere could barely contain the lanky bodies of Beebe and his high-strung patron Barton. Inside, the steel sphere was cold and wet from condensation; stuffed with oxygen canisters and trays of chemicals to remove moisture and carbon dioxide, plus lights and primitive electronics; all crammed into the small 4-foot wide interior. Three small porthole windows in the front and a hatch wrenched shut with fifteen huge bolts: risky barriers holding back the enormous pressure of the sea during descents.

When I was a child, the home of the Bathysphere was the New York Aquarium, where, slathered in blue paint, it stood in a place of honor. I frequently could be found staring with wonder and horror at this tribute to man's foolhardiness. Every observer would recognize that risking life in this rusting clunky dollop of metal, suspended by a fraying cable thousands of feet into the deepest ocean was perilous at best. There it stood for many years, a few hundred feet from my home, daring me to risk something. It was my touchstone: proof of the triumph of discovery over fear. For the last decade, the Bathysphere was put away in a storage yard in the shadow of the Cyclone. Recently it was stripped of paint and rust and moved to some indoor storage site. I needed to find the Bathysphere again, to show it to my children, to help explain my imminent departure.