Science: Deep Dip

In 1934, when Dr. William Beebe made his record ocean descent in his baby blue Bathysphere off Bermuda, he had to stop at 3,028 feet because the cable was about to run out. As he crawled out on deck after being pulled up, Scientist Beebe announced: “I’ll tell the world that this is the last time I’ll attempt record-breaking dives which really have no scientific value.”

On that trip Beebe had a helper. Harvardman Otis Barton, who designed and built the Bathysphere, took notes and pictures while Beebe was reporting to the surface over special telephone equipment. Last week after an interim career making movies in Panama, the Bahamas and Australia, plus combat photography in the Philippines (as a Navy lieutenant), Barton went at it again on his own. Off the California coast, 35 miles southwest of Santa Barbara, he went down alone in his Benthoscope.* and broke the Beebe-Barton record with a descent to 4,500 feet, the deepest that any living man has ever gone under the sea.

Tests & Delays. Barton’s Benthoscope (which cost $15,000) is an improvement on the Bathysphere ($12,000). Fifty-seven and a half inches in diameter, weighing 7,000 pounds, it is more stoutly built (of 1¾ in. steel) for the tremendous pressures at lower depths—2,000 pounds per square inch at 4,500 feet. It also has a new three-inch quartz window, slanted toward the bottom; the Bathysphere had side windows only. It carries a six-hour supply of oxygen in cylinders, fans to keep the air circulating, and trays of soda lime to absorb the carbon dioxide given off by breathing.

After several test dips and three days’ delay because of rough water, Barton clambered through the 15-inch porthole in the rust-streaked white ball, and made the plunge for the record. He was in constant telephone communication with his surface crew. His comments, amplified topside by loudspeakers:

“It Makes Me Dizzy…” At 460 feet: “Now the fireworks are really starting…There’s a creature that looks like a long pipe with a row of lights along it. I don’t know what it is. The tentacles of an octopus just dragged by, showering sparks.” At 1,750: “The headphones are getting cold.” At 2,500: “I see a barrage of luminescent, spirally shrimp beating against the window. They seem to splash when they hit.” After passing the old record: “This is an unbelievable world down here. I wish Dr. Beebe were down here with me. He might know what some of these things are…” A little later: “Let’s hold up here a while. There are so many things going by that it kind of makes me dizzy.” Then: “I want to prove this thing by going down a little deeper, for competitive reasons, I suppose.”

At 4,100 his lights went out. Listeners above could hear his teeth chattering and he seemed short of breath. Once he said: “I’m freezing to death.” But he stuck it out to 4,500. “I’ll say it’s cold down here. There goes a big white jellyfish. I never saw anything like that before.”

Two hours and 19 minutes after he started, Barton climbed out on the deck of the barge Cherry Picker. “I don’t hold any great brief for this type of diving helping academic science,” he admitted, “but it will be useful to let the Bentho-scope down slowly into narrow ocean canyons. I would like to go down with an expert on the subject.” Scientists, he added, would find a plunge “more interesting” at 2,000 feet than at record depth: “There is more life at 2,000 feet.”

* From the Greek benthos, meaning sea bottom, and scopein, to view.