The Bathysphere
Half Mile Down. By William Beebe. (Bodley Head. 18s.) IT is six years since Dr. Beebe, with the help of Dr. Otis Barton, designed a curious and rather clumsy looking vehicle which he named almost in jest the bathysphere. Many men had invented deep-sea diving apparatus before him, from Alexander the Great who descended into the sea in a candle- lit barrel and had the good fortune to observe a record monster which took three days and nights to pass him, to the nine- teenth-century inventor Kleingert, who produced a diving suit which seems to be a combination between a bathroom geyser and a pair of Edwardian bloomers. But the record for deep-sea diving still remained at 525 feet, and the record for endurance at that level at a good deal less than Alexander's mythical six days or so. And clearly there remained to be explored, and still, remains in spite of Dr. Beebe's record achievements, an undersea world " of life almost as unknown as that of Mars or Venus," a world of colossal pressure and darkness, fantastically inhabited. With a view to exploring this world, Dr. Beebe and Dr. Barton invented the bathy- sphere. In design, compared with many historic diving machines, it was extremely simple : a steel sphere of a single casting, measuring only four feet nine inches in diameter, not quite so tall as an average man, walls a uniform one and a quarter inches thick, and weighing altogether five thousand four hundred pounds. There was a door, actually more like a rabbit-hole, and two windows of fused quartz through which observation could be made by the aid of a powerful arc light. There was room inside for two people, a telephone, oxygen tanks, various instruments and pressure gauges and a book or two. This sphere, which seems to bear a close relationship to the gondola of a stratosphere balloon, was to be lowered froma ship's deck into the sea off the coast of Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, suspended by a single non-twisting cable of steel: seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, and a breaking strain or
twenty-nine tons. For all its size and weight, it. seems to have been, relatively, like an eggshell suspended from a reel of cotton.
However, in this bathysphere Dr. Beebe, accompanied except on one occasion by Dr. Barton, made thirtry-fiVe deep- Sea dives during the years 1930-1934, without the slightest mishap. The record for helmet diving is 60 feet, for the diving suit 306 feet, for the submarine 383 feet; and for the armoured suit 525 feet. The bathysphere descended to 3,028 feet on -a 'day in 1934. It was a descent into perpetual night. The . spectrum ended at something like 1,500 feet, the sea becoming like a Stvgian sky broken by no lights except the lights of the fish themselves. The arc light was barely adequate. Arid across this absolute, sepulchral and terrifying darkness the passage of Unknown and jovely fish was endless. It seemed to have been like a' passage of delicate floating meteorites of every possible colour. Curiously, the deep sea monsters of Biblical allegories seemed hardly to exist. A doubtful twentY- feeter was the record. The rest were delicate creatures of - altogether bewildering habit and shape and beauty : the five- lined constellation fish carrying along its fiat sides five arcs of golden yellow lights, each partly or wholly surrounded by .purple lamps ; the rainbow gars .sailing upright like sea- swallows of scarlet and blue and yellow.; the brown avocat eel with torquoise eyes sinuously swimming with its trans- parent young like a creature of silken seaweed ; the sinister deathly pallid Sailfin, toothless and lightless ; strange lantern- fish and hatchet fish ; the orange lighted finger squid with enormous eyes having luminous spots on the iris and orange bulls-eye lamps at the end of its longest arms ; rainbo.w jellies and serpent dragons and viperfish and fish whose lights exploded like soundless fireworks on the quartz windows of the bathysphere—countless unknown and undreamed-of creatures, all observed and described by Dr. Beebe on the bathysphere telephone, to be carefully recorded on the ship's deck and in due course to form the characters of this book.
It is a book that to the uninitiated—of which I am one—can -only be taken as a wonderful but almost terrifying fairy-tale. The mind is dazzled by this under-sea ballet played out in the eternal darkness of proverbial hell, and the heart chilled by this strange corridor that Dr: Beebe has added to the-maze-of human knowledge. It is a long way from .Alexander to the bathy- sphere, from the7diver7s sixty feet to the_record'half-mile, but it is farther still from the bathysphere's deepest dive to the last fathom of ocean. ' What lies- there only Dr. Beebe and his associates can guess. The rest of us in turn can only real with open mouths and Wthider. H. E. BATES.
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