Sealab Page 10

  On November 27, 1962, Barth and two young doctors from Bond’s staff at the Medical Research Lab, John Bull and Albert Fisher, stepped into the Bethesda chamber. Like a lot of pressure chambers, it resembled a stout railway tank car, about seven feet in diameter and fifteen feet long, with a circular entry hatch at one end that led into the outer lock, a kind of foyer a few feet long that could be sealed and used as an airlock. Through a second hatch at the opposite end of this foyer was the inner lock, a considerably longer space of ten feet. This would be their main living quarters. The chamber was an older model, housed in a basement amidst a clutter of industrial fixtures.

  While living in the chamber, the doctors would run myriad tests, poking and prodding Barth and each other. There would be regular pulse taking, temperature checking, and bloodletting. There would be daily electroencephalograms. There would be a lot of huffing and puffing into a “donkey dick,” as they called the spirometer. The chamber was stocked with food and supplies that made it all look like a campout of crazed medics—syringes, vials, bandages, spirometers, rectal thermometers. As part of the experiment, Dr. Bull planned to examine the heat-sapping effect of helium and how it might play havoc with the human thermostat under pressure and over time. For Barth it all just felt like being trapped in an endless physical exam, and in a very cramped doctor’s office.

  With this first human trial Bond focused only on the effect of breathing an artificial atmosphere over a prolonged period. The chamber pressure was kept a little higher than the benign 14.7 pounds per square inch at sea level. In case of leaks, this slight pressure differential would ensure that no outside air could seep in, altering the artificial atmosphere. But they didn’t need to worry about decompression schedules or potential cases of the bends. If anything went wrong—if Barth or the others got sick—the medical watchdogs could open the hatch and yank the men out, no decompression required.

  Once Barth, Bull, and Fisher were locked inside, a gaseous cacophony signaled the filling of the chamber with 80 percent helium and 20 percent oxygen. They were ridding the chamber of virtually all nitrogen, although some scientists at the time worried that nitrogen, although inert, played a hidden role in human function. Going a week without breathing the element, so plentiful in ordinary air, might be as harmful as going a week without food or water or essential vitamins. An absence of nitrogen hadn’t seemed to hurt the animals. Now they would find out whether that was also true for people.

  The experiment hadn’t been under way for very long when they noticed that the old chamber was leaking. Within a few hours it became clear that helium was slipping out so fast that they were having trouble maintaining the chamber’s slightly elevated pressure. Had they been operating at much higher pressure, the leak could have given the subjects a bad case of the bends—or worse. As it was, the leak threatened the integrity of the experiment.

  At times like this Bond was fortunate to have a right-hand man like Mazzone to handle the details. The erstwhile wartime submariner had the mechanical acumen that Bond lacked, and that was just one way in which the two men’s different personalities could be complementary assets at work. Since Mazzone did not have Bond’s appetite for publicity, he was happy with the lower profile that came from working night shifts. That left daylight hours, and any limelight, to Captain Bond—Commander Bond had recently made captain. During Genesis the two began to establish a routine in which Mazzone stood watch and manned the controls from dusk until dawn—or until Bond moseyed in to relieve him. The boss did not necessarily show up in the morning at five o’clock sharp as scheduled. Mazzone learned that his night shifts could stretch into the day by an hour or two, perhaps longer. It might depend on how heavily Bond had indulged in a favorite bourbon the night before, or how late he had stayed up writing, or both.

  Mazzone sometimes bristled at Bond’s self-assured obstinacy, probably honed when Bond was a lone country doctor accustomed to calling all the shots. There were moments when Mazzone got so frustrated with Bond he could have thrown a typewriter at him. But the same qualities in Bond that could try Mazzone’s patience were also those that Mazzone had admired from the start, and had made possible the opportunity to carry out pioneering scientific research. So let Bond be Bond was Mazzone’s basic attitude. And when a problem like a leaking chamber arose, or just about anything else, Bond could always count on his capable friend and colleague.

  Mazzone busily dabbed suspect points around the chamber with a sponge and soapy water, watching for bubbles as if he were trying to find the leak in a bicycle tire. Wherever pipes or valves or electrical wiring pierced the chamber’s steel skin were the most likely areas for gas to escape. Barth could see Mazzone through the little portholes, dancing around the chamber, dabbing and fretting. Any spot that bubbled, Mazzone would slap it with monkey shit—sailor slang for caulking paste. The outside of the chamber began to look like a fecal foray in abstract expressionism.

  Helium leaks had prompted Link to cut Sténuit’s cylinder dive short, and now Bond and his group were getting a reminder that helium could be much more difficult to contain than air. Helium is the second lightest gas after hydrogen. The lighter the gas, the less dense it is and the smaller its atomic structure; the smaller the gas’s atomic structure, the more easily it can permeate a seal, slipping like sand through a sieve. Helium might solve the problem of narcosis, but its containment posed another challenge. To keep one particularly leaky hatch sealed they ended up using dental cement, obtained from a nearby lab and cured with a blow-dryer from a nurse’s station. It worked. This would not be the last time they had to improvise.

  Bob Barth was not the kind of guy who liked to sit still, which made him an interesting choice for a test like this. Apart from receiving his daily pokes and prods, Barth didn’t have a whole lot to do other than read the sports pages or another chapter of pulp fiction. He never played cards, but his inscrutable smirk could have been the centerpiece of a killer poker face. He and his fellow Genesis subjects sat around stewing in 90 percent humidity and similarly high Fahrenheit temperatures. Water droplets rolled down the inside of the chamber walls. One constant source of entertainment came from breathing the helium-rich atmosphere. As anyone who has ever taken a breath from a helium-filled balloon knows, the ultralight gas makes the human voice sound like a falsetto cross between Donald Duck and the Chipmunks. Divers call it “helium speech.”

  A little bored one night, Barth found himself staring at the manifold inside the chamber. The oxygen masks hung there that he and the doctors put on when the chamber atmosphere was being emptied and refilled with the desired helium-oxygen mixture. The gauge indicated that oxygen could still be breathed through the masks. Commander Mazzone, whom Barth knew was anxious about helium leaks, was on the topside watch, so with a practical joke in mind, Barth put on a mask and took a few breaths of oxygen. He spoke a few words to himself. Sure enough, his helium speech all but vanished for a few phrases. Perfect! Barth then inhaled deeply from the mask and shouted at Mazzone over the intercom: “Hey topside! I think maybe we have an atmosphere problem in here.” The sound of Barth’s voice in its natural register prompted an immediate spike in Mazzone’s blood pressure. Barth watched with glee through a porthole as Mazzone leapt from his chair, primed to wage holy war with monkey shit and dental cement. Just before the battle began Mazzone heard telling guffaws from inside the chamber. Mazzone could be tough on those he worked with but he also had a wry sense of humor. It was, as much as being a consummate doer, a requirement of his job, working as he was between the iconoclastic Captain Bond and whimsical white hats like Barth. Once Mazzone realized this supposed leak was only a practical joke, his pulse returned to normal and he gave Barth a mischievous order: Try that one during Dr. Bond’s shift!

  Dr. Charlie Aquadro, now back in Washington, working at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, would drop by the Bethesda chamber to see how his friends were doing with their latest chapter of Genesis. He was there as Barth and the others ended their week-l
ong exposure to the artificial atmosphere. Barth emerged from the chamber breathing from a scuba tank filled with the same nitrogen-free mixture as in the chamber, as Dr. Bond had told him to do. Bond wanted Barth to be the one to continue breathing the artificial atmosphere while undergoing some follow-up blood tests, pulmonary exams, and electroencephalograms at the nearby naval hospital. Aquadro volunteered to push Barth in a wheelchair over to the hospital, with the scuba tank cradled in his lap like a beloved family pet. Unshowered, unshaven, having just emerged from a week-long helium steam bath, Barth felt like one of the goats who preceded him, reeking and hairy. As Aquadro wheeled him through the endless corridors, Barth could only gurgle pathetically into his mouthpiece, a severe handicap for someone fond of sardonic rejoinders.

  As Barth was getting his final checkup, a well-publicized deep-diving exercise was under way off the coast of Southern California. It would become a chilling reminder of how risk factors multiplied when experimenting at sea. Near Catalina Island, about forty miles south of Los Angeles, a dashing and ebullient Swiss mathematician in his late twenties named Hannes Keller staged what was believed to be the first attempt at a thousand-foot dive—a big leap down to a whopping pressure of thirty atmospheres. Keller had gained widespread attention in recent years by doing deep dives and promoting the secret breathing gas recipes he devised with the aid of an IBM computer and the advice of Dr. Albert Bühlmann, a specialist in physiology and respiration at the University Hospital in Zurich.

  Keller, like Bond, had come to diving as an outsider of sorts. He was teaching math to engineering students in his hometown of Winterthur, not far from Zurich, and wanted to learn to fly but found flying too expensive to pursue on a teacher’s salary. In the late 1950s a friend introduced him to the growing sport of skin diving. Keller did his math and science homework and came to believe, much as Bond had, that deep-sea diving was entrenched in old methods and in need of a historic breakthrough. Within a few short years Keller had attracted enough attention with his secret breathing gas recipes to be invited to join Jacques Cousteau, Ed Link, and other noted experts on the prestigious program of the Second World Congress of Underwater Activities. At the London meeting Keller enthusiastically described his impending plan to “make history” by touching the continental shelf a thousand feet below the surface, and then swimming around at that depth for five minutes.

  Keller’s was a different approach from saturation diving and living in the sea, more along the traditional lines of a brief bounce dive from the surface. But he claimed that his secret gas mixtures would drastically cut the long decompression times believed to be necessary after a very deep dive, even a relatively brief one. The U.S. Navy was among those to take notice. If Keller’s methods proved successful, they would revolutionize the dive tables and make deeper dives safer and more practical. The results of Keller’s preliminary chamber tests and several shallower open-sea demonstrations looked promising. The Navy allowed Keller to make one of his test dives at its main experimental facility, next to the Washington dive school, and signed on as an underwriter of Keller’s climactic thousand-foot dive.

  To observe the dive, the Navy sent Dr. Workman, one of its leading decompression experts, along with another officer during the same week Bond and Mazzone were running Genesis at Bethesda. A few days after arriving at Catalina in late November, Workman joined Dr. Bühlmann, the rest of Keller’s crew, and a number of observers on board Eureka, the experimental offshore drilling ship made available by the Shell Oil Co. Like other oil and gas companies, Shell was interested in any methods that might improve the efficiency of commercial divers, as offshore drilling operations were moving into deeper water off the California coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. Keller’s high-profile plunge would begin inside a diving bell called Atlantis, a prototype similar to Link’s cylinder, or a space age version of Halley’s seventeenth-century bell. Atlantis looked like a big steel soda can, seven feet tall and just over four feet around, with a pad eye on top, a hatch in the bottom, and a dozen or more protrusions of pipes and valves.

  Keller’s diving partner, Peter Small, was a trim thirty-five-year-old British journalist, a well-known diver and a principal organizer of the Second World Congress of Underwater Activities. Small planned to write a first-person account of the record-breaking dive. On December 1, as a final test dive, he and Keller were lowered in Atlantis to three hundred feet and spent an hour diving outside the bell. While decompressing in the bell, both divers got relatively mild cases of bends—Keller in the belly and Small in the right arm. You could never be sure where bubbles might fizz.

  Keller recovered on his own that night but Small’s pain persisted until he was treated with recompression. But Keller insisted on proceeding as scheduled, rather than running further tests at progressively deeper depths before going straight down to a thousand feet. His decision was due at least in part to the presence of a boatload of journalists and other observers assembled to watch the historic dive. Time, money, and equipment were on the line, adding pressure to go ahead with the experiment. So around noon on December 3, a Monday, Atlantis dipped below the Pacific surface, its two divers sealed inside. The descent took less than a half-hour. Then, during a few dark and troubled minutes at the target depth of a thousand feet, Keller left the bell to plant a Swiss flag and an American flag on the ocean floor. His breathing hoses got tangled up with the flags and after he climbed back inside the bell, he passed out. The gas mixture had gone bad. Peter Small blacked out without ever having left Atlantis. Several support divers swam down to meet the Atlantis bell as it was hurriedly raised to within two hundred feet of the surface. One of the support divers sent down to meet the bell, Christopher Whittaker, who was just nineteen years old, vanished. He would not be the experiment’s sole casualty.

  Keller regained consciousness about a half-hour later and Small came around, but not for almost two hours. He asked Keller some lucid questions about what had happened. Small felt cold, and although he could speak, see, and hear, he couldn’t feel his legs. He told Keller he was in no pain. Too weak to stand, he leaned against his Swiss partner and fell asleep as their decompression inside the bell continued. Several hours later, as Atlantis was shipped back to shore from the dive site near Catalina, Keller noticed that Small had stopped breathing and had no pulse. Keller tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and cardiac massage. Nothing. Small was cold and pale. The remaining pressure inside the bell, about two atmospheres, was hurriedly released to get Small to a hospital after eight hours locked in Atlantis. He was soon pronounced dead.

  The Los Angeles County coroner said the cause of death was decompression sickness. Small contracted a fatal case of the bends; his tissues and organs were riddled with gas bubbles. Keller insisted that other factors were to blame, including a possible heart attack and the panic Small exhibited upon reaching their thousand-foot destination. Death due to any cause during decompression would prevent the proper elimination of absorbed gases, Keller would argue. Either way, the disastrous dive to thirty atmospheres and its two fatalities caused a sharp decline in interest in Keller’s sensational methods. The prospect of experiencing this magnitude of failure had worried Bond when Ed Link took his cylinder to sea. Saturation diving had lukewarm Navy support as it was. A Keller-style tragedy, especially at this delicate stage, could put an end to Navy saturation experiments and the quest to live in the sea. Bond could not afford any such tragedy, and certainly not on his watch.

  Within six months of the test at Bethesda, Bond arranged to lock Barth and two other volunteers into a chamber for another week, this time at a simulated depth of one hundred feet, or four atmospheres. Genesis D, as they called this next step, was set for the end of April 1963 at the Experimental Diving Unit. “The Unit” was a mecca for Navy diving, and the top testing zone for diving techniques and technology. It was where Swede Momsen had led the experimentation with helium that made clearheaded deeper diving and the Squalus rescue possible. The Unit shared Building 214, a brick c
omplex at the Navy Yard in Washington on the turbid Anacostia River, with the Navy’s deep-sea diving school. It had a pair of specialized chambers for running tests, and its own staff of divers who were accustomed to getting locked into those pressurized railway tank cars, often to find out whether the latest refinements and recalculations made on paper translated into improved, more streamlined decompression schedules, or whether they caused a bad case of the bends.

  Much as being a test pilot was not for every pilot, so the job of experimental diver was not for every diver. There was always a chance of getting bent, and you could never know where those soda pop bubbles would lodge—joints, spine, brain. Peter Small had suffered all sorts of physiological short circuits before dying, but harmful bubbles could usually be squashed and proper blood flow restored by cranking up the pressure, as Dr. Bornmann did when Robert Sténuit’s wrist began to ache. Those extra hours spent in decompression could make for a long, stressful, and possibly painful experience. EDU divers prided themselves on enduring this sort of thing, but life as a professional guinea pig was not for everyone.

  Although chambers like those at the Unit were designed to simulate dives, there was a stark difference between chambers and flight simulators. In a flight simulator, the kind that Ed Link invented, a pilot never really left the ground. So if he got a bad case of motion sickness or for any other reason wanted to bail out, the simulator could be shut off and a training session aborted. Not so for the diver in a pressure chamber. Even if he wasn’t in the ocean, a test diver was really under pressure. Once the hatches were sealed shut and the pressure was on, there was no bailing out—regardless of how sick or troubled a test subject might become. The experimental diver might as well be in orbit. For this reason Bond had intentionally kept the pressure off at Bethesda, but now they would be cranking it up to four atmospheres, and holding it there for an unprecedented six days.