Sealab Page 3
When the Korean War started Bond got a telegram informing him that he was eligible for recall to the Army. But it wasn’t until after the armistice in 1953 that Bond finally had to pull up his mountain roots to relieve a paratroop doctor. Soon after arriving at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Bond found that he and several hundred others would be redirected either to the Air Force or the Navy, where more doctors were needed. Bond chose the submarine service for no particular reason other than his understanding that the hazard pay would be the same as it would have been with the paratroopers. Bond’s next stop, as part of his undersea medical training, was the Navy Yard on the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., the home of the Navy’s school for deep-sea divers. This unplanned immersion into diving began his professional conversion.
After dive school Bond spent six months at the New London base studying submarines and related medical issues. By the summer of 1954 he had moved with his young family to Pearl Harbor to serve as a submarine squadron medical officer. The post included shifts at the escape training tank, and Bond’s touch-and-go ride in the pressure chamber to revive Charlie Aquadro was not his only such act.
George Bond was by then a father of four and he relished having a much more manageable schedule than was possible during his eight years as a country doctor. He was about ready to leave his Navy post, as scheduled, in the spring of 1955 when Navy officials ordered him to Hollywood, supposedly to act as an adviser for a training film on submarine escape. Bond was sitting in a little waiting room at the NBC studios when suddenly, as cameras rolled, he became the latest unsuspecting guest of honor on This Is Your Life, the popular TV show. Dr. Bond was lauded for his exploits as a country doctor, and as the program ended host Ralph Edwards handed Bond the keys to a new Mercury station wagon that had been converted into an ambulance for the Valley Clinic. The television program served as a fitting epilogue to Bond’s life as a rural physician.
While Bond was in the Navy, another doctor had taken his place at the Valley Clinic. The two planned to go into a partnership upon Bond’s return, but Bond soon found that he disapproved of how his replacement was running the practice—sending out bills, for example. Such a formal demand surely came as a shock to the mountain people. Bond had always waited until his clients could rustle up the dollars—or he would gladly take payment in the form of a ham shank or a basket of vegetables. But there were more serious concerns weighing on Bond, too. His childhood friend Fate Heydock had recently died of leukemia. Lonnie Hill, who was among the surprise guests flown in to give testimonials about Dr. Bond on This Is Your Life, had been depressed over Fate’s passing, as Bond knew. Bond figured he could lift his old friend’s spirits once back in Bat Cave, but by the time Bond got home Lonnie had hanged himself from a dogwood tree near the house he had built with his own hands.
The passing of his childhood friends and the schism with the other doctor may have provided a catalyst, but Bond’s professional passion had already shifted like the tide. Within six months Bond volunteered to return to duty and soon got orders to report to the Medical Research Laboratory at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in New London. In March 1957, he took over as the assistant officer-in-charge of the lab and moved into his office in a brick building on the upper base. More than working with submarines, it was diving—the “diving game,” as Bond would sometimes call it, with folksy flair—that had captured his lively imagination. Soon after taking his new lab post he began plotting the sunken jet escapes and the unprecedented three-hundred-foot blow and go from the Archerfish. These acts were testaments to his love of the game, and mere prologue to Bond’s grandest plan yet, a plan buoyed by his vision of a future in which man would live in the sea.
2
DIVING
Living in the sea had long been a staple of myth and science fiction. But what Bond learned during his early Navy years got him wondering how to bring Jules Verne–style fantasy into the realm of reality. There were practical reasons for doing so, and Bond could launch into quite a sermon on the subject. An undersea frontier equal in size to the continent of Africa could be opened for “exploration and exploitation,” Bond liked to say, if only divers were able to live and work on the continental shelves of the world, the submerged fringes of the planet’s landmasses. To reach this undersea frontier would mean diving to depths of at least six hundred feet, far beyond the standard diving limits of the day, and then figuring out how to stay there for a while.
Bond had in mind a whole range of undersea activities—scientific, humanitarian, military, industrial. The Navy, given its undersea expertise and wherewithal, not only seemed like the most logical leader of a quest to live in the sea, but stood to benefit militarily through a dramatic expansion of its aquatic acumen. Spin-offs into civilian life and science would undoubtedly follow as endeavors such as mineral mining, marine biology, and marine archaeology were brought within man’s reach. Bond believed that undersea exploration would bring the next generation of antibiotics, and that massive supplies of fresh water that boiled up from the continental shelf could be tapped. He believed, too, that the very survival of the human species depended on our ability to take up residence on the seabed and learn to harvest the ocean’s edible protein.
In a speech to an audience of honor students at Albany Medical College, Bond said, in his lolling pulpit brogue: “Those of you who are close to the agricultural picture know that with the expanding populations which we have, should we avoid all-out war, and God willing we will, we are going to come up against the old enemy hunger, and it’s gonna be serious. There’s no reason to believe that we can take care of the combined hungers of the expanding populations a hundred years hence. The oceans around us can do it, however, the organisms in the oceans and the continental shelves. We had best be about the business of trying to find out how to get our food out of the seas, and I say this in all seriousness.” In many of his speeches and lectures it was clear that Bond’s plans had grown from saving the ailing souls of Bat Cave to saving the world, or at least a good part of it, by leading a pilgrimage into the sea.
The first nuclear-powered submarine had already been launched when Bond took his job at the New London base in early 1957. Yet to Bond underwater vessels weren’t the complete answer. Man would never attain the ultimate goal of exploration and exploitation locked in a submarine or a submersible pod, like the bathysphere the naturalist William Beebe famously used to descend a half-mile down, tethered by a cable to the surface in the 1930s.
To fully explore and exploit the seas, man had to be able to swim freely, like a fish, or, for that matter, like his primeval self. With a specially designed sea dwelling as a base, divers could live and work on the ocean floor for days, weeks, even months at a time. From a pressurized sea floor base, with the proper dive gear, they could pop anytime into the surrounding water, day or night. They could then spend hours in the water, working or exploring, and return to their base as needed for food and shelter, like weary mountaineers retiring to a cozy, well-stocked tent, or astronauts to a moon base.
There were a couple of fuzzy spots in this grand vision. One was that no such sea dwelling had ever been built. The other made the whole concept of living and working in the sea seem even more farfetched than putting a man on the moon: Long-accepted deep-diving limits typically allowed for bottom times of scant minutes. The deeper the dive, the shorter a diver’s stay. No one spent hours or days in the sea, nor did they spend long periods exposed to high pressure, either in the water or in a dry chamber. The depth limit for most Navy divers, even for brief sojourns, was far less than Bond’s initial target of six hundred feet. But as a scientist Bond believed it could all be done. As a man of faith he believed it would, for it is written: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” This divine directive, from the opening of the Book of
Genesis, resonated deeply with Bond. He liked to say that mankind would one day “acquire dominion over the seas, and the creatures therein,” a neat paraphrase that also deftly shifted the biblical emphasis from “the fish of the sea” to the sea itself. “Dominion over the seas” became for Bond the ecclesiastical version of his more pragmatic exploration-and-exploitation mantra. Either way, he intended to give the Lord a hand.
Not long after Bond settled in as assistant officer-in-charge at the New London research lab, he wrote up a characteristically grand plan that he called “A Proposal for Underwater Research” and submitted it to his immediate superiors around the time the Soviet Union shocked the world with its launch of the Sputnik satellite. The proposal was relatively brief, but bold in its argument that diving and deep-sea exploration needed a breakthrough like the one in space. Divers who could live and work on the ocean floor would gain access to a vast, invaluable submerged frontier. “In man’s history efforts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to derive the benefit of this offshore treasure,” Bond wrote. “To date, these efforts have resulted only in sporadic and drastically limited forays, which offer little promise of full utilization, of the continental shelves of the world.”
The sound barrier had been broken a decade earlier, in 1947, ushering in the space age. But the depth barrier that dogged divers remained intact, although no one much thought in those terms. “Depth barrier” was not part of the lexicon, and there was nothing as specific as the speed of sound to be broken, nor anything as dramatic as a sonic boom to punctuate an equivalent underwater achievement. As Bond had learned during his Navy dive school training, no one had ready answers to what struck him as the essential questions: How long can a man stay down? How deep can a man go? In many ways, Bond would find, deep-sea diving methods and equipment had changed little more over the previous century than rural life in the backwoods around Bat Cave.
A case in point was the Mark V, the venerable “hardhat” diving gear—so called because of the bulbous copper helmet, which had become the icon of the deep-sea diver. The Mark V had been in use ever since the U.S. Navy became serious about diving during the Woodrow Wilson administration. The basic hardhat design hadn’t changed that much since Augustus Siebe, a German-born instrument maker and gunsmith who settled in England, first bolted a similar helmet to the collar of an airtight diving suit in the 1830s.
The helmet, the bulky rubber-lined canvas suit, the lead-weighted boots, and the hose connecting the helmet to an air compressor at the surface—hand-cranked in the early days—gave human beings a reliable way to spend more than a breath-hold’s worth of time underwater. For centuries, breath-holding divers trained themselves to wring as much time out of a lungful of air as possible, going as deep as they could to grab sponges, oysters, or other quarry off the bottom. Evidence of rudimentary forms of diving gear intended to allow for longer underwater stays is scattered across the ages. Aristotle, writing in his Problemata in about 360 B.C., referred to divers supplied with containers of air, and in the first century the Roman naturalist Pliny made one of the first of a number of early historical mentions of divers using breathing tubes, often in warfare to elude enemies. Leonardo da Vinci sketched a few underwater breathing devices. A variety of apparatuses, some more preposterous than clever, were devised during the two centuries preceding Siebe’s hardhat. But Siebe did for diving what the Wright brothers would do for flight in 1903. An early demonstration of Siebe’s revolutionary design was made in the busy port of Portsmouth, England. For half a century the harbor had been obstructed by the famed wreck of the Royal George, which sank in 1782. The battleship was in no more than ninety feet of water, but nothing much could be done to salvage it until six decades later when divers put on Siebe’s new gear.
As Bond would find out for himself, there was much more to hardhat diving than tramping along the ocean floor like an undersea gladiator, as might be inferred from the movies. The Mark V helmet alone weighed some fifty pounds, the lead-soled boots twenty pounds each. Together with the rubber-lined canvas suit and a belt of lead weights held up by leather suspenders, the hardhat diver wore nearly two hundred pounds of gear. On dry land he could hardly walk. Tenders had to help him dress and then monitored the compressed air supply delivered to the helmet through a hose—a lifeline fittingly called the umbilical. Improvements had been made since Siebe’s day—notably the addition of voice communication—but the Mark V, and similar versions made in other countries, was like a Model T frozen in time.
Once a hardhat diver was lowered into the water, the gear’s substantial weight diminished. Give or take a few leaks in the suit, the diver remained dry. He wore undergarments for warmth and often a wool cap. Besides keeping the diver relatively warm and protected, the hardhat gear functioned as a pressure suit. The pressure of the air a diver breathes has to be about equal to the surrounding water pressure. If the pressure differential becomes too great—it doesn’t take much—his respiratory mechanics quickly break down, as they had for Charlie Aquadro. If a hardhat diver’s breathing gas is insufficiently pressurized, or if a nervous diver were to hold his breath while descending, the increasing water pressure could crush a rib cage and cause the under-pressurized lungs to collapse, a condition known as “lung squeeze.”
Such diving hazards underscore the physical risks from the rapidly rising pressure at depth. In the everyday atmospheric pressure at sea level, the human body, and every object, is subjected to 14.7 pounds of air per square inch, the pressure that comes from the weight of the air at sea level. For every thirty-three feet of descent underwater, the pressure increases by another 14.7 pounds per square inch, the basis of a unit of measure called an atmosphere. The term atmosphere itself is a poignant reminder of just how very distant anything quickly becomes underwater. Thirty-three feet is about the height of a three-story building—just a few flights of stairs away. But once underwater, any distance is much farther from home. Pressure increases by nearly a half-pound per square inch with every foot of depth. At thirty-three feet a diver is at a depth of two atmospheres (sometimes counted as just one when excluding the pressure of the one atmosphere above sea level). The total water pressure on a body immersed in thirty-three feet of seawater is then about 29.4 pounds per square inch. At sixty-six feet, you’re at three atmospheres, or 44.1 pounds per square inch, and so on down to the deepest canyons of the abyss, more than a thousand atmospheres away. In contrast, outer space is just one atmosphere away.
Even on the surface, the body is routinely under thousands of pounds of air pressure, but the pressure doesn’t bear down in a single direction, like a boulder crushing a bug. Liquids and gases envelop an object and exert pressure in all directions simultaneously, and human bodies have the advantage of being mostly water. Liquids like water are essentially incompressible, as are solids like rock or bone, and the enveloping pressures cancel each other out, creating a state of equilibrium. But the air in the ears, sinuses, and mainly the lungs is compressible, so a diver has to have adequately pressurized air to maintain the equilibrium needed to breathe, and to prevent lethal embolisms or lung squeeze.
These were the kind of lessons in physics and physiology taught at the dive school at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. While much of the science might be familiar to medical officers like Bond, the experience of hardhat diving was usually not, until they got to practice in the turbid waters of the nearby Anacostia River. The brisk current and dismal visibility acquainted trainees with the kind of challenging conditions they could expect to find at sea. They couldn’t see much beyond their faceplates. They had to learn to work by sense of touch and avoid tangling or kinking their umbilical—getting “fouled”—which could cut off their air supply, snag them on the bottom, or both.
A hardhat diver had to carefully manipulate the valves that regulated the flow of air in and out of the helmet. The main valves could be opened and closed like faucets—the one controlling air intake was positioned around the chest; an exhaust valve was on
the right side of the helmet. If the diver’s hands were occupied or he couldn’t reach the exhaust valve, he could work a “chin button” from inside the helmet, pushing it open with his chin or yanking it shut with his mouth.
Besides regulating the flow of fresh air for breathing, the valves adjusted the buoyancy of the airtight suit. As per Boyle’s law, the volume of air inside the suit increases and decreases with changes in depth and pressure. Even small changes in pressure affect the diver’s buoyancy and the pressure equilibrium between the inside and outside of the suit. A skilled hardhat diver could reduce his buoyancy and plant his feet firmly on the bottom—or as firmly as a muddy sea floor would permit. If need be, he could also make himself neutrally buoyant and float like a weightless spaceman. He might shut off the air flow entirely for a few minutes to cut the whooshing cacophony so he could talk and listen over the telephone set in his helmet. All of this could make hardhat diving as artful and risky as flying a plane.
If the suit becomes overly buoyant, the diver starts to float upward. Boyle’s law kicks in, the gas inside the suit expands still more, and the diver would find himself in a “blowup,” rocketing toward the surface, limbs outstretched, looking like the Michelin man swept up in a tornado. Besides causing embarrassment, a blowup could give a diver a case of the bends from the fast ascent. A “squeeze,” while less commonplace than a blowup, could be even worse. Pressure inside the suit suddenly drops below the pressure outside because of a ruptured umbilical or perhaps an unintentionally fast descent. The higher surrounding water pressure then closes in unrelentingly. Because the diving suit is flexible and the helmet solid, the body can get squeezed like a tube of toothpaste into the helmet with potentially torturous force and ghastly results. Even if the diver isn’t killed, he could bleed from the lungs, mouth, nose, ears, a bloody mess.