Sealab Read online

  In addition to experiencing hardhat diving for themselves, Bond and the other doctors were schooled in diving physiology and medicine, a specialized field filled with unsolved mysteries about breathing gases and the effects of high pressures on the human organism. One major topic was the bends, more formally known as decompression sickness. For years the condition was called “caisson disease” because it was best known for striking nineteenth-century workers who spent their days in pressurized workspaces, or caissons. Workers would climb down into a hollow shaft and pass through an airlock leading into the caisson, which had all the comforts of a muddy tomb. As long as the air pressure inside was at least equal to the pressure of the water or the oozing muck outside, the workspace would remain dry enough so that crews could do their jobs, jobs like excavating New York’s East River to build the submerged foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The puzzling thing about the caissons was that workers would generally be fine until they left their pressurized job site and returned to the surface. There were a lot of deaths, paralysis, and excruciating pain. Afflicted workers doubled over as if mimicking the “Grecian bend,” a passing fancy among Victorian women who took their promenades bent forward from the hips, pigeonlike. Thus decompression sickness was nicknamed “the bends.”

  An explanation for the bends, and how best to prevent it, came in 1878 from the great French physiologist Paul Bert. Bert’s experiments showed how, under pressure, the problem originated with the absorption of nitrogen gas into the blood and tissues. Nitrogen makes up nearly four-fifths of atmospheric air but is inert, meaning molecules play no part in metabolism. They merely tag along as oxygen molecules are carried through the bloodstream. Carbon dioxide, the body’s exhaust, flows out—from tissues and organs into the blood, then into the network of tiny capillaries covering the translucent membranes of millions of air sacs in the lungs, the alveoli, and finally into the lungs to be exhaled through the nose and mouth. As oxygen is taken in, and carbon dioxide released, omnipresent nitrogen makes the trip, too, in and out, shadowing the life-giving gases.

  Under increased pressure underwater or in a caisson, nitrogen begins to accumulate in the tissues, harmless and unnoticed. If the pressure rapidly drops, as when one returns to the surface, the nitrogen emerges as bubbles, a phenomenon often likened to opening a bottle of carbonated soda pop. Bert found that these nitrogen bubbles were the cause of the bends. They could fizz like soda pop almost anywhere, in varied size and number, and block the vital flow of oxygenated blood to tissues and organs, wreaking corporeal havoc—excruciating aches and pains, paralysis, unconsciousness, and death. To avoid the telltale signs of decompression sickness, the caisson worker or the diver had to be slowly returned to the lower pressure. His body could then gradually release nitrogen by the normal process of respiration. The time required to safely decompress became known as a decompression penalty—the price a diver had to pay for each dive.

  If a diver did get bent, the best treatment was “recompression,” which meant putting the victim into a sealed chamber where pressure could be raised so that errant gas bubbles would dissolve. Severe aches, pains, or other symptoms would then usually subside, and an orderly process of decompression could be resumed in the chamber’s controlled atmosphere. The dive school at the Navy Yard had chambers for training and testing and as a student Bond likely got a first chance to be locked into the kind of chamber he would return to many times, often to treat bent or embolized divers like Aquadro.

  Paul Bert’s discoveries—enumerated in his thousand-page tour de force on barometric pressure—were a huge advance in unraveling the mystery of the bends. Still, his slow and steady approach to decompression did not always prevent decompression sickness. He might have refined his methods but died suddenly at age fifty-three. The unsolved mysteries of decompression sickness would linger for three decades, until 1905, when the British physiologist John Scott Haldane led a committee that codified Bert’s discovery of the bends into the first diving tables, also known as decompression schedules.

  The dive tables look a lot like bus schedules—a grid made up of rows of different diving depths and durations (“bottom times”), with corresponding columns showing the depths at which a diver has to make decompression stops on the way back to the surface. A certain amount of time is specified for each stop to allow the accumulated nitrogen to ease out of the system without bubbling. Haldane’s tables took the guesswork out of decompression and gave divers a guide to making a safe return to the surface. The tables were tested up to 210 feet and became the foundation for decompression schedules worldwide, including those adopted by the U.S. Navy. But even by the 1920s, Navy hardhat divers were not typically qualified to dive much deeper than ninety feet.

  The Haldane tables, while a major advance, were not foolproof and were continuously tested and refined over the years. There are many variables on a dive, including a diver’s unique physiology and the degree of physical exertion a dive requires. There are also many different ways to adjust a decompression schedule, and significant depth barriers remained. Divers were strictly limited in both how deep they could go and how long they could stay down. One major problem was that at depths of more than about 130 feet, divers began to experience something as puzzling as the bends. They started acting as though they’d just stumbled out of an all-night martini party.

  The phenomenon became known as nitrogen narcosis, or, as divers would say, getting “narked.” The French called it l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs—rapture of the great depths. Under pressure, nitrogen short-circuits the human brain like a round of stiff drinks. The deeper a diver goes, the stronger and more menacing the effect. As with ordinary drunkenness, the effect of nitrogen narcosis varies from diver to diver, but universally judgment is seriously impaired.

  In the 1930s, after identifying nitrogen as the culprit in narcosis, a team of U.S. Navy researchers, led by Charles Bowers “Swede” Momsen, a renowned submarine rescue advocate, went looking for a remedy. They found it in helium. The compressed air typically used as a breathing gas is just ordinary air, with its abundant nitrogen, that’s been pressurized and thus compressed. By replacing the nitrogen with helium, divers could go deeper without experiencing the potentially deadly mental haze of nitrogen narcosis. Like nitrogen, helium is inert, and under increased pressures it accumulates in the blood and tissues, but at different rates than nitrogen, so researchers devised new decompression schedules for divers breathing a helium-rich mix. To handle the helium they also had to create a new version of the venerable Mark V dive helmet, known as the “helium hat,” which required even heavier gear. The noticeably larger bulbous helmet weighed more than a hundred pounds, about twice as much as the standard air-fed Mark V. To compensate for the heavier hat the helium diver’s lead-weighted boots were forty pounds each instead of twenty. A fully outfitted diver wore some three hundred pounds of gear.

  The helium hat was just out of the experimental box when the USS Squalus sank off the East Coast in May 1939. The sub came to rest about 240 feet down in the freezing Atlantic, and as the historic rescue and salvage operation began, the first hardhat divers got to the bottom the old-fashioned way, breathing ordinary compressed air. One diver passed out. Another called out football signals. A third befuddled diver almost cut his air hose and lifeline. Such was the power of the potent narcotic haze. Swede Momsen, who ran the diving operations, decided they should try the recently developed helium gear, and its successful use became one of the most significant diving milestones in the century since Siebe had devised his hardhat system. The helium diving gear, along with the inaugural use of the McCann Rescue Chamber—an elevator-sized, drum-shaped pod run on a cable between sub and surface ship—made possible the rescue of thirty-three survivors from the Squalus crew of fifty-nine, a triumphant first in submarine rescue. After the celebrated rescue, helium divers went back to the bottom to lay the groundwork for the successful salvage of the sub, which was ultimately raised, repaired, and recommiss
ioned as the Sailfish.

  During the 1940s, between the Squalus recovery and Bond’s arrival at the dive school, there was another major development in the long evolution of diving gear. It was self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, which would become known by its familiar acronym, SCUBA. Self-contained gear eliminated the need for an umbilical and was relatively lightweight. The diver could carry a portable supply of compressed air and swim freely, without any tethers to the surface for air. Rough-hewn scuba designs had been tried with varying degrees of success since the nineteenth century. Then, shortly after the Squalus rescue, during World War II, a French naval officer named Jacques-Yves Cousteau, working with the engineer Emile Gagnan, came up with the pièce de résistance for scuba: a regulator that automatically and reliably allowed a swimming diver to breathe the highly compressed air from his tanks at the same pressure as the water around him. Cousteau and Gagnan would patent their invention and call it the Aqualung.

  The simplicity of the Cousteau-Gagnan brand of scuba made diving accessible to virtually anyone. If traditional hardhat diving—with its need for an umbilical, compressor, heavy gear, and surface tenders—was like a railroad system, the Aqualung was like a private automobile. The Aqualung’s success, rather like the success of the car or any consumer durable, was at least partly due to good timing. Swim fins and masks had only recently been introduced. There was growing interest in diving as a sport and as a tool for oceanography. Before Cousteau, diving was mainly a means of doing an underwater job, often a difficult or unpleasant one. Salvage operations such as those carried out after the attack on Pearl Harbor, inside the jagged remains of bombed ships, in oily blackness, could be terribly dangerous even if they weren’t deep.

  Jacques Cousteau played a starring role in popularizing and promoting both recreational diving and the Aqualung. A few months before Bond entered dive school in 1953, Cousteau published his first book, The Silent World, which was filled with diving adventures and photographs from the wet world that few readers had ever seen. The book sold briskly and Cousteau’s name quickly became synonymous with the underwater world. The National Geographic Society signed on as a major sponsor of Cousteau’s undersea ventures in the early 1950s and its widely read magazine gave Cousteau a preeminent forum for his stories, pictures, and of course the Aqualung. In early 1954, Cousteau made his debut on American network television on Omnibus, the premier cultural program of the day. On the Sunday night show, Cousteau embellished his account in that month’s National Geographic with ample film footage about his team’s excavation of an ancient Greek wine-transport ship off the coast of Marseille. With foot fins and the Aqualung, Cousteau told his TV audience, “You get the impression of being a spaceman, free to fly in any direction.” No man had yet flown in space, but this kind of enticing imagery added to Cousteau’s soaring popularity and that of recreational diving.

  Scuba was proving to be a plus for more than just recreation—search and rescue, for example—but the U.S. Navy, or at least many of its hardhat divers, did not immediately embrace it. Part of the reason, as Bond may have detected at the dive school, was that working Navy divers were accustomed to the traditional hardhat system and they liked it. They liked staying dry underwater, sealed in their helmet and heavy suit. The suit and helmet offered good protection on treacherous salvage jobs. Hardhat divers liked to be able to communicate by the phone link inside their helmets. Scuba did not present a welcome change. Having a mouthpiece stuffed in their faces and being unable to speak annoyed hardhat stalwarts. Scuba also meant swimming, often in cold water. Not all hardhat divers were swimmers, and staying warm and protected without a bulky dive suit introduced a new challenge. But despite the misgivings, scuba was gradually more accepted in the U.S. Navy. In mid-1954 the Navy established a new, scuba-oriented diving school at Key West called the U.S. Naval School, Underwater Swimmers.

  George Bond liked the way scuba enabled a diver to swim and roam more freely. But the self-contained gear did nothing to change the long-standing depth barriers. Duration was also limited by the amount of air that could be compressed into the tanks carried on a diver’s back. And the deeper a dive, the faster the air in the tanks would be used up. The Navy favored scuba for relatively short, shallow dives but generally considered it unsuitable beyond 130 feet—about half the depth at which helium hat divers worked on the Squalus. Helium and the helium hat had made deeper dives possible, but 350 feet was pushing the standard Navy limit. Duration, too, remained limited to a matter of minutes. Rarely would anyone stay at a substantial depth for more than half an hour.

  Against this backdrop, diving looked ripe for a major breakthrough, at least to Bond. In his “Proposal for Underwater Research,” first submitted in 1957, Bond said that he, along with fellow scientists at the New London Medical Research Laboratory, should begin a series of experiments that could show whether longer, deeper dives were physically and physiologically possible. Bond believed they were, as some earlier researchers had suggested. Man could not live in the sea, even with a well-crafted sea dwelling, if it turned out that he could not survive prolonged exposure to pressure or safely breathe under pressure for periods of time longer than the conventional dive tables allowed. No one knew for sure, but Bond wanted to find out. How long can a man stay down? How deep can a man go?

  Bond believed that even those who were skeptical about the grander elements of his proposal—building laboratories on the sea floor, turning divers into mineral miners, or finding an undersea solution to world hunger—would see the value in attempting to break depth barriers. Longer, deeper dives had great practical potential for the Navy’s own salvage and submarine rescue operations. It had taken more than six hundred hardhat dives and almost four months to complete the rescue and salvage of the Squalus. A diver’s typical bottom time had been twenty minutes. Nearly twenty years later, at the dawn of the space age, an underwater job similar to the Squalus recovery would have been handled much the same way.

  The Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, under which the New London Medical Research Lab operated, was in no mood to approve Bond’s proposed experiments. Bond later summed up the official response this way: “You are wasting time. In the first place, who wants to go to the ocean bottom, there’s nothing down there worth fooling with. In the second place, it can’t be done. And, thirdly, you were pretty good at delivering babies and looking at tonsils. Why don’t you get back to doing that and knock off this wild dreaming?” Bond considered his BuMed boss to be a man of virtually no vision, and a personal enemy as well.

  Having just reentered the Navy and started his new job at the Medical Research Lab, Bond might have chosen to back off, but that was not his way. He believed that it was time for the breakthrough that diving deserved and that providence prescribed. Undaunted by the rejection of his proposal, Bond was determined to conduct his undersea crusade clandestinely, but he was going to need some help.

  3

  GENESIS

  Bundled inside the hefty Sunday papers of November 9, 1958, with their front-page news about atomic weapons testing and the botched flight of the latest Pioneer moon rocket, The American Weekly thudded onto doorsteps across the country. The widely circulated Sunday supplement had an eye for the sensational and on this fall day it featured a tantalizing glimpse of the plan that George Bond had outlined in his rejected “Proposal for Underwater Research.” The renowned illustrator Alexander Leydenfrost had sketched a futuristic sea floor scene showing scuba divers working around an enclave of boxy two-story structures that matched the hypothetical description for an undersea laboratory in Bond’s proposal. Two divers were depicted cruising along in a kind of undersea Corvette. The title splashed across the illustration and accompanying article read: “YOUR FUTURE HOME UNDER THE SEA,” with the subheading: “Fantastic? Not at all, say Navy scientists—it’s not only possible but we’re a lot nearer to it than you think.”

  The lone Navy scientist cited in the “exclusive first look at this amazing project” was
Commander George F. Bond of the U.S. Naval Medical Research Laboratory, New London, Connecticut, “one of the Navy’s experts on underwater physiology.” Bond had somehow managed to get his vision of life on the continental shelf featured in the Weekly.

  “So far, no human being has explored our inclining coastal shelf for more than minutes at a time due to the need for slow, painstaking decompression on the return trip to the surface. Consequently, our knowledge of nearby underwater terrain is embarrassingly scanty,” the Weekly said, adding an unequivocal statement from then Commander Bond: “But we possess all the necessary hardware to complete a rapid conquest of our oceans.”

  Such showy talk readily contributed to Bond’s reputation, and his ability to promote this vision of living in the sea could sometimes be as significant as anything he did as a scientist. Bond understood the basics of the hardware that might be put to use for this undersea conquest, but he was no engineer and had nothing specific on the drawing board. Nonetheless, as the Weekly article showed, Bond eagerly promoted his exploration-and-exploitation ideas. He maintained a peripatetic schedule and could often be found on the lecture circuit, giving his lively brand of scientific sermon, and in Washington, looking for influential converts to his cause.

  Despite the formal rejection of the “Proposal for Underwater Research” he was determined to proceed, sub rosa, and prove that the picture sketched for the Weekly was not something lifted from Buck Rogers—a favorite sci-fi icon of Bond’s. The first step was to test animals and Bond enlisted the help of scientists on the Medical Research Lab’s staff, much as Swede Momsen had an expert team around him in the development of the helium hat. One man in particular would become as dedicated as he was indispensable. He was Commander Walter Mazzone, a decorated veteran of some of World War II’s most harrowing submarine patrols.