Sealab Page 7

  The Rovers took understandable pride in having introduced Bond and Cousteau to each other during this period. Bond would fondly recall that his first significant meeting with Cousteau took place in the fall of 1959, following a seminar on undersea activities at Town Hall in New York City. He joined Cousteau after the event at the home of Cousteau’s good friends the writer James Dugan and his wife, Ruth. Jimmy Dugan had been a correspondent for Yank, the U.S. Army magazine during World War II, when he first met Cousteau, and his 1948 article in Science Illustrated introduced Cousteau, his underwater films, and the Aqualung to America. Dugan’s role in Cousteau’s rise to prominence deepened almost immediately. He helped transform the Frenchman’s logs and notes into The Silent World and from then on would have a hand in almost everything Cousteau published, including the lyrical scripts for his films.

  The conversation at the Dugans’ went deep into the night. Bond spoke a little French, picked up over the years in school and during some adolescent adventures abroad. Cousteau, the son of a businessman, had lived on 95th Street in Manhattan for a couple of years as a boy, attended an American school and a Vermont summer camp, where he hated riding horses but loved frolicking in lakes. The possibility of undersea living would likely have sparked Cousteau’s vibrant imagination. But Cousteau had no formal scientific training, so talking to Bond, a fellow diver and U.S. Navy doctor, must have been inspiring. Bond explained the concept of saturation diving, told Cousteau about Genesis, and no doubt assured him that Dominion over the Seas was just around the corner.

  Bond was pleased to be able to share ideas, and perhaps a few watts of Cousteau’s limelight. Walt Mazzone couldn’t help noticing that Bond got into the habit of saying “Jacques Cousteau and me.” Other divers, notably the accomplished Austrian Hans Hass, preceded Cousteau in writing books about undersea adventures and in developing the new art and technology of underwater filmmaking, but Jacques-Yves Cousteau would become something more: the first celebrity diver. In the spring of 1960 he was on the cover of Time magazine. A year later, Cousteau joined President John Kennedy for a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. The president proclaimed him “one of the great explorers of an entirely new dimension” and presented him with the National Geographic Society’s Gold Medal, a tradition since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. Cousteau’s ready smile and Roman nose, his lean physique and distinctive French accent, were becoming familiar across the United States and to millions around the world.

  “JYC”—pronounced zheek—as Cousteau was known to friends, was a private operator, unfettered by military bureaucracy and backed by sponsors like the French government and the National Geographic Society. He could also tap the proceeds from his roles in profit-making corporations, notably U.S. Divers, founded in the 1950s and based in Los Angeles, which was growing into a major supplier of diving gear, including, of course, the Aqualung. An inveterate promoter like Bond had to have recognized that Cousteau was uniquely equipped to advance—and to advertise—the cause of saturation diving. If the celebrity diver could somehow provide a good showcase for the quest to live in the sea, then Bond might have an easier time appeasing the saturation skeptics and getting the U.S. Navy on board. Being first to put a man on the ocean floor could have wide-ranging political, social, or economic ramifications, but the quest to live in the sea was still nothing like the space race, which had turned the heavens into the prime arena for a great showdown between Us and Them, West and East, Americans and Russians, Good and Evil.

  The Russians also had been engaged in diving activities, inspired by American experimentation with helium and by the advent of the Aqualung. Yet their advances, often shrouded in Soviet-style secrecy, appeared to lag behind those in the United States and elsewhere. The British, like the French, were longtime leaders in diving but the Royal Navy was focused on improving conventional methods and striving to reach deeper depths, as Lieutenant Wookey’s experimental dive to six hundred feet had shown.

  Perhaps more lively competition, even from a military ally like Great Britain, might have been a boon to Bond, but in the days of Genesis he had few known rivals. Those he did have tended to be friendly, like JYC, and another emerging and enterprising competitor in the quest to live in the sea, the American industrialist Edwin Albert Link Jr.

  Ed Link had the kind of inventive spirit that had characterized Thomas Edison a couple of generations earlier. Like Edison, Link didn’t have much use for traditional schooling. His parents sent him to several private high schools but in 1922, at the age of seventeen, Link dropped out of school and started working full-time at his father’s business, the Link Piano and Organ Company, in his hometown of Binghamton, New York. It was a good fit. As a boy Link had been fascinated with gadgets. He was especially fond of his electric trains and happily tinkered away for solitary hours, which he often had to do because his brother was seven years older. Working on player pianos, nickelodeons, and theater organs, Link learned the pneumatics of organ mechanisms and compressed air. He also loved to hang around dusty airfields, lending barnstormers a hand in order to glean lessons about planes and flying. His father strongly disapproved—some pilots had shady reputations—and he threatened to disown his son. But Edwin Junior made his first solo flight in 1926, the year before Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in the Spirit of St. Louis.

  As Link would learn, aspiring aviators had little choice but to fly by the seat of their pants. Many were killed in training. This morbid fact gave Link the idea of developing a machine that would allow people to begin learning to fly without leaving the ground. A few such devices had been built but none was able to simulate the sensations of real flight. By fusing his knowledge of stops and props, Link created a prototype made from organ parts and pumped with compressed air to mimic the movements of a flying plane. His Kitty Hawk of a flight simulator would be called the Link Trainer. In 1929, twenty-five-year-old Link formed his own company to sell his invention. At about the same time he met Marion Clayton, who was twenty-two, fresh out of journalism school at Syracuse University, and working as a newspaper reporter in Binghamton. The two were set up on a blind date and Marion then lined up an interview so she could write an article about this intriguing young local pilot. A couple of years later, in 1931, she married her best story, as she liked to say, and soon took an active role in her husband’s activities and enterprises.

  Link’s new flight trainer business stalled in the wake of the stock market crash and because the U.S. Army Air Corps, a presumptive major customer, wasn’t interested. With their nine-foot wingspans, the early trainers looked something like a carnival ride, and during the Depression Link found a sales niche in amusement parks. In the meantime he persevered and by the mid-1930s attitudes and economics began to shift in his favor, especially once the military finally bought in. Over the next two decades an estimated two million airmen, including half a million World War II pilots, would learn to fly using Link’s flight simulators.

  Link began to ease out of the trainer business in the 1950s after his company, Link Aviation, merged with General Precision Equipment Corporation, a large holding company in New York City. He established the Link Foundation to support research and education in the fields of aeronautics and oceanology, and channeled more of his seemingly bottomless reserves of energy into the sea. Already a self-made millionaire and a holder of twenty patents, Link had grown restless and taken up sailing. In 1951, Link tried the Aqualung and joined the growing legion of scuba enthusiasts. He was in the Florida Keys with his wife and two young sons that summer on what would be the first of many expeditions in search of shipwrecks and sunken treasure. Link often coordinated his forays into marine archaeology with the Smithsonian Institution and other reputable organizations, and he became enthralled with the history underlying the artifacts he found. High school had never been like this.

  Link’s discovery of a four-hundred-year-old cannon a couple of years later got him hooked on researching and retracing the Caribbean routes of Chris
topher Columbus. He even scoured the north coast of Haiti for the lost Santa María. This blossoming field of undersea archaeology, fostered by scuba, also gave Link fresh opportunities to exercise his inventive spirit by designing needed tools—like a jet air hammer and an underwater metal detector. When Ed Link caught wind of Bond’s Genesis experiments he was quick to see the potential of saturation diving. The greater efficiency of staying down longer had a natural appeal to a businessman with a sharp eye for the ocean bottom and for the bottom line.

  Link had made numerous influential friends and industry contacts over the years, including some in the U.S. Navy, and he did what he could to convince the Navy brass to embrace and develop saturation diving. He argued that it held great promise and ought to be pursued more actively than just through Dr. Bond’s unofficial experimentation. The Navy didn’t seem to agree. If Link wanted to see real progress anytime soon he would have to take matters into his own hands. Unfettered by official red tape, he had his own financial and inventive resources.

  So in February 1962, shortly after Bond’s trinity had wrapped up the animal phases of Genesis and published its favorable results, Link presented a project he called Man-in-Sea to the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. He soon had the society’s backing for his proposed experiment in undersea living, and in addition to the money, he could count on a story in National Geographic magazine. Link still had to invest substantial sums of his own, as he had for other expeditions. He didn’t mind. His earthy pragmatism and simple tastes lent credence to his frequent refrain about having little interest in money, except as a means of survival. In Europe he and his wife got around in their battered Volkswagen Bug. Yet Link had the wherewithal to put up $500,000 in the late 1950s to replace a couple of his first boats with a new, specially outfitted expeditionary yacht that he designed with marine archaeology in mind. Sea Diver, which might be considered Link’s version of Cousteau’s Calypso, was ninety-one feet long, steel-hulled, and equipped to accommodate a dozen crew members. It had navigational systems to rival those on a large ocean liner. It had a built-in crane and winches for raising heavy relics from the sea floor, and a diving compartment crowded with gear. Reef Diver, an eighteen-foot auxiliary cruiser, was slung in davits on the stern. That still left ample space on the open deck to carry Link’s twin-engine plane, Widgeon.

  Link met with Jacques Cousteau a number of times in Monaco, where Cousteau had an office at the Oceanographic Museum, housed in a luminous limestone edifice built a half-century earlier by Prince Albert I. The building blended majestically into the Rock of Monaco and overlooked the Mediterranean’s azure expanse. From the renowned museum, it was a short walk past the Royal Palace—home to JYC’s friends Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace, the former American actress—and then down the steep embankment to Monaco’s exclusive harbor, where Link kept Sea Diver berthed in winter. Cousteau’s team had a craft moored nearby.

  While it’s not clear how and when the paths of the inventor and the celebrity diver first crossed, it couldn’t have hurt that they were practically neighbors for at least part of the year. Link’s reputation may have preceded him, too, because Cousteau had always dreamed of flying. In the mid-1930s Cousteau was in training to become a navy pilot until he almost lost his right arm in a late-night car crash. The twenty-six-year-old French lieutenant was then forced to work at sea instead. He was assigned to gunnery duties on a battleship and took up swimming to strengthen his injured arm. His fascination with the silent world soon followed. George Bond was apparently the only one of the three men who didn’t yearn to fly before learning to dive. Any fancy for flight on Bond’s part may have died with his older brother, Bobby, a pilot, who was killed in a plane crash.

  Late in the fall of 1961, Link had lunch with Cousteau and his wife, Simone, at their Monaco home and the two men discussed their mutual interest in staging a prolonged deep dive. They also talked about the possibility of teaming up for an experiment the following spring. Upon Link’s return to Monaco a few months later, and with his Man-in-Sea project taking shape, he met again several times with Cousteau. It was clear that the U.S. Navy was in no hurry to pick up where Bond’s animal experiments left off, so Cousteau and Link decided to put saturation diving and undersea living to the test. Cousteau’s team would build a “house” big enough and well-equipped enough to shelter at least a couple of divers for the duration of the Man-in-Sea experiment. It would have the cylindrical, railway tank car appearance of a pressure chamber. The air pressure inside this sea floor habitat would be kept equal to the water pressure outside. That meant the sea would not enter the pressure chamber. There would be a pool of water in a circular opening about the size of a manhole in the floor. A diver in the habitat could pass through this liquid looking glass freely, from the comforts of his dry shelter into the uncertainties of the silent, wet world outside, and then he could come back again. Ideally, to best show off the potential advantages of living in the sea, the divers should be able to spend ample time in the water, not just lounge inside the habitat.

  Link’s contribution to the project would be an aluminum cylinder he had designed and built with backing from the Smithsonian Institution. It looked like a section of shiny sewer pipe, capped on top and with several portholes around the midsection. In many respects it was similar to a diving bell, a piece of underwater equipment that had been around for centuries, beginning with simple forms that weren’t much more than upside-down barrels with an open end at the bottom. When lowered into the water, the air pocket trapped inside the bell provided nominal shelter and the means to stay down longer than would be possible on a single breath. Alexander the Great is said to have used a diving bell during the siege of Tyre in 332 B.C.

  Much more recently, in the 1930s, the British Navy improved upon the basic concept with what was called a Submersible Decompression Chamber, which gave Link some ideas for his cylinder. Prior to the SDC, a diver had little choice but to take his decompression stops hanging in mid-water on a “shot rope,” a line between the bottom and the surface. In cold water and strong currents, a long decompression could be incredibly tedious and exhausting. The SDC was like a pressurized elevator, with a diver’s tender on duty inside. At a depth of about sixty feet, after having made some deeper stops along the shot rope, a hardhat diver could climb a ladder into the open bottom of the SDC, passing through a liquid looking glass from the water into the bell’s dry, pressurized interior. With the help of the tender, the diver could take off his helmet and continue decompressing in relative comfort and safety. Link’s cylinder, which was eleven feet tall and three feet in diameter, would serve a similar purpose, as Link and Cousteau discussed. They could use the cylinder as a pressurized elevator to shuttle divers or visitors between the surface and Cousteau’s undersea dwelling. If habitats were ever going to be placed deep on the continental shelf, this type of diver delivery and retrieval system could be as essential as an elevator in a skyscraper, even more so, considering the water and the pressure. Of course the success of all this newfangled Man-in-Sea hardware assumed that human saturation divers would fare as well physiologically as the goats had in Genesis.

  The plans for a joint undersea venture with Cousteau were left to simmer. Link sailed on Sea Diver from the Côte d’Azur for southeastern Sicily. With the new cylinder on board for preliminary testing, Link and his crew went to work with an archaeological team to help dredge up tons of Byzantine artifacts lost twenty-five centuries before—columns of white marble, composite cornices, foundations, mosaic fragments, a ritual saucer engraved with religious motifs, even a pulpit carved in green marble. All this human history had been hidden in less than forty feet of seawater. Other treasures yet to be discovered lay much deeper. Later that summer, Link went to examine an ancient Greek shipwreck north of Sicily near the Lipari Islands. The wreck was at 150 feet, deep enough to make excavation a time-consuming and expensive prospect by “bounce” dives, as conventional dives were sometimes called
because of their brief bottom times. With saturation diving, if it proved feasible, divers stationed on the sea floor could carry on with their underwater work uninterrupted for days, almost as if they were on dry land.

  When Link returned to the south of France, during the summer of 1962, it became clear that Cousteau was bailing out of the Man-in-Sea project. Link was told that the undersea house wasn’t ready, but he believed that the celebrity diver was only using that explanation as a convenient excuse. In February Link had arranged for him and Cousteau to meet with one of Link’s many high-ranking friends, Vice Admiral John T. Hayward, a deputy chief of naval operations, in the hope of getting some Navy participation in Man-in-Sea. Link believed that the real reason Cousteau had backed out was that he had discovered that there was considerable money to be made in selling the story and the television rights about an underwater house—so best not to have to split the proceeds.

  “Frankly I am a little sore about this double-crossing by Cousteau since it was we who interested him and started him off and he agreed to work with me,” Link wrote to his friend Mendel Peterson, a Smithsonian curator. Link told Peterson he wasn’t interested in a public squabble with Cousteau. “When queried, I am simply announcing that Cousteau did not get his part of the program ready to go along with us at this time, and we are proceeding as scheduled.” It was by then the end of August, and Link planned to start his experiment in less than a week. He wouldn’t have the benefit of Cousteau’s underwater house, but he could use his cylinder instead, even if it was more pup tent than bona fide dwelling.

  That same week, George Bond sent a letter he hoped would persuade Link to hold off on his attempted saturation dive. Bond worried that Link was putting too much stock in the animal experiments and that a rush to put humans under prolonged pressure could be dangerous, even deadly. Experimental human exposures, under controlled and carefully monitored laboratory conditions, were needed before anyone took the concept of saturation diving deep into the open sea. Furthermore, Bond said he was on the verge of receiving Navy approval to proceed with a new phase of Genesis in which he would be allowed to test human volunteers. Sub-rosa animal experiments were one thing, but even George Bond couldn’t lock people into a chamber for days at a time without proper approval.