Bathysphere (vessel)

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William Beebe (left) and Otis Barton standing next to the bathysphere

A bathysphere is a spherical deep-sea submersible which is unpowered and is lowered into the ocean on a cable.

The first bathysphere was devised by Otis Barton in 1928. The vessel was designed by Captain John H. J. Butler, an engineer with Cox & Stevens, Inc., the firm that Barton hired in 1929 to construct his "diving tank". The casting of the steel sphere was handled by Watson Stillman Hydraulic Machinery Company in Roselle, New Jersey. After the first version proved to be too heavy to be practical, the final, lighter design consisted of a hollow sphere of one inch (2.54 cm) thick cast steel which was 4.75 ft (1.5 m) in diameter.

The sphere was fitted with three-inch thick windows made of fused quartz, the strongest transparent material then available, and had a 400-pound entrance hatch which was bolted down before a descent. Oxygen was supplied from a high pressure cylinder carried inside the sphere, while electric fans circulated the air over pans of soda lime to absorb exhaled CO₂ and calcium chloride to absorb moisture.

In use, the bathysphere was suspended from a one inch (2.54 cm) cable, and a solid rubber hose carried an electrical supply and telephone wires which were the occupants' only means of communication with the surface. The entire apparatus including the cable and associated lines weighed approximately 10,000 pounds (4,536 kg) submerged.

To obtain the financial and logistical support necessary to deploy the sphere, Barton enlisted the help of famed explorer and naturalist, William Beebe. Together, on June 6, 1930, they piloted the first manned dive of the bathysphere and reached a depth of 803 ft. (245 m).

In 1932, Barton and Beebe made a world record descent to a depth of 3,028 feet (923 m), the record remaining unbroken for 15 years.

What Beebe saw on that trip—and reported with such vividness—was a glowing world of creatures so astonishing that for decades many doubted his veracity. The clear sea stretched endlessly, and was so full of luminescence that it sparkled like the night sky. Cavalcades of black shrimps, transparent eels, and bizarre fish approached the descending sphere, and when Beebe used his spotlight to see them, great shadows and shifting patches of light hovered just out of view, leading him to postulate the existence of giants in the Bermudan depths. And below the bathysphere? There, said Beebe, lay a world that "looked like the black pit-mouth of hell itself."[1]

At extreme depths, the cable suspending a bathysphere becomes unmanageable, and deeper dives must be performed by self-propelled vehicles such as bathyscaphes.

The bathysphere is currently on display at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, New York.

The term bathysphere is composed from the Greek words βάθος (bathos), "depth" and σφαίρα (sphaira), "sphere".

[edit] References

Beebe, William. Half Mile Down. Harcourt Brace and Company. (1934).
Matsen, Brad . Descent - The Heroic Discovery of the Abyss. Pantheon Books. (2005).