A Short History of Nearly Everything

and nearly all that was written was based more on anecdote and supposition than on physical  

evidence. In the 1830s, the British naturalist Edward Forbes surveyed ocean beds throughout  

the Atlantic and Mediterranean and declared that there was no life at all in the seas below  

2,000 feet. It seemed a reasonable assumption. There was no light at that depth, so no plant  

life, and the pressures of water at such depths were known to be extreme. So it came as  

something of a surprise when, in 1860, one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables was  

hauled up for repairs from more than two miles down, and it was found to be thickly  

encrusted with corals, clams, and other living detritus.

The first really organized investigation of the seas didn't come until 1872, when a joint  

expedition between the British Museum, the Royal Society, and the British government set  

forth from Portsmouth on a former warship called HMS Challenger. For three and a half  

years they sailed the world, sampling waters, netting fish, and hauling a dredge through  

sediments. It was evidently dreary work. Out of a complement of 240 scientists and crew, one  

in four jumped ship and eight more died or went mad-"driven to distraction by the mind- 

numbing routine of years of dredging" in the words of the historian Samantha Weinberg. But  

they sailed across almost 70,000 nautical miles of sea, collected over 4,700 new species of  

marine organisms, gathered enough information to create a fifty-volume report (which took  

nineteen years to put together), and gave the world the name of a new scientific discipline:  

oceanography. They also discovered, by means of depth measurements, that there appeared to  

be submerged mountains in the mid-Atlantic, prompting some excited observers to speculate  

that they had found the lost continent of Atlantis.

Because the institutional world mostly ignored the seas, it fell to devoted-and very  

occasional-amateurs to tell us what was down there. Modern deep-water exploration begins  

with Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton in 1930. Although they were equal partners, the  

more colorful Beebe has always received far more written attention. Born in 1877 into a well- 

to-do family in New York City, Beebe studied zoology at Columbia University, then took a  

job as a birdkeeper at the New York Zoological Society. Tiring of that, he decided to adopt  

the life of an adventurer and for the next quarter century traveled extensively through Asia  

and South America with a succession of attractive female assistants whose jobs were  

inventively described as "historian and technicist" or "assistant in fish problems." He  

supported these endeavors with a succession of popular books with titles like Edge of the  

Jungle and Jungle Days, though he also produced some respectable books on wildlife and  

ornithology.

In the mid-1920s, on a trip to the Galápagos Islands, he discovered "the delights of  

dangling," as he described deep-sea diving. Soon afterward he teamed up with Barton, who  

came from an even wealthier family, had also attended Columbia, and also longed for  

adventure. Although Beebe nearly always gets the credit, it was in fact Barton who designed  

the first bathysphere (from the Greek word for "deep") and funded the $12,000 cost of its  

construction. It was a tiny and necessarily robust chamber, made of cast iron 1.5 inches thick  

and with two small portholes containing quartz blocks three inches thick. It held two men, but  

only if they were prepared to become extremely well acquainted. Even by the standards of the  

age, the technology was unsophisticated. The sphere had no maneuverability-it simply hung  

on the end of a long cable-and only the most primitive breathing system: to neutralize their  

own carbon dioxide they set out open cans of soda lime, and to absorb moisture they opened a  

small tub of calcium chloride, over which they sometimes waved palm fronds to encourage  

chemical reactions.

But the nameless little bathysphere did the job it was intended to do. On the first dive, in  

June 1930 in the Bahamas, Barton and Beebe set a world record by descending to 600 feet. By  

1934, they had pushed the record to 3,028 feet, where it would stay until after the war. Barton  

was confident the device was safe to a depth of 4,500 feet, though the strain on every bolt and  

rivet was audibly evident with each fathom they descended. At any depth, it was brave and