Ever flip a cup the wrong way up within the tub or a pool and dunk it under the floor? The cup bobs there, buoyed by a pocket of air trapped within the backside of the cup. Push it slowly down and that air pocket stays—that’s what shoots the cup towards the floor whenever you let it go. That cup trick is actually how a diving bell works. That comparatively easy machine has been round for hundreds of years, doubtless for the reason that first human observed when a ship capsized and began to sink there was nonetheless air to breathe in the best pocket. Alexander the Great supposedly used one in one in all his numerous sieges.
Would you belief one to sink you to 1,000 ft of depth within the Pacific Ocean? Probably not.
Hannes Keller, a leisure diver, thinker, inventor, and mathematician, positive did. And in doing so, on a tragic day in 1962, he set a file for deepest dive in human historical past that lasted for over fifty years.
Okay, that’s not totally honest. Keller used a closed bell for his dive, which is sealed to keep up ambient strain because it sinks to eery, ink black depths. But the plain outdated diving bell is what piqued Keller’s curiosity to start with, get this, a mere three years earlier than he dove to the deepest depths anybody ever had.
Keller, born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1932, was educating math in school when, in 1958, he began tinkering with diving in deep Swiss lakes. He discovered of the diving bell ideas, and constructed a rudimentary wood helmet to behave because the bell, with hoses to pump in oxygen. It barely labored, “Worked very bad,” Keller really mentioned. But his tinkerer’s mind was instantly fascinated with the issues of deep sea diving.
There is barely sufficient ‘air’ to breathe and it’s bitter chilly, even colder than the ice water during which we now hover. My tooth itch. I attempt to say okay however can not handle it.
Keller reasoned that since area exploration required governmental help and monetary assets unavailable to yard diving lovers, he might make his mark as an explorer by conquering new depths within the ocean.
He began working with a physiologist on the University of Zurich, Dr. Albert Buhlmann, experimenting with totally different gasoline mixtures to keep away from nitrogen narcosis (a state much like drunkenness attributable to respiratory gases below strain) and the final issues related to decompression illness. The two tasked themselves with drastically shortening the time it took for a deep sea diver to decompress on the way in which to the floor. At the time, dives a whole bunch of ft down required sitting in a decompression chamber for twelve hours or extra. Keller and Buhlmann wished to go right down to 700 ft and get better in an hour.
Keller, proper, and MacLeish, left, at Lake Maggiore. Photo: US Navy
In 1961, Keller and journalist Ken MacLeish of Life Magazine plunged into the depths of Switzerland’s Lake Maggiore taking pictures for that mark, hoping a proprietary desk of gases launched at prescribed depths would maintain the lads secure. It labored, nevertheless it was depressing. At 328 ft, once they switched to a deepwater gasoline combination to breathe, MacLeish reported:
“There is barely enough ‘air’ to breathe and it is bitter cold, even colder than the ice water in which we now hover. My teeth itch. I try to say okay but cannot manage it. Still, it appears that we can live on what we are getting.”
Motivated by that success, Keller determined to shoot for the moon. Or, slightly, the deep depths of the ocean off the coast of Southern California. He determined he’d attempt to break the 1,000-foot barrier with the assistance of Buhlmann’s gasoline mixing tables. Might as nicely have been the moon at that depth.
December, 1962, Keller and one other journalist, Peter Small, a diver with loads of expertise, have been primarily involved with the ascent and whether or not the gasoline blends concocted by Keller and Buhlmann (with the assistance of a hulking, rudimentary IBM pc crunching numbers) would forestall them getting the bends once they rose again to the floor.
“Anybody can go down,” Keller advised Life Magazine about deepwater dives. Getting to the floor in a single piece was the problem. Keller and Small descended with out incident to 1,000 ft, setting the file Keller had hoped for. But as he left the diving bell, the Atlantis, to sink Swiss and American flags on the underside, his ft bought tangled in his respiratory hoses. Alarmed, he returned to the Atlantis however struggled to shut the hatch. A TV digital camera monitored from above confirmed Keller and Small appearing disoriented, then collapsing into unconsciousness because the Atlantis slowly rose to the floor. Two divers have been despatched to research and one was in a position to shut the hatch, however the different diver merely vanished into the deep. His physique was by no means discovered.
Small and Keller each got here to through the ascent, however Small was deeply sickened. Before satisfactory medical assist may very well be summoned, he died of the decompression illness each males dreaded. It was assumed the gasoline mix was both miscalculated or someway went unhealthy.
Diving historian Christopher Swann advised the New York Times, Keller’s dive “was a milepost in the sense that it was the first time something like that had been done.” But in the end, Swann concluded, it needed to be thought of a failure as a result of two divers misplaced their lives.
Yet Keller’s push to 1,000 ft opened eyes within the diving world, with the mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and helium the divers used exhibiting what was potential. Saturation diving, which makes use of complicated blends of gases that dissolve in a diver’s blood to match the ambient strain of the surroundings, got here alongside within the decade after Keller’s dive. That technique permits divers to securely plunge to nice depths and spend time working earlier than returning to the floor to spend days decompressing. And at the very least one diver has handed the 1,000-foot mark swimming in modified SCUBA gear.
Keller felt the ocean ground was the final nice unexplored realm on the planet.
“If a man could go, for instance, to 1,000 feet down and do practical work,” Keller advised The Sydney Morning Herald, “then all the continental shelf zone could be explored, a total of more than 16 million square miles.”
Keller went on to develop extra deepwater diving gear, then developed software program. He died in 2022 on the age of 88.