Naturalist William Beebe (1877-1962) was a great popularizer of science in the 1920s and 1930s. A prolific writer of 15 books and a sought-after lecturer, he was a scientist who did well financially.
His lifelong love for natural history began as a child. At Columbia University he worked part-time at the New York Zoological Society's park (the future Bronx Zoo). In 1899, after three years at Columbia, he left without a degree. Beebe's career with the Zoological Society began that year, when he was appointed assistant bird keeper at the park. Three years later he became curator of birds.
In 1903 he went to Mexico on his first field expedition to collect bird specimens. This was the first of many such trips, with the last being in the 1940s. Each of them was good for a book and profitable lecture tours.
In 1922 he was appointed director of the Zoological Society's department of tropical research and concurrently honorary curator of birds. He kept both titles until his retirement from the society in 1952.
Although he was a "bird man" and tropical naturalist for most of his career, Beebe's lasting fame came from his exploration of the sea. In 1925 he began helmet diving, taking his natural history fascination underwater. His dives were limited to about 60 feet—but he knew he had to go deeper than the penetration of sunlight. In 1926, from his office at the Zoological Society, he asked for proposals to build a deep-diving machine. Deluged with half-baked concepts, he all but gave up on his dream.
Otis Barton, an engineering graduate student at Columbia, was working on a deep submersible design of his own at the time. When he learned of Beebe's interest, Barton wrote several letters with sketches of his concept. The design-saturated Beebe, however, did not respond. Finally, a mutual friend got them together. The two met in late 1928 and the "bathysphere" (Greek for "deep ball") project was born. The wealthy Barton offered to contribute his own funds for construction. In addition, the New York Zoological Society and the National Geographic Society also invested in the project.
Built in the late 1920s, the bathysphere was a cast-steel sphere equipped with three windows and a heavy hatch that was bolted from the outside. The sphere was tethered to a 3,500-foot-long, inch-thick steel cable tended by a winch on board a support vessel. In addition to the lift cable there was a rubber hose containing lines for electrical power and communications. Inside the cabin there was barely space for two men along with a supply of oxygen and carbon-dioxide- and moisture-absorbing chemicals. A barge optimistically named Ready was procured and operations began near Bermuda's Nonsuch Island. The island was owned by Beebe, purchased with the royalties from his books.
Diving operations commenced in June 1930. In 1933 the submersible was overhauled and returned to service the next year. A total of 35 dives were made, with the deepest being to 3,028 feet in August 1934. Although Beebe and Barton remained at this depth for only five minutes, it was this dive that gave the name to Beebe's 1934 book, Half Mile Down. He had been on all 35 dives; Barton made all but 4. There were many firsts with regard to sightings of new species of marine life (some critics said Beebe even invented a few). There also were many operational firsts. Most obvious was the series of record depths, but there also was the first live radio broadcast (1932) from beneath the sea.
After the Bermuda series, the bathysphere never dove again. Beebe left marine research behind to resume science on land. Apparently his curiosity about the sea had been sated. Today, the bathysphere can be seen at the New York Aquarium.
In 1949, Barton built the "benthoscope" bathysphere. It made just a few dives off the California coast, with the maximum depth being 4,500 feet. His record did not survive for long; that same year Auguste Piccard tested the first "bathyscaphe" ("deep boat"). By 1954, a French Navy version dove to 12,500 feet off West Africa. Finally, in 1960, the U.S. Navy bathyscaphe Trieste plunged nearly seven miles to the greatest depth in the ocean. This event was not quite three decades after Beebe and Barton had heroically seized world attention with their pioneering bathysphere exploits. Indeed, they were the first hydronauts.