Tommy Patterson, age 12, of Gastonia, N.C., for his questlon:
What is a bathysphere ?
Our bodies are designed to withstand the normal pressure of air and water is much, much heavier than air. At 60 feet down, a deep sea diver needs a sturdy helmet to protect his head. He can descend to 500 feet, but this is the limit. Down here he needs a complete diving suit and so much armor that he can hardly move around: He also needs a constant supply of oxygen. Under such handicaps, he can hardly do mu;h exploring.
The deepest ocean floor is more than seven miles below the surface. At 1400 feet, the water pressure is 650 pounds upon every square inch. At seven miles it is about ten tons upon every square inch. These figures are scary enough to make anyone give up the idea of exploring the deep ocean for himself. However, they did not scare William Beebe, who was born in Brooklyn., N.Y.
Beebe was a naturalist., a student of nature, with all his heart. He was curator of birds for the New York Zoological Society. His many scientific explorations made him a world traveler,. Then, of ail things, Beebe wanted to explore the deep ocean, deeper than any diver could go. The problem, of course, was the deadly water pressure. This Beebe solved with his bathysphere a word coined from bathos, meaning depth,
Basically, the machine was a steel chamber in the shape of a sphere. The sphere was four and a half feet wide and a window of thick fused quartz was set into one side. The little chamber weighed two and half tons and it was lowered from a ship by steel cables. Inside there was a telephone with wires leading up t o the ship.
In 1930 Beebe and his co worker Otis Barton descended to a depth of 3,028 feet in his deep diving device. This deep diving record took place six miles south of Nonsuch Island in the Bermudas.
The bathysphere was the original deep sea diving machine, but bigger and better ones were to follow.. Later, Barton built a diving sphere which he called the benthosphere. In 1934, he descended in it 5000 feet off the coast of California. And last year all records were broken, perhaps for ever. A new diving sphere called the bathyscope descended seven miles into the Pacific ocean. All these machines are similar to Beebe's original bathysphere.
These diving machines have revealed all sorts of new data about life in the deep ocean. However, powerful searchlights are needed down there, for sunlight pierces only the surface of the sea. The red, orange and yellow rays of light are filtered out at a depth of 200 to 300 feet. The green rays reach a little lower. At 1,000 feet, the blue rays have also gone and below this the deep ocean is midnight black.