Low Ball

Analogs of Professor Auguste Placard's flights toward the stratosphere above Switzerland are Dr. William Beebe's dives toward the bottom of the sea off Bermuda. Dr. Beebe, field agent for the New York Zoological Society, uses a bathysphere. 4 3/4 ft. quartz-windowed steel ball with walls 1 1/2 in. thick. Its purpose is to withstand the pressure of deep sea water, whereas Professor Piccard's 7-ft. aluminum gondola was constructed to prevent its explosion in rarefied air.

Fortnight ago Dr. Beebe lowered his bathysphere empty to 3,000 ft. at the end of a stout cable. When he hauled it back to the deck of his tug Freedom, the bathysphere was full of water under pressure such that it blew the lid's bolt across the deck after it was loosened. There was a tiny leak in a port gasket. Any surface creature inside would have been crushed to jelly.

Dr. Beebe made sure that the bathysphere was water-tight when he and Otis Barton, builder of the diving ball, took a deep ride last week. Dr. Beebe had descended 1,426 ft. two years ago, a record (TIME, June 23, 1930). Last week he broke this record.

An intelligent publicist, he had arranged for a radio broadcast of his descent. A telephone line ran between the bathysphere and the tug Freedom. So the world heard a description which, while less Shelleyesque than Professor Piccard's stratospheric exuberances (TIME, Aug. 29), ran in the same strain of ecstasy.

1,500 ft.: "Black as Hades."

1.550 ft.: "There is plenty of light down here now."

1,650 ft.: "It is absolutely black. Now there are fish about two or three feet away. I can make out their forms from their own light. There are a great many of them. ... It is the most amazing thing now, the amount of light down here."

Gloria Hollister, a comely assistant handling the telephone aboard the Freedom, asked: "Can you give the light a color?"

Dr. Beebe, shouting: "It varies from pale blue to pale green. But all on the very pale side. No deep tone. It must be the normal luminescence of the creatures."

2,000 ft.: "Loads of little. ... I don't know what they are."

2,200 ft.: "Rolling like the dickens."

The water pressure on the bathysphere was about 4,800 tons; the temperature 50DEGF within. Dr. Beebe ordered the sphere raised to the Freedom's deck, popped out with: "The scientific results are most satisfactory."

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