Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: we're back with part two of our two part exploration
Speaker 1: of the Depths of the Sea, the History of Knowledge
Speaker 1: and Exploration of the Deep Sea. And this this time
Speaker 1: we're really going to be focusing in on William B. B.
Speaker 1: That's right. We we alluded to him at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the last episode. So he was an American naturalist, explorer, author. Uh.
Speaker 1: He lived from eighteen seventy seven to nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: and uh, he was He was a very interesting fellow,
Speaker 1: just to put him mildly. Before there was Neil deGrasse
Speaker 1: Tyson or Carl Sagan or even Jacques Cousteau, there was
Speaker 1: William Beebe, who some writers have called the first celebrity scientist.
Speaker 1: So he he traveled around and lectured, he wrote books,
Speaker 1: he recruited, we received quite a bit of media coverage,
Speaker 1: and he was actually in writing books. He was a
Speaker 1: good writers. This thing that helps. Yeah, he was a
Speaker 1: good popularizer of science. He was a great science communicator.
Speaker 1: Before this was really that much of a thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I often think of Darwin as a great science communicator,
Speaker 1: but yeah, Beebe really took it to the next level,
Speaker 1: especially as we'll talk about in a minute, by employing
Speaker 1: all kinds of people to help spread the message of
Speaker 1: scientific discoveries in ways that are easily digestible to the public. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he he was an ornithologist at the New York
Speaker 1: Zoological Society and uh he he actually left college before
Speaker 1: completing his degree in order to to to work, uh
Speaker 1: for for the society. But he just he's one of
Speaker 1: these guys who just seemed to really just ascend once
Speaker 1: he you know, once he hit the ground working he
Speaker 1: was he was have ended up being becoming the founder
Speaker 1: of the Society's Department of Tropical Research. And he conducted
Speaker 1: he conducted research, it's worth noting across two world wars
Speaker 1: and the Great Depression, Like that was the time period,
Speaker 1: the trying time period, a time when most of the
Speaker 1: energy in the world seemed to be aimed at either
Speaker 1: conducting warfare, surviving warfare, surviving economic depression. Uh. But he
Speaker 1: was able to successfully carry out a great deal of
Speaker 1: research and uh and then communicate the Department of the
Speaker 1: Tropical researches work as well, and to do this he
Speaker 1: enlisted not only scientists but also historians, writers, and artists.
Speaker 1: And by this I mean he took artists with him
Speaker 1: on his expeditions, generating some really captivating artwork, and b
Speaker 1: B himself sketched the creatures that he saw in the depths.
Speaker 1: I mean it's really kind of surprising, however, though, that that,
Speaker 1: given that he was such a celebrity at the time, uh,
Speaker 1: that that we don't see him celebrated as much in
Speaker 1: pop culture today. Like he's certainly again he's remembered. It's
Speaker 1: not like he's forgotten and lost to history. But you
Speaker 1: would just think that he would have more of a
Speaker 1: like a tesla status today. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: will say that again. Before we went to this recent
Speaker 1: exhibit at the American Museum and Natural History of New
Speaker 1: York about the Unseen Depths of the Ocean, had some
Speaker 1: stuff about BB before that. I think maybe I was
Speaker 1: a little bit aware of him, but didn't really know anything.
Speaker 1: And that's crazy because his life and his work was
Speaker 1: so interesting. Yeah. I mean, for starters, he influenced the
Speaker 1: number of notable people, um for instance, EO. Wilson who
Speaker 1: we've discussed on the show before. Uh has has pointed
Speaker 1: to William B. B as someone who inspired his scientific career. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of interesting things about Bebe's legacy.
Speaker 1: One cool one that does get mentioned sometimes is the
Speaker 1: fact that he was criticized during his life for hiring
Speaker 1: and mentoring female researchers, which a lot of irritable sexist
Speaker 1: establishment scientists of the time thought was an indication that
Speaker 1: his work was not serious or was unprofessional. Uh. But
Speaker 1: of course they were wrong, right. Bbe helped give a
Speaker 1: leg up to great scientists like Joscelyn Crane, who studied,
Speaker 1: among other things, invertebrate ethology, so the behavior of invertebrates,
Speaker 1: with a special focus on fiddler crabs, and also the
Speaker 1: explorer and research scientists Gloria Hollister, who pioneered lab techniques
Speaker 1: for preparing marine specimens, and she herself actually performed dives
Speaker 1: in the capsule that we're gonna be talking about more
Speaker 1: in this episode of the Bathosphere, the steel ball that
Speaker 1: finally took us down into the depths. Some of the
Speaker 1: females he employed were also artists as well. There's actually
Speaker 1: a wonderful New York Times article that came out, uh,
Speaker 1: just last year about an exhibition of various works from
Speaker 1: this period that I recommend everyone check out it. If
Speaker 1: you just look for William Bbe Department of Trapical Research illustrations,
Speaker 1: you'll find it. And there's some just some fabulous illustrations
Speaker 1: that say that the bathosphere descending into the depths with
Speaker 1: strange creatures swirling around it. Yeah, if you get a chance,
Speaker 1: you should look up illustrations. Especially I would say of
Speaker 1: the artist Elsa Bostelmann, who she was one of the
Speaker 1: artists who accompanied his research, and she sketched and painted
Speaker 1: what bb And and his companion, notice Bartan saw in
Speaker 1: the deep from the bathosphere, which we're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about more later. But her work is just beautiful and
Speaker 1: weird and superb. It's uh, it's excellent science art. Yeah.
Speaker 1: For reasons that will become obvious. Uh, as we proceed
Speaker 1: of photography or certainly film was just not an option
Speaker 1: aboard the bathosphere, so they had to depend on sketches, uh.
Speaker 1: And and also just you have to consider the time
Speaker 1: during which all this have taken place. For instance, one
Speaker 1: of his dives was actually broadcast on NBC Radio, which
Speaker 1: is a testament to the popularity of his work, but
Speaker 1: also just shows you the limitations of the visual technology
Speaker 1: at the time. Now, of course, another great weird note
Speaker 1: in pop culture is that BB's elaborator Otis Barton, who
Speaker 1: was his his co pilot in the Bathosphere and one
Speaker 1: of the people, I think the designer, the main designer
Speaker 1: of the Bathosphere, made a movie, made a movie based
Speaker 1: on what they did. Yeah, Titans of the Deep. And
Speaker 1: if you look at the poster art for this film,
Speaker 1: and I'll try to include it on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode, is stuff to blow your mind. It
Speaker 1: creates certain expectations of the content. Yeah, I will say
Speaker 1: it's so it's supposed to be like a documentary film,
Speaker 1: right that they made it as a documentary apparently, And
Speaker 1: even though it's like BB is mentioned on the on
Speaker 1: the poster, it's really apparently. BB wasn't himself super involved
Speaker 1: in the production. Yeah, I've seen it actually described as
Speaker 1: more of like an action movie or an exploitation horror movie.
Speaker 1: I couldn't. I couldn't find this movie, so I don't
Speaker 1: I didn't get to watch it, Yeah I would. I
Speaker 1: was not able to find, uh, even any footage from
Speaker 1: it or a trailer or what would pass for a trailer.
Speaker 1: But you can definitely get a say of the vibe
Speaker 1: they were going for if you just look at the poster,
Speaker 1: which of course has like a vague whale shaped sea
Speaker 1: monster with this big saw toothed face and then a
Speaker 1: dude with a harpoon poise to hit it. It looks
Speaker 1: in composition like the much later poster for the movie
Speaker 1: Journey to the Seventh Planet, which is this nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: two sci fi barbecue about a bunch of astronauts who
Speaker 1: fly out to explore Uranus and then get this They
Speaker 1: essentially end up with a d intellectualized version of the
Speaker 1: plot from Solaris and the movie stars of course, John
Speaker 1: agar Ah, yes a frequent a frequent name for anyone's
Speaker 1: who's ever plunged the depths of of B movies from
Speaker 1: that era. But if you look at this poster for
Speaker 1: Journey to the Seventh Planet, it's I don't know if
Speaker 1: it was actually inspired by Titans of the Deep, but
Speaker 1: they look very similar to me. I also found an
Speaker 1: image this is an advertisement. But it turns out even
Speaker 1: Otis Barton, who accompanied William BB in the Bathosphere, he
Speaker 1: is famous enough at the time to appear in a
Speaker 1: camel advertisement for Camel cigarettes where you see him featured
Speaker 1: there and he's saying, I smoke as many camels as
Speaker 1: I like. They don't give me jittery nerves. Camels have
Speaker 1: a have a swell taste, mild and yet with rich,
Speaker 1: mellow flavor. I smoked them all in the bathosphere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't. I do not think the bathosphere is a
Speaker 1: good smoking environment. Two packs per dive. Well, we've been
Speaker 1: teasing it enough. I think maybe we should take a
Speaker 1: quick break and then when we come back, we should
Speaker 1: discuss the bathosphere itself. All right, than alright, we're back, alright,
Speaker 1: So I will refer you to an image like a
Speaker 1: photograph of the bathosphere on the landing page for this
Speaker 1: episode is stuff to blow your mind dot com. But
Speaker 1: we're also going to describe it for you here, so
Speaker 1: no need to pull the car over. What happ you
Speaker 1: depending on how you're listening to us. So as you're
Speaker 1: trying to imagine the bathosphere, it's probably best to dismiss
Speaker 1: some of your more modern and TV friendly notions of
Speaker 1: exploratory submarine means, because the bathosphere was less of a
Speaker 1: submarine and more of just a death trap. Right. It's like,
Speaker 1: would you like to get inside a bowling ball and
Speaker 1: go to the bottom of the ocean. Yeah, a steel
Speaker 1: ball that men climb inside and then it is lowered
Speaker 1: into the ocean depths. Let's let's ask some questions. Does
Speaker 1: this have a propeller? No? Does it have fins? Does
Speaker 1: it have robotic arms? Does it have really anything on
Speaker 1: the outside other than just a steel sphere? I mean, basically,
Speaker 1: it is a steel bowling ball that men climb inside
Speaker 1: through what what Bby referred to just as the door,
Speaker 1: and then it has even door is a little misleading, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's not really a door. They got in
Speaker 1: through a hole that was then bolted shut, right, See,
Speaker 1: its sealed shut like a like an iron casket. And
Speaker 1: then it has these three, uh the three portals that
Speaker 1: they look out off. It look kind of like stubby
Speaker 1: eyes talks. So, Robert, how big was the bathosphere that
Speaker 1: the two people got into? Well, here's a here's a
Speaker 1: quick quote from Baby from his biography Half Mile Down,
Speaker 1: which which we're gonna refer to a lot. If if
Speaker 1: if we read a quote quote from Baby in this
Speaker 1: and we don't fully attribute it. It's from half mile down.
Speaker 1: Baby says. It was not as tall as a man,
Speaker 1: measuring only four ft nine inches in diameter, but its
Speaker 1: walls were everywhere an inch and a quarter thick, and
Speaker 1: it weighed five thousand, four hundred pounds. A first casting
Speaker 1: had weighed twice as much, but it would have been
Speaker 1: too heavy for any of the winches available in Bermuda.
Speaker 1: And was jumped. Now about this steel ball. If you
Speaker 1: don't have an intuitive sense of numbers to physical scale,
Speaker 1: I want to pause for a second and dwell on
Speaker 1: how tiny this is. You can buy beach balls bigger
Speaker 1: than this undersea exploration vessel. That's crazy. You included a
Speaker 1: picture here on our notes showing what a sixty inch
Speaker 1: beach ball looks like next to presumably an average sized individual.
Speaker 1: I guess this is probably a tall guy, but but
Speaker 1: still imagine two of him inside of it. That's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: And that's bigger than the bathosphere was. This was this
Speaker 1: thing was tiny. People like they were crammed inside. But
Speaker 1: there was a reason it had to be that small, right, Yeah, Because,
Speaker 1: as William J. Broad points out in his book The
Speaker 1: Universe Below, the smaller the sphere the greater strength of
Speaker 1: its walls. If you had more space in there, you
Speaker 1: need thicker walls, which would of course mean increasing the
Speaker 1: weight of the thing. So yeah, we run into the
Speaker 1: problem with with with the winches that we've already discussed.
Speaker 1: It's almost like a parallel of the problems of shielding
Speaker 1: from radiation in space, right, Like, you want to send
Speaker 1: up a spacecraft that will protect the astronauts with really
Speaker 1: thick shielding in the walls, but you've got a problem
Speaker 1: with getting so much mass up into space that you know,
Speaker 1: you could have all these really really thick walls. It's
Speaker 1: like a parallel to that. You know, you you could
Speaker 1: have really really thick walls to make sure you're super
Speaker 1: protected from the pressure and you've got enough room to
Speaker 1: move around, but it gets harder and harder to get
Speaker 1: you down into the depths and back up safely if
Speaker 1: you do that. Yeah. So this was designed by bb
Speaker 1: an American engineer Otis Barton, who already mentioned, and it
Speaker 1: featured three viewing portals, and these were This was not glass.
Speaker 1: You couldn't just look out just normal glass because it
Speaker 1: needed to withstand the pressure. This was fused quartz eight
Speaker 1: inches in diameter and three inches thick, and the fittings again,
Speaker 1: they looked like stubby eye stalks. It's like a three
Speaker 1: eyed monster. Yeah, and quartz was used because it was
Speaker 1: the quote strongest transparent substance known and it transmits all
Speaker 1: wavelengths of light. Now, earlier we mentioned the door that
Speaker 1: wasn't really a door. What does BB say about the door?
Speaker 1: He describes it as a quote round four hundred pound
Speaker 1: lid that quote had to be lifted on and off
Speaker 1: by a block and tackle and fitted snugly over ten
Speaker 1: large bolts around the manhole. The ladder just big enough
Speaker 1: to permit the passage of a slender human body. Bebe
Speaker 1: was a very slender guy, we should point out. I've
Speaker 1: seen pictures of him and he is spind lee. Now,
Speaker 1: on top of that, let's discuss some of the other
Speaker 1: attributes of physical attributes of the bathisphere. It had a
Speaker 1: single external light, just one thousand wats and one light,
Speaker 1: and you flipped it on or off from inside. And
Speaker 1: the sphere was lowered on a single steel, non twisting
Speaker 1: cable nearly an inch in diameter with a breaking strain
Speaker 1: of twenty nine tons, or a dozen bathispheres Okay, So
Speaker 1: they wanted to be real safe because of course, if
Speaker 1: that cable breaks, you're in a world a hurt. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're done for, and you have to worry about
Speaker 1: more than just the what happens if the cable breaks,
Speaker 1: So you have to worry about, well, what if they're
Speaker 1: stormy weather, et cetera. Now you mentioned there's a light
Speaker 1: on the thing, so that means they got to get
Speaker 1: power down there somehow. Yeah, So they had an additional
Speaker 1: cable that carried both the electrical power and the telephone wires. Oh,
Speaker 1: telephone wires. So they had to have some way to
Speaker 1: communicate with the service, right, I assume they couldn't just
Speaker 1: tug on the cable. Yeah, I don't think that would work.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, this is this is kind of the
Speaker 1: limits of their connection to the surface. They had electricity
Speaker 1: coming down, and they had that telephone wire. They did
Speaker 1: not have an air tube coming down. But of course
Speaker 1: they had to breathe. So the bathmosphere included oxygen tanks
Speaker 1: with automatic valves up that provided uh, the atmosphere, and
Speaker 1: then they just had trays of chemical setting out. I
Speaker 1: believe it was soda, lime, and calcium chloride. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: this was to absorb moisture and carbon dioxide because you
Speaker 1: don't just need fresh air to breathe in, you need
Speaker 1: to scrub the carbon dioxide that you're breathing out. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I would, I would just want to drive home. How
Speaker 1: I mean, it's an amazing invention, but how dangerously crude
Speaker 1: it can it can feel. It reminds me of there
Speaker 1: was the Night film? Was it The Voyagers? Explorers? Yes,
Speaker 1: where the kids build this kind of spaceship that sets
Speaker 1: inside a like a magic force field sphere. But they
Speaker 1: just build it, right, They just constructed from what they
Speaker 1: have at hand, And there's a there's a similar vibe
Speaker 1: with the bath Isphere like that. There's just it's just
Speaker 1: so ballsy to imagine climbing in this thing and to
Speaker 1: the death. I mean, it is a large ball. It
Speaker 1: is a it is a steel ball. Yes, and even
Speaker 1: though it holds two divers and is essentially a two
Speaker 1: man crew. Uh. BB says that the total crew required
Speaker 1: to support this thing, uh, most of which you're going
Speaker 1: to be members on the surface. Uh, it comes to
Speaker 1: around twenty eight people total, so two under the water,
Speaker 1: above the water. All right, So let's say you're William Beebe,
Speaker 1: and you're like, Okay, I've got a steel ball to Diane, Um,
Speaker 1: where where are we going to put this down in
Speaker 1: the water. Well, they set their side some the deep
Speaker 1: seas off the coast of Bermuda, Uh, specifically a circular
Speaker 1: area about eight miles in diameter near non Such Island,
Speaker 1: and here the depth reached about a mile. The first
Speaker 1: dive occurred in nineteen thirty. By June eleven, nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: they've reached the depth of feet or four ds. In in
Speaker 1: in n four they reached three thousand feet or nine
Speaker 1: d and that was, of course, by far the world record.
Speaker 1: That they went much lower than anybody had ever been
Speaker 1: able to explore before. Yeah, they were really breaking new
Speaker 1: grounds with this. Now, the bathosphere greatly improved humanity's ability
Speaker 1: to explore the depths UH. But again it was it
Speaker 1: was ultimately a risky vessel to use, and it was
Speaker 1: soon replaced by safer designs, including the bath Escape, which
Speaker 1: positioned a traditional bathosphere beneath a large float, and even
Speaker 1: the likes of the modern Deep Sea Challenger famously piloted
Speaker 1: by James Cameron that boasts a pilot sphere position beneath
Speaker 1: the rest of the vessel. So you can think of
Speaker 1: post bathosphere designs as just basically being the bathosphere attached
Speaker 1: to a larger system of flotation submarine submarine. Basically like,
Speaker 1: let's attach this to a submarine that has power, that
Speaker 1: has the ability to to to raise and lower itself
Speaker 1: within the water. But the bathosphere was was just the sphere,
Speaker 1: just the this uh, this steel container for the humans
Speaker 1: to descend in. Having your own power really does seem
Speaker 1: to make a difference, right, I mean, there's a huge
Speaker 1: difference between being in a submarine that can move and
Speaker 1: just hanging in a ball on a thread. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean just the psychological uh notion here, just the idea
Speaker 1: that they have something if I if I get tired
Speaker 1: of descending into the darkness of the deep sea, then
Speaker 1: I can just I can I can raise myself out
Speaker 1: of this. I have some level of control, and I'm
Speaker 1: not just hoping that everything is going okay up there
Speaker 1: on the surface. Now. Of course, by virtue of the
Speaker 1: fact that bb and his team went deeper than anyone
Speaker 1: ever had before, he got to observe far more than
Speaker 1: anyone ever had before. So I think we should go
Speaker 1: into his scientific observations, and we'll do that right after
Speaker 1: this break. Thank thank alright, we're back. So William bebe
Speaker 1: the modern guilt a mesh. He and his co pilot
Speaker 1: are in the ball in the steel death trap, sinking down,
Speaker 1: down down into the ocean, deeper than anybody's ever gone before,
Speaker 1: and looking out the portholes to see what they can see.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what they see. What did they
Speaker 1: discover through this research method? Well, BB observed and sketched
Speaker 1: again because cameras of the day were largely useless given
Speaker 1: the conditions of the bathosphere in its environment. But he
Speaker 1: described a world quote stranger than any imagination could have conceived,
Speaker 1: and he writes about it very beautifully. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: and he really brought the results between N and n
Speaker 1: b B and his team caught more than a hundred
Speaker 1: and fifteen thousand animals from two hundred and twenty species,
Speaker 1: many many of which were new to science, so they
Speaker 1: were combining different research methods at the same time. Now,
Speaker 1: before we get into some of the specific creatures that
Speaker 1: he saw claim to have seen, uh, we should probably
Speaker 1: just talk about his experience with darkness and light, because
Speaker 1: ultimately that is the how that that's kind of the
Speaker 1: defining experience that he describes. Oh exactly, so Bb Rights quote.
Speaker 1: In the course of the half mile down, although my
Speaker 1: eyes were perfectly dark adapted, I could detect not the
Speaker 1: faintest glimmer of light from seventeen hundred feet down. So,
Speaker 1: as far as the human eye was concerned, conditions of
Speaker 1: absolute darkness existed at these deeper levels. And then he says,
Speaker 1: from seventeen hundred feet down, animal light is the only
Speaker 1: external source of illumination. So of course they did have
Speaker 1: a light they could flip on, but they didn't want
Speaker 1: to do that all the time, right, because that would
Speaker 1: be affecting and changing the environment, So they didn't do
Speaker 1: that always. They would try to see, often just what
Speaker 1: they could see in the dark that was self illuminated.
Speaker 1: And when you go that far down, there actually are
Speaker 1: very many bioluminescent creatures that will illuminate themselves for you
Speaker 1: to see, but they'll also illuminate the water so that
Speaker 1: you can see other animals around them. And bb Rights quote,
Speaker 1: occasionally the head of a fish would appear conspicuously against
Speaker 1: the surround black, illumined by some indirect source of unknown lighting.
Speaker 1: Eyes especially stood out with no definite source of light visible.
Speaker 1: When teeth were thus silhouetted, I knew it was from
Speaker 1: a luminous mucus which covered them. Cheek lights flashed and
Speaker 1: dimmed or vanished, altogether showing some control other than the
Speaker 1: usual disappearance into an opaque epidermal trench. And I should
Speaker 1: mention those last quotes I provided came from a paper
Speaker 1: he published in Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty two or thirty three. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: extremely impressed by the display of bioluminescence as as he descended.
Speaker 1: So he noted the lights of fish, jellies and various
Speaker 1: animals that he couldn't really identify in passing, and it
Speaker 1: was something of a revelation to him. About a third
Speaker 1: of a mile down he saw something that he described
Speaker 1: as a quote pyrotechnic network and was and it was
Speaker 1: quote so delicate and evanescent that its abyssal form is
Speaker 1: quite lost if we ever take get in our nets. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, if we were just to pull this up,
Speaker 1: you know what, what would we have. We would have
Speaker 1: maybe some shriveled mass, but we certainly would not have
Speaker 1: this floating bioluminescent thing that I'm witnessing right now. Well,
Speaker 1: in the last episode we talked about the c cucumber
Speaker 1: that turns to red kool aid. Here you would guess
Speaker 1: turn into Buyo luminescent kool aid. And then there's this,
Speaker 1: there's this, this description of the Abyssle rainbow cars, which
Speaker 1: will come back to later on. He says, at eleven
Speaker 1: seventeen o'clock, I turned the light on suddenly and saw
Speaker 1: a strange quartet of fish to which I have not
Speaker 1: been able to fit genus or family, shape, size, color,
Speaker 1: and one fin I saw clearly. But Ourbissle rainbow cars
Speaker 1: is as far as I dare go. You other words
Speaker 1: these saying that's as far as I dare go, and
Speaker 1: classifying it and naming it quote. And they may be
Speaker 1: anything but cars about four inches overall. They were slender
Speaker 1: and stiff, with long, sharply pointed jaws. And it's worth
Speaker 1: noting no one has ever captured a specimen quite like this,
Speaker 1: nor seen it uh. And this this is one of
Speaker 1: the mysteries that arises from William Beebe's observations. Specimens that
Speaker 1: have have not been caught or even witnessed again, and
Speaker 1: we're left to wonder what what did he see? Right?
Speaker 1: Did he have access somehow to to seeing things no
Speaker 1: one has actually seen since then? Or was he mistaken?
Speaker 1: Did he think he was seeing something that he actually
Speaker 1: wasn't or was he making it up? I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't want to think he was making it up, but
Speaker 1: I guess we have to consider that as possibility. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll touch on that some of the thinking
Speaker 1: on that a little later. But but one thing we
Speaker 1: should go ahead and drive home here is that again,
Speaker 1: the bathosphere did not have an engine on it, It
Speaker 1: did not have propellers. It was a very silent affair
Speaker 1: in a realm where we're sound truly carries and can
Speaker 1: have damaging effects, especially our modern uh our modern state
Speaker 1: of affairs with with with ships and sonar. But even
Speaker 1: just a noisy submarine would have potentially scared away various species.
Speaker 1: So there is an argument to be made here that
Speaker 1: the bathosphere, as it's descending rather silently and at times
Speaker 1: uh an incomplete darkness, would have attracted or been or
Speaker 1: at least would not have have frightened away species that
Speaker 1: would recoil from a modern exploratory submarine. That's interesting, and
Speaker 1: that's that's a good point to keep in mind as
Speaker 1: we go on and discuss some more of the things
Speaker 1: he recorded seeing. I think if you have the ability
Speaker 1: while you're listening, you should look up some of the
Speaker 1: artworks of Elsa bo Stelman. She was again one of
Speaker 1: the artists who was doing sketches for for BB's team,
Speaker 1: and so it would be great to have some of
Speaker 1: those in front of your eyes while we're talking here. Now,
Speaker 1: another variety of fish that BB reported seeing are the dragonfish.
Speaker 1: Now these are different than sea dragons, right quote a
Speaker 1: six inch dragonfish or still Maya's past. Lights first visible
Speaker 1: than three seconds of searchlight for identification, then lights alone.
Speaker 1: And there seemed no reason why we should not swing
Speaker 1: the door open and swim swim out. Now I can
Speaker 1: think of various reasons not to do that, baby, but
Speaker 1: I understand that he's trying to capture his excitement here.
Speaker 1: It's the deep sea version of the thing, like you know,
Speaker 1: the sudden desire to the call of the void, right yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: or the desire to like swerve into oncoming traffic. So
Speaker 1: he was this was his guess that these were dragonfish.
Speaker 1: And again we have to put ourselves in the bathmosphere
Speaker 1: and imagine peering out through these tiny uh courtz lenses
Speaker 1: at at things just swimming by, sometimes lingering but maybe not,
Speaker 1: sometimes wholly visible for a few seconds, sometimes only partially visible.
Speaker 1: But he guessed that these were some variety of dragonfish. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the particular species that he was describing was unknown
Speaker 1: to science at the time, but he was familiar with
Speaker 1: other species of stomias. Now he apparently reported seeing a
Speaker 1: six foot dragonfish as well as a marine biologist and
Speaker 1: author Richard Ellis discusses in his book Singing Whales and
Speaker 1: Flying Squid the Discovery of marine life. So to put
Speaker 1: that in perspective, uh, I believe the largest known dragonfish
Speaker 1: at the time was a mere fifteen inches in length. Wow.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you look up what dragonfish look like
Speaker 1: they are, it is terrifying to imagine a six foot
Speaker 1: long one. It's kind of like. Uh. In fact, I
Speaker 1: would compare it very much to the discovery of the
Speaker 1: six foot long Cambrian predator Anomala carrass right. Uh. The
Speaker 1: the idea that something that creepy could get that big
Speaker 1: is really disturbing. Yeah, So these these creatures were members
Speaker 1: of the order stomaformes, which also includes the viperfish, which
Speaker 1: Bebe also notes on his dives. Now, in the introduction
Speaker 1: UH to the novel Starfish UH, the author Peter Watts,
Speaker 1: who was also also as a marine biology background, he
Speaker 1: mentions bb having reported a seven foot viperfish. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't doubt Wat's in this, but I can't
Speaker 1: personally find a reference to this particular sighting. But then again,
Speaker 1: I didn't look at all of the scientific papers that
Speaker 1: that baby put out over the years. But but he
Speaker 1: certainly mentions viperfish in his biography and the idea if
Speaker 1: you look up a picture of a viper fish again,
Speaker 1: it's very much like like the dragonfish. This uh, this
Speaker 1: sharp tooth, long, fierce, eel like creature. And to imagine
Speaker 1: a seven foot version of this a swimming past you
Speaker 1: as you're cramped in your steel beach ball, it's just
Speaker 1: terrifying to imagine. Yeah, well, it swims up to the
Speaker 1: window to say, hey, I'm here to vash and vipe
Speaker 1: your windows. What is that from? Oh, you don't remember
Speaker 1: that story the viper No, I think it was in
Speaker 1: It was in that book Scary Stories to Tell in
Speaker 1: the dark. I remember the book, or at least the illustration. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: bad joke if it didn't land. Sorry, I mean, no,
Speaker 1: I no, no, I mean there's a story called The
Speaker 1: Viper about a guy who keeps calling on the phone
Speaker 1: who says like, I am the Viper and I'm coming,
Speaker 1: and somebody gets really scared because the viper is coming.
Speaker 1: And then finally, when the viper gets there, he says
Speaker 1: he's there to vash and vipe the window because he's
Speaker 1: really the viper. Okay, now, I think the joke will
Speaker 1: work for people who know the reference that I just
Speaker 1: didn't catch it. Jokes are always better when you spend
Speaker 1: a few minutes explaining him, you know. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: let's move on to another sighting that BB reported that
Speaker 1: of the great fish, and I believe we read a
Speaker 1: little bit from this one at the top of the
Speaker 1: first episode. Yeah, so what was this great fish? Well,
Speaker 1: he describes it. Essentially, it's just this wall of flesh
Speaker 1: passing him by in the faint light, something that he
Speaker 1: guessed to be about twenty ft long, and it could
Speaker 1: have been a number of things, So he he thinks
Speaker 1: it might have been some manner of whale and it
Speaker 1: could have been. It could have been a sperm whale
Speaker 1: for instance, which is as we've discussed on the show
Speaker 1: in our Leviathan episode, is a large creature and it
Speaker 1: can and it can dive much deeper than the bathosphere
Speaker 1: and can get my bigger than correct. Yes. Now, however,
Speaker 1: it's also been brought up so that it could have
Speaker 1: been some kind of a deep sea shark, because in
Speaker 1: nineteen five marine biologists managed a glimpse and photograph six
Speaker 1: gill sharks at a depth of the two thousand, four
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty ft and and so Ellis suggests that
Speaker 1: it's possible that Beebe could have seen this, or perhaps
Speaker 1: a deep sea sharks such as the greenland shark, whose
Speaker 1: range apparently includes Bermudo's waters. Okay, now you know, one
Speaker 1: of everybody's favorite deep sea creatures is of course the
Speaker 1: Tricksie angler fish. Oh yes, because because the image of
Speaker 1: the angler fish with its large gaping mouth and sharp teeth,
Speaker 1: and then that that that strange bioluminescent lure that hangs
Speaker 1: in front of it, I mean, it's just such an
Speaker 1: amazing looking creature. And that's without even getting into it's
Speaker 1: extremely bizarre reproductive methods. So with the tiny male, the
Speaker 1: tiny male that's like a little reproductive heat seeker that
Speaker 1: infuses with their body. We've discussed that on the show before,
Speaker 1: but he did have a run in with the angler fish.
Speaker 1: Here's another quote from half mile down quote. Another interesting
Speaker 1: fish on this trip was one which I saw by
Speaker 1: the light of our electric beam at nine feet on
Speaker 1: the way up. It was one of the true giant
Speaker 1: female anglerfish, a full two ft in length, with enormous
Speaker 1: mouth and teeth, deep and thick, with a long tentacle
Speaker 1: arising from the top of its head. I saw no
Speaker 1: light from this, but it was distinct for a moment
Speaker 1: in the surrounding illumination. Twice its mouth opened and partially shut,
Speaker 1: and then we passed out of its life. Three of
Speaker 1: these weird fish have been taken dead at the surface,
Speaker 1: but three years of intensive trawling have given us no
Speaker 1: hint of their presence here. For a few seconds, I
Speaker 1: was within ten ft of one, and the memory will
Speaker 1: never leave me. Yeah, I'd guess. In the steel ball
Speaker 1: in the deep, you make a lot of memories, alright.
Speaker 1: So one of the things we've discussed here is that
Speaker 1: so many, many of these sightings were can definitely be
Speaker 1: backed up. Many of these sightings were of creatures that
Speaker 1: are known to science, and we have specimens for them.
Speaker 1: But there's mystery. Yeah, I mean it is necessarily subjective reporting.
Speaker 1: Like we said, the photography of the time could not
Speaker 1: capture things. So now if you take a deep sea subdown,
Speaker 1: you can videotape the whole thing, so you can prove
Speaker 1: what you saw when you came back. Here, we have
Speaker 1: to rely on the word of the people who were
Speaker 1: in the bathmosphere looking out right, and that led even
Speaker 1: scientists at the time to question some of it. So
Speaker 1: if theologist Carl Hubbs, for instance, he had some issues
Speaker 1: with the reported duh bioluminescence, and he suggested in ninety
Speaker 1: three quote, I am forced to suggest that whatever the
Speaker 1: author saw might have been a phosphorescenceylinter rate whose lights
Speaker 1: were beautified by halation in passing through a misty film
Speaker 1: breathed onto the quartz window by Mr Biebe's eagerly oppressed faith.
Speaker 1: I like the snooty voice you give Hubs there, Well,
Speaker 1: I get, I do get a very like snooty, intellectual,
Speaker 1: like stuffy academic vibe here saying who is this this
Speaker 1: science popularizer, Uh, you know, without an advanced degree, daring
Speaker 1: to report on the secrets of the deep. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you're naturally I think a modern person is sort of
Speaker 1: naturally inclined to be on BB side here, especially because
Speaker 1: of like we see him being criticized for non legitimate reasons,
Speaker 1: like you're hiring women researchers that you know that's a nonsense.
Speaker 1: So you you kind of like naturally want to say, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: if people are coming at him with criticisms, they're not fair,
Speaker 1: but some criticisms might be fair while other ones aren't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it comes back around to the fact that
Speaker 1: we are depending upon his observations and the observations of
Speaker 1: Otis and and in many cases one it's not like
Speaker 1: both of them saw the same thing. They're looking out
Speaker 1: of different windows. There are several cases where Baby says, oh,
Speaker 1: and then Otis saw this creature and I really wish
Speaker 1: I could have seen it, by I didn't, or likewise,
Speaker 1: it's something that only BB saw and Otis was looking
Speaker 1: at something else. Now, in all of this, I'm personally
Speaker 1: inclined to believe beebe or at least I really want
Speaker 1: to believe him and I and I have I have
Speaker 1: not conducted in like an exhaustive analysis of his personality
Speaker 1: or anything, but based on what we've read about him
Speaker 1: and his work, he seems to be to have been
Speaker 1: a very meticulous researcher who cared about accurately presenting uh
Speaker 1: what was going on in the ocean. Well, Ellis had
Speaker 1: an opinion on that, right, did he does? Yees? So,
Speaker 1: Ellis writes, quote, it is possible that Bebe was the
Speaker 1: only person ever to see these mysterious creatures. It is
Speaker 1: also possible that he made them up. But although he
Speaker 1: wrote very cleverly and well, there is very little in
Speaker 1: his published work to indicate that he was a practical
Speaker 1: joker now to play Devil's advocate, though. Ellis does point
Speaker 1: out that Bebe might have possibly joked at one point
Speaker 1: about lights being those of quote a giant toadfish, and
Speaker 1: that perhaps bb having neither a graduate or undergraduate degree,
Speaker 1: wanted to quote put one over on the academics. Uh
Speaker 1: and it's it's. It's also worth noting that he would
Speaker 1: have not been the first to play such a prank.
Speaker 1: Elis points to a nineteen thirty three prank by Australian
Speaker 1: ethologist Gilbert Whitley, and he makes the point that B.
Speaker 1: B would have known that his observations were fairly safe
Speaker 1: for the fris Eevil future. So, in other words, he
Speaker 1: could have made something up and known that, Hey, if
Speaker 1: future explorers come down to the same part of the ocean,
Speaker 1: the same depth and they don't see it, that in
Speaker 1: no way disproves what I'm claiming to have seen his
Speaker 1: reports quote would it would enter the literature as they
Speaker 1: have done, with virtually no possibility of being discounted. It is,
Speaker 1: after all, one of the basic tenets of cryptozoology that
Speaker 1: negative evidence cannot be disproved, a fact beloved by chupacabra
Speaker 1: movie purveyors everywhere. So Ellis stresses that, look, we we
Speaker 1: simply don't know. Another thousand or ten thousand dives might
Speaker 1: be required to to really prove any of this out.
Speaker 1: But he says that the very fact that that they
Speaker 1: that some of these specimens have not been seen since Bebe,
Speaker 1: that that casts their existence into doubt. But now, also,
Speaker 1: as I think we have said before, Bebe did see
Speaker 1: some things that were not known about at the time
Speaker 1: but have since been verified. Yeah, I mean in the
Speaker 1: vast majority of the deep sea fishes he describes are
Speaker 1: confirmed by specimens uh, and in one case, the quote
Speaker 1: untouchable bathmosphere fish uh did turn out to be a
Speaker 1: species of dragonfish later found to inhabit the middle layers
Speaker 1: of the ocean where he reported them. So for many
Speaker 1: of these great creatures, perhaps we simply haven't seen them again. Uh.
Speaker 1: The ocean is a big place and one that contains
Speaker 1: plenty of mystery. Perhaps these species have suffered or gone
Speaker 1: extinct due to the due to the damage that humans
Speaker 1: have inflicted on the ocean's highly possible yeah. Or as
Speaker 1: we've discussed, perhaps these creatures were more easily seen by
Speaker 1: the silent, motorless bathosphere as it descended through the depths.
Speaker 1: The aquatic environment, after all, is quite vulnerable to sound.
Speaker 1: And to go back into the differences of the general
Speaker 1: methods of sampling the depths, you if you've got the
Speaker 1: Gilgamesh method and the eba zoom method, there are plenty
Speaker 1: of species that are not very easily picked up by
Speaker 1: various kinds of eb zoom methods. Like whether you're trawling
Speaker 1: with a net or trying to drag a dredge along,
Speaker 1: whatever you're doing, there's some species that just tend not
Speaker 1: to get caught like that. Yeah. Now, one thing I
Speaker 1: do want to throw in here is that in some
Speaker 1: of these discussions of of the more mysterious creatures, it
Speaker 1: tends to it tends to fall into extremes. Right, Either
Speaker 1: he definitely saw something that we have not seen since,
Speaker 1: or he just made it up without really without really
Speaker 1: addressing the fact that there are a number of possible
Speaker 1: variations between those two extremes. I mean, it was dark
Speaker 1: down there, it was dark. They're they're just getting glimpses
Speaker 1: of things, So I would I would order with, isn't
Speaker 1: it possible that he saw some of these things but
Speaker 1: misjudged their size, that he later remembered them a little differently? Like,
Speaker 1: I don't think it is necessary for for b B
Speaker 1: to be a prankster or a liar for him to
Speaker 1: have misreported something that he that he thought he saw. Oh,
Speaker 1: I totally agree there. Yeah, And so you know, speaking
Speaker 1: for myself, I'm not inclined to really entertain some of
Speaker 1: these more nefarious interpretations of his observations. I was a
Speaker 1: little thrown when he saw the crack in the size
Speaker 1: of an island. Wait, that wasn't b B. I'm always
Speaker 1: confusing BB with those medieval Norwegians. Well, this does raise
Speaker 1: the question if he if he was to make something up,
Speaker 1: like why didn't he go even broader with his descriptions?
Speaker 1: But I don't know that. Again, we're getting into into
Speaker 1: areas of pure speculation here. Well. I I like this
Speaker 1: because it sort of brings us back to the fact
Speaker 1: that we were discussing earlier and in the last episode
Speaker 1: about how we know a lot more about the deep
Speaker 1: than we used to, but we still don't know tons
Speaker 1: of stuff about the deep oceans. The deep oceans are
Speaker 1: it's almost a cliche to say now because people emphasize
Speaker 1: it so much, but it's very true. They're they're entirely
Speaker 1: alien to us. We know very little about them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's been reported that of the ocean is unexplored.
Speaker 1: Uh and and and that's to say it hasn't even
Speaker 1: been seen with human eyes. Yeah. I know there are
Speaker 1: various ways of people disputing that figure, but suffice to
Speaker 1: say that even large portions of the ocean that are
Speaker 1: sort of roughly mapped have not actually been seen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as of two thousand fourteen, less than point zero five
Speaker 1: percent of the ocean floor had been mapped to a
Speaker 1: level of detail useful for detecting items such as the
Speaker 1: wreckage of airplanes or the spires of undersea volcanic events,
Speaker 1: and I've seen a higher stat in recent years. For instance,
Speaker 1: according to the Unseen Oceans exhibit at the American Museum
Speaker 1: of Natural History, only ten to fifteen percent of the
Speaker 1: CV sea floor is revealed to us inaccuracy. And in
Speaker 1: either case, ultimately we know more about the surface of
Speaker 1: Mars than the sea floor of our own planet. Part
Speaker 1: of the issue there, of course, is that we can't
Speaker 1: use satellites to map the sea floor in the same
Speaker 1: way that we can use satellites to map the surface
Speaker 1: of Mars. We have to depend on things like sonar
Speaker 1: and to to do it. Yeah, but at the same time,
Speaker 1: as we've said, we know a lot more than we
Speaker 1: used to and it's exciting that there is so much
Speaker 1: more to learn. Indeed, and I think that's why we
Speaker 1: keep coming back to the ocean on stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. We talk about the mysteries about our space,
Speaker 1: we talk about the mysteries of the inner mind, and
Speaker 1: of course we're going to keep talking about the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the ocean. I mean, there's no dragonfish in space.
Speaker 1: It's true, Like the ocean is the mysterious realm in
Speaker 1: which we know there is alien life and we keep
Speaker 1: discovering new forms. There may be dragonfish in the mind, yes, oh,
Speaker 1: undoubtedly they're dragonfish in the mind. But but in the
Speaker 1: in the ocean, we can actually pull them up and
Speaker 1: uh and poke at them. Though how much better to
Speaker 1: go down and observe them in the natural habitat rather
Speaker 1: than pulling them up. And so that's the legacy of
Speaker 1: William bb in the athmosphere. That's right, The modern Gilgameshes
Speaker 1: should put it all right. Well, hey, be sure to
Speaker 1: check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
Speaker 1: where you'll find this episode, the previous episode, and all
Speaker 1: the other episodes of the podcast, as well as blog
Speaker 1: posts and links out to our various social media accounts.
Speaker 1: Thanks as always to our audio producers, Alex Williams and
Speaker 1: Tory Harrison. If you would like to get in touch
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