by Brad Matsen
After Cousteau finished a couple of years of scientific work, Dugan wrote, he planned to make a romantic feature film under the ocean. As fantastic as it might sound, Cousteau said he would have his diving technique worked out by this time so that the stars would be able to swim around 50 feet down without face masks or air bottles.
“I will show you a beautiful mermaid swimming around with the ghost of a drowned pirate for fifteen minutes without masks,” he promised. “No studio tanks, no fake optical printing. I will film it in the sea.”
Dugan sent his story to editors in London, New York, and Paris. All of them rejected it.
Within three years, the exploits of Cousteau and his band of Aqua-Lung explorers had begun to creep into newspapers and newsreels. Dugan sold his story in early 1948 to Scientific Illustrated, a small magazine edited by a friend from his days as a war correspondent. A selection of black-and-white photographs, printed from frames of 35 mm movie film, appeared with the story. One shows Dumas playing with an octopus and chasing a giant manta ray along a reef. Another shows four Undersea Research Group divers descending into an underwater cavern, looking like shadows against the light from above them. Tailliez, armed with his speargun, takes aim at a target just to the right of the camera’s position in another shot, and a final frame shows the ghostly remains of the ship’s wheel on Dalton, surrounded by a halo of fish, clearly oblivious to the intruder taking their picture.
Almost as an aside, Dugan had written that the revolutionary Cousteau Aqua-Lung would soon be available in the United States and Canada through a subsidiary of Air Liquide.
Émile Gagnan had immigrated to Canada in 1947, fearing that France after the war was bound for a future as a Communist country. With the help of Canadian Liquid Air, a subsidiary of Air Liquide, for whom he still worked, Gagnan set up his laboratory and workshop in Montreal to produce Aqua-Lungs for the North American market. Before Gagnan left France, Air Liquide formed a new division it called Spirotechnique, a stand-alone corporation in which it owned 99 percent of the shares. Cousteau owned the other 1 percent. In creating Spirotechnique, Air Liquide was particularly careful about constructing a legal barrier between the assets of the new corporation and its own massive wealth. While everyone was enthusiastic about entering the robust North American market with the Aqua-Lung, no one was certain that the revolution they had pioneered with highly trained, very fit military divers could be safely extended into the civilian world.
After Dugan’s article on the menfish was published, requests from readers wanting to know where they could buy an Aqua-Lung poured in to the editors of Scientific Illustrated. The only source for scuba gear in the United States, they wrote back to their readers, was Spaco, Inc., a foreign manufacturing representative with its headquarters in Vermont and offices in New York. Spaco had a deal with Air Liquide for the rights to import and distribute the Aqua-Lung on the East Coast of North America. They sold the few they were getting from Gagnan in Canada to dealers, including the internationally known sporting outfitter Abercrombie and Fitch. On the West Coast, Air Liquide was negotiating rights with an expatriate Frenchman in Los Angeles, René Bussoz.
For the better part of a year, the news that the Aqua-Lung was for sale in North America found its way into military strategy sessions and waterfront gossip on both coasts. An American admiral who had made an Aqua-Lung dive at Cannes shortly after the war staged an impromptu competition between a scuba diver and a hard-hat diver clearing wreckage from the edge of the shipping channel in Norfolk, Virginia. The diver wearing an Aqua-Lung easily outperformed the hard-hat diver, who was bedeviled by strong currents. The admiral was happy to open the door for sales to the U.S. Navy experimental diving team.
9
THE ABYSS
WITH JAMES DUGAN’S ARTICLE on menfish in print and the demand for Aqua-Lungs outstripping supply, Cousteau was beginning to realize that he was no longer an obscure French gunnery officer with a passion for diving and filmmaking. He did not intentionally seek the spotlight, but when illuminated, he instinctively performed with a charming blend of forthrightness, humor, and an unself-conscious, boyish curiosity that was irresistible to reporters, news cameras, and admirals.
“My father loved his life, especially after surviving the war,” his son Jean-Michel said. “His curiosity and ambition were starting to pay off and everything seemed like playing to him.”
There appeared to be no limits to the contributions Cousteau and the Undersea Research Group were going to make to the world’s knowledge of the sea. Tailliez remained in command, but he was still the shy, stammering man Cousteau had met before the war. He was infinitely competent, but much happier orchestrating the work of the group from the wings, while Cousteau took the bows. In the four years since Épaves had convinced the navy to embrace and support the group, Cousteau and Tailliez had built their fiefdom on the Toulon waterfront. They had a three-story building on a wharf where L’Elie Monnier and an assortment of smaller diving tenders were moored. On the ground floor of their headquarters, they had a machine shop, photo lab, generator room, compressor room, and one of the few decompression chambers in Europe. On the second floor were the drafting room and crew’s quarters. Cousteau and Tailliez had their offices on the top floor, with physics, physiology, and chemistry labs. Their conference room doubled as a museum for some of the booty the group had recovered from the sea: ships’ bells and wheels, amphorae from the Roman wrecks, and pieces of marble columns from the Tunisian expedition. Most impressive was a water-filled tube running from the first floor through to the roof, in which the group could simulate water pressures down to 800 feet.
“Other navies had larger diving centers,” Cousteau remembered.
But ours had the virtue of an intimate connection with the sea beneath our windows …If Dumas had a new undersea device, the draftsmen and machinists could have a model ready for tests the next day. Where there were diving accidents, naval or civilian, the emergency patients were brought to our doctors. Bent and agonized men were carried into the physiological lab for decompression and we would all have the pleasure of gathering to see the patient emerge leaping and rejoicing.
Even with orders for equipment flowing in from navies, salvage divers, and scientists, Cousteau was surprised and honored when Swiss inventor and explorer Auguste Piccard came to Toulon to ask for help building a diving machine he said could reach the eternal darkness of the abyss. “Professor Piccard, who had been eleven miles in the sky, now proposed to go thirteen thousand feet into the ocean,” Cousteau remembered. He called Piccard a “scientific extremist,” in a tone of humorous admiration.
Piccard was the most celebrated pioneer in a scientific community whose chief preoccupation at the time was determining the limits at which life could sustain itself. A physicist by training, he had been an unknown though well-regarded professor in Brussels until 1930, when he turned his attention to the composition of gases and effects of cosmic rays in the earth’s upper atmosphere. The best way to prove his several hypotheses was obvious: go there. With funding from the Belgian national science foundation, Piccard built a pressurized aluminum gondola big enough for two men and slung it under a gigantic helium balloon. On a still, spring morning in 1939, he took off from a farmer’s field near Augsburg, Germany, with his assistant Paul Kipfer. Seventeen hours later, their gondola and the partially deflated balloon, having reached an altitude of 51,775 feet, crashed down on a glacier in Austria. Both men survived. Piccard broke his own record the following year, and after twenty-seven more balloon flights reached 72,177 feet, a record that would stand for thirty-five years. Piccard’s ascents into the stratosphere made international headlines, and he quickly became a master of the art of turning his sensational exploits into sponsorships for his next earth-shaking expedition. In 1937, he announced that the same kind of pressure gondola he had used to set his altitude records would be perfect for exploring the depths of the ocean.
Auguste Piccard’s deep-diving bathyscaphe (ACTUALIT)
“It is a world as unknown to us as the surface of the moon,” Piccard told reporters.
Piccard set aside his ambitions for exploring the ocean when Germany invaded Poland. He went back to work on the diving project after the war, and by the time he came to Toulon had completed the heavy steel capsule he called a bathyscaphe, which means “deep boat” in Greek. The first part of the name is an homage to the earliest pioneers of deep-ocean exploration, the celebrated naturalist William Beebe and his partner Otis Barton. From 1930 to 1934, inspired coincidentally by Piccard’s revolutionary ascents into the upper atmosphere, Beebe and Barton had built a 4.5-foot steel chamber with quartz glass portholes that they called a bathysphere, meaning “deep sphere.” In it, they had been lowered on the end of a cable into the Atlantic off Bermuda, reaching an ultimate depth of a half mile and becoming the first human beings to peer into the abyss. Barton had even succeeded in producing primitive moving pictures with a handheld camera pointed through one of the portholes. Piccard rejected the bathysphere’s cable in his own design, deciding to control his ascent and descent with lead ballast and enormous chambers of lighter-than-water gasoline—much as he would a helium balloon. Though his bathyscaphe would be capable of only slight course changes and speeds under one knot while submerged, the absence of the cable greatly simplified dives beyond the half mile Beebe and Barton had reached. The weight of a cable alone would be prohibitive, and the most terrifying risks for the occupants of a suspended gondola were broken or tangled cables that would doom them.
When Piccard came to Toulon with his blueprints for the bathyscaphe, he told Cousteau and Tailliez that it was worthless to risk their lives diving into the abyss and return with no samples. He wanted the Undersea Research Group to design a grappling claw to pick things up from the bottom and a battery of harpoon cannons to shoot fish and other creatures. They might even get lucky, Piccard said, and bring back the first specimen of the legendary giant squid. Piccard also wanted Cousteau and the other Undersea Research Group divers to come with him to West Africa to photograph the bathyscaphe in the water and help with the difficult business of launch and retrieval from the water. Finally, Piccard said that one man from the group could make a dive to test their equipment and photograph the abyss through the thick portholes of the bathyscaphe. The sheer adventure of it would have been enough for Cousteau, but the fact that Auguste Piccard had come to him for help made the challenge impossible to turn down. The Aqua-Lung had opened a new universe to exploration, but it had already clearly defined its limits. Cousteau longed to go farther into the depths of the ocean. He assumed that he would be the man to make a dive with Piccard in the bathyscaphe.
Two weeks before the Undersea Research Group was set to sail for West Africa, Cousteau’s leg was in plaster. Despite finding his natural athleticism in the water, he had continued to avoid physical games unless his sons were involved. Jean-Michel was a natural at anything to do with hand-to-eye coordination and had especially taken to tennis. On the city court in Sanary, Cousteau had lunged for the ball, fallen awkwardly, and broken a bone in his foot. Simone was sympathetic about her husband’s injury, but secretly delighted that he might not be able to go on the bathyscaphe expedition.
“No one ordered you to go,” Simone said when she broached the subject of JYC staying home. “Don’t risk yourself in that craziness. Please don’t go down in that horrible machine.”
“It was one of the rare times Simone had objected to any of my plans,” Cousteau recalled. “She was a navy wife with a self-disciplined attitude toward my activities.”
Simone wasn’t the only member of Cousteau’s circle of family and friends to urge that he steer clear of Piccard and what they cynically called the “submarine dirigible.” Both Daniel and Elizabeth begged him to stay home to let his foot heal. Several of the scientists who worked with the Undersea Research Group cautioned him against allying himself with a man considered to be a daredevil showman. They said he had been a distinguished physicist early in his life, but now seemed to be more interested in making headlines and raising money than in real scientific inquiry.
There was nothing reckless in Cousteau, and he tried to ease their concerns. “The bathyscaphe is perfectly safe,” he told them. “There is nothing to worry about.” But even if he were concealing uncertainty about his chances for success, he was determined to go with Piccard. Anything as bold as descending into the abyss where only a handful of people had been before him was bound to be dangerous, but the rewards far outstripped the risk. Piccard’s bathyscaphe was a primitive vehicle, but Cousteau was sure it was only the beginning. He wanted to be part of the adventure.
“It was impossible to resist,” Cousteau admitted. “Tailliez, Dumas, and I were together again, about to sail to West Africa on our greatest adventure, and nothing could stop us. I had been selected to enter a wonderful submarine dirigible and dive five times deeper into the sea than man had ever gone.”
Scuba divers had worked at depths down to 400 feet. Military submarines cruised only slightly deeper. Beebe and Barton had been to a half mile, where they remained for only minutes. Piccard’s bathyscaphe, if it worked, meant human beings would be able to investigate the sea and its creatures down to 13,000 feet, a depth that allowed access to almost 90 percent of the ocean floor. Only the deepest trenches in the midocean rifts were deeper.
From the blueprints of Piccard’s chief designer, Max Cosyns, Dumas and the engineers at the Undersea Research Group had spent more than a year building the grappling claw and harpoon cannons, each of them utterly unique. The claw was a simple mechanism mounted on an arm outside the bathyscaphe. The engineering problem was finding a way to control it without breaching the pressure hull, which had to remain intact under pressures as great as 6,000 pounds per square inch. Dumas and his team solved it with a two-piece fitting that went through the hull, one piece of stainless steel and the other of aluminum. The metals of differing degrees of hardness compressed when tightened to seal the hole around the control wire leading to the grappling claw.
The harpoon cannon they built was controlled by wires through similar fittings, but it was far more bizarre and ingenious than the grappling claw. Each of seven tubes in the cannon carried a .25 caliber three-foot-long harpoon propelled by the immense pressure that would build up in a chamber at the base of the cannon as the bathyscaphe descended. At a depth of 3,000 feet, the harpoons could pierce three-inch-thick oak planks; on the surface, they were harmless. The harpoons were designed for taking specimens of abyssal creatures—the giant squid being the grand prize—so each was tipped with a strychnine reservoir that would burst on impact. If that wasn’t enough to make the kill, the bathyscaphe hunters cold trigger an electrical discharge to further immobilize their prey. At the base of the cannon were seven reels with lines attached to the harpoons for reeling in the speared specimens.
Cousteau loved the claw and cannon, which reminded him of the wondrous technology of Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine Nautilus in the films of Georges Méliès and the Williamson brothers. The action in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea had featured battles with sea monsters that dominated the imaginations of everyone who saw the films. If there really were giant, deadly creatures down there, Cousteau would be ready for them.
On October 1, 1948, Cousteau took L’Elie Monnier out of Toulon. He set a course past Gibraltar and south to the coast of Dakar to rendezvous with the Belgian freighter Scaldis carrying Piccard, the bathyscaphe, a half-dozen scientists, and a troop of journalists. Tailliez, Dumas, and everyone in the Undersea Research Group not absolutely needed to stand duty at their headquarters were aboard L’Elie Monnier, along with the grappling claw and harpoon gun. Théodore Monod, director of the Institute for Black Africa, and oceanographer Claude-Francis Boeuf sailed with them as scientific observers for the French government. The navy sent two frigates and a reconnaissance plane to accompany the mission that would enhance the image of France as a power in ocean exploration around the world.
As soon as L’Elie Monnier was at anchor off the coast of West Africa, Cousteau, Tailliez, and Dumas went over to Scaldis to inspect the bathyscaphe, which they had not seen until then. The strange craft looked enormous resting in its special cradle in the midships cargo hold on the freighter. Cousteau was startled to see that it looked even more like a dirigible than it had in the blueprints. The top was a diamond-shaped metal balloon 30 feet long and 15 feet high, under which was suspended a steel sphere about 6 feet in diameter to carry two passengers. In each of two hatches on the side of the sphere was a glass porthole. Cousteau knew from the plans he had studied that the balloon held six steel tanks that could carry a total of 2,500 gallons of gasoline for buoyancy. Coiled under the sphere was a cable, at the end of which was a huge weight shaped like the blade of an ice skate. The bathyscaphe also carried more than a ton of iron-shot ballast that could be released. Descending and ascending were theoretically simple: The lead and iron weights took the bathyscaphe down when some of the gasoline was pumped out of its tanks. When some or all of the weight was released, the craft either hovered in midwater or rose to the surface from the buoyancy of the remaining gasoline.
“My trust in the bathyscaphe was reinforced when I saw it,” Cousteau said. “I knew the principles by heart from the blueprints, and now I touched the real thing.”
When the moment came to select a member of the Undersea Research Group for the first test dive, Cousteau, as L’Elie Monnier’s captain, typically insisted that he and his men draw straws for the honor. Even if he lost the drawing, he was confident that he would be able to make one of the all-up test dives into the abyss to test the grappling arm and harpoon cannon. Théodore Monod, the director of the Institute for Black Africa, won. On the afternoon of November 26, Piccard and Monod were sealed in the sphere. The freighter’s cargo crane lowered the bathyscaphe into the water for the dangerous business of pumping 2,500 gallons of gas into the tanks. The ship’s crane was not powerful enough to lift the gassed-up and ballasted sphere, and in case something went wrong, an explosion in the water would do less damage than an explosion on the ship. With Cousteau hobbled in his plaster cast standing on deck, Tailliez and Dumas led a team of safety divers to check on Piccard and Monod in the suspended sphere. Tailliez surfaced, flipped up his mask, and yelled to Cousteau, “Everything is okay. They’re playing chess.”
