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- Herausgeber: ONE
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
A luminous and original account of the Bathysphere expeditions: the first ever deep-sea voyage to the otherworldly terrain more than 3000ft below sea level 11 June, 1930. On a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, a curious steel ball is lowered 3000 feet into the sea. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch thick quartz windows, sits the famed zoologist William Beebe. With uncontrollable excitement, he watches as bizarre, never-before-seen creatures flit out of the inky blackness, illuminated by explosions of bioluminescence. He is the first person to witness this alien world.Beebe's dives take place against the backdrop of a transforming and paradoxical America, home to ground-breaking scientists, eccentric adventurers, and eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the ocean's crushing pressure, scientific expectations disintegrate; the colour spectrum shatters into new dimensions; outlandish organisms thrive where no one expected them.The Bathysphere Book blends research, storytelling, and poetic experiments, traveling through entangled histories of scientific discovery into the bottomless magic of the deep unknown.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Contents
First Glimpse
Five Miles South of Nonsuch
Midmorning on June 11, 1930, a barge called the Ready, bearing the staff of the Department of Tropical Research, floated off the coast of the island of Nonsuch in the Bermuda Archipelago. Men in white sailor’s caps and overalls gathered around a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere as an enormous winch lifted it off the deck. The men stabilized the ball as it wheeled outward, dangling above the surface of the sea. It had three circular holes pressed tightly together like eyes. Suspended on the cable, it seemed to look down at the choppy water.
DTR scientist Gloria Hollister watched the winchmen lower the ball into the sea. When it splashed down and disappeared, she took a seat, picked up a canvas-bound notebook that served as the expedition log, and readied herself.
It happened to be her thirtieth birthday.
Photos show her with a focused expression, a telephone receiver shaped like an old hunting horn attached to her neck and a small speaker pressed to her right ear. She kept her chin slightly tucked as she listened and spoke and took preliminary notes. The wire from her receiver ran off the edge of the deck and submerged into the water, attached to the sinking bathysphere now lowering into the ocean depths.
Inside the ball, curled up and occupying themselves with various tasks, were two skinny men: Otis Barton and William Beebe. They 10had to be skinny because the opening to crawl through was less than two feet wide. Barton, who designed the ball and oversaw its production, monitored the water seal of the four-hundred-pound door, the functioning of the oxygen tanks that provided eight hours of breathable air, and cartons of soda lime to absorb the carbon dioxide exhaled by the occupants. He checked the telephone battery and the blower that circulated air.
He is irascible, jealous, and suffers from seasickness.
As they sank, the temperature inside cooled and water condensed on the ceiling of the ball, dripping down to form puddles at the bottom.
The ball was fitted with two three-inch quartz windows. There were supposed to be three, but one of the quartz panes was faulty so its opening had to be plugged with more steel.
Beebe, a bird scientist and protoecologist, curled up as close to the panes as possible. Entranced by the undersea world, he was highly aware of his status as witness to something no human had ever seen. An energetic man with infectious enthusiasm, he was already famous for his popular books describing trips around the world tracking pheasants, for an expedition up the Himalayas, and for risking his life to observe an erupting volcano on the Galápagos. He was fifty-two years old, bald and bony and almost knock-kneed, with a thin but stately voice pronouncing his observations as he descended. He’d been all over the world but still had the accent of his native New Jersey, so worlds and birds came out woylds and boyds.
The winchmen unwound the cable, and as the bathysphere descended further the light began to shift. The warm tones of the earth’s surface were absorbed by the water. At one hundred feet, Beebe held up a red color plate and found it had gone completely black. Fish swam into view in the cool brightness of the greens and blues of the water outside. He called out what he saw 11to Hollister, who continued to jot down his statements in her expedition notebook:
Red gone, color plates black.
Linuche jellies.
200Pilotfish around bait, 6 inches long, pure white with 8 jet black bands.250No red or yellow in sunlight. More jellies, tail of Pilotfish seen again.300Otis saw Pilotfish, fish many-colored at surface but looks white.400Two strings of Salpa.
Shrimps look pure white.
500Transparent fish with only food visible.550Temperature 75 degrees. Large Leptocephalus.
Many Cavolinia. Several Myctophids.
650Flashes of light in distance.800Pretty dim. Meter wheel reading 237.900Several mists of little Shrimps.
Large Serrivomer.
Light off.
As they descended, this interplay continued: the shifting of the spectrum until the world outside the steel ball was blue, blue, and nothing else, slowly fading to black but still bright with a strange brightness Beebe could not put into words. Their spotlight cast a dismal yellow glow out the quartz windows, but now at a thousand feet it dimmed quickly.
The beam switched off, and the water outside filled with miniature explosions. Tiny shrimp. Beebe had seen them carried up in nets, lifeless. Now he could see them for the first time in their native habitat, lighting up the black depths with quick oxidations of a chemical produced in their bodies called luciferase. 12
14When the explosions ceased, the strange brilliance returned, and it was like there had never been another color in the universe. He was sure he could read by it, but when Barton held up a page he couldn’t make out a single word. Beebe turned back to the circular window, continued to observe and speak, and Hollister on the deck recorded it all in the lined pages of the log:
Blacker than blackest midnight yet brilliant.
Air splendid. 20 little fish might be Argyropelecus.
1100Thick rat-tailed long pale white Macrourid-like fish with six lights went around bend of hose.1150Beam of light showing clearly—light on.1200Idiacanthus. Two Astronesthes.1250Fish 5-inch-long, shaped like Stomias
3-inch shrimps absolutely white.
Argyropelecus in light beam.
2 luminous pale white jellies.
13006 or 8 shrimps. 50 or 100 lights like fireflies.
Small squid in beam of light, seems to have no lights, went down to bait.
Cyclothones. Two-inch shrimps.
1350Light very pale.
Temp. 72. Meter wheel reading 403.
1400Looking straight down very black.
Black as hell.
Then a huge flash of light. Like a strobe light illuminating something outside the window. What had caused it? He could see nothing now but shrimp and jellyfish, but a form was etched in his mind.
It had been a thick, eel-like creature, fanged. He’d seen a mouth wide open, small jagged teeth like nails through a board, but the 15mouth gaping. What kind of terror and hunger had he just seen? A slipped gear in the grind of reality and he’d been thrust briefly into a nightmare of fluorescent tearing and gnashing. And then it was gone and he was back in the ball.
Outside were the familiar undulations of jellyfish.
A feeling came over him that that he’d seen enough. He told Hollister to pass word to the crew that it was time to haul them up to the surface. When they reached 150 feet the crew could see the vessel underwater.
The winchmen dropped the bathysphere back on board and unscrewed the bolts to let the skinny men out into the afternoon sun. Beebe emerged into the now unfamiliar daylight. He unbent his knobby knees and stamped his feet on the deck of the boat. He looked off at the low hills of Bermuda in the distance and knew something in him had permanently changed. Later he would try to pin down what it was. Something to do with the light he had seen.
The yellow of the sun, he wrote, “can never hereafter be as wonderful as blue can be.”
Transparent Bodies
Gloria Hollister began exploring the subaquatic world as a little girl, going under the Mahwah River with an oilcan helmet and an air hose.
She made her name by developing a new method of staining fish so that their skin and internal organs became transparent and their skeletons showed in vivid hues under ultraviolet light. It meant scientists could now view their osteological structures without dissection.
In 1926, a colleague at the zoo brought her by Beebe’s office. She was in her midtwenties, intense and intelligent and physically 17strong—Otis Barton called her “a golden-haired scientist of Amazonian stature.”
She was a privileged child of wealthy New Yorkers. When she joined Beebe’s team at the Department of Tropical Research, the New York Evening Journal published a piece called “Girl Fleeing Gay White Way Finds It at Sea Bottom.” A picture shows her fixed gaze as she clutches her little dog Trumps. In the accompanying interview she described the colors of undersea life, the bioluminescent organisms, as brighter than Broadway.
The October 1930 issue of Popular Mechanics carried a feature on the bathysphere sandwiched between articles on needle sewing, a silent violin, and animal dentistry. An illustration shows Hollister taking notes in the logbook during a dive. She presses the earpiece to her head with her left hand and takes notes with her right. Her knees are held together to support the notebook, and her feet, in white tennis shoes and ankle-length socks, are angled together suggesting anxiety or focus.
Beebe kept extensive journals, but he didn’t want the readers of the future to find out about his personal life. He wrote about his early romances, but later ripped out those pages. He also developed a substitution code—a monkey meant the letter a, a small insect was a b—so he could write things he hoped no one would understand. The biographer Carol Grant Gould broke the code only decades after his death, revealing the boyish thoughts of a middle-aged man:
“I kissed Gloria and she loves me.”
Beebe and Hollister had already been working together four years by the time of the first bathysphere dive. Gould describes them hiding from tropical storms in caves on Nonsuch, then emerging to glory in rainbows that shone in the mist. They worked together during the day cataloging plants and animals, everything they found on the island and in the sea. 18
“They exchanged visits at night,” Gould wrote. “But only with a caution that heightened the experience.”
Hollister kept her own diaries, covering piles of plain white unbound paper in looping pencil marks. They don’t mention kissing Beebe or hiding with him in Nonsuch caves. She is cryptic, introspective, struggling with ideas she’d had about her life, now starting to fall away.
She watched a scarlet sunset and marveled at the “crystal bright planets.” The next day was so perfect, Beebe canceled work. He sent everyone to Castle Island except Hollister, who had been ill.
His coded writing the next day records that she was “well over her sickness.”
In her own papers from that day is a copy of Howard Barnes’s work on crustacea. Penciled faintly and upside down over the scientific findings, as if she might have flashed it at Beebe surreptitiously while they worked on opposite sides of a lab table, Hollister had written “I am forever yours.”
When her mother visited at Easter, they attended service together, the first time Hollister had been to church in many 19months. It took all her strength to maintain her composure, because she could feel a wave of powerful conflicting emotions swell up. She maintained her calm by focusing on what she imagined the first Christians had felt at Easter—“those who had caught the image—the vision.”
“Even in despair and depression,” she thought, “it should carry some stimulation of the right attitude toward death.”
Two weeks after Easter she lay sleepless when a strange sensation came over her about her relationship to her surroundings:
“It is difficult to write for my ideas are not thoroughly formulated yet. It came to me that my world is not at all one of matter. It is one of interpretation and thought. I see beyond cedar trees and breaking waves to a certain Deity of Beauty Deity of Right.”
She went on:
“Christianity is formulated on a doctrine of wrong. What about a faith drawing strength and inspiration from the Beauty of Nature instead of a ‘sinful’ act of a human? A queer sense of strength surges over me and an understanding of surrounding forces.”
Hollister lay awake at night stirred by thoughts of what she’d seen during her dives. What if the entire world is different when you wake up? What if your own body has transformed?
“What happens to the brain of a flounder during the migration of its eye?” she wondered. “Imagine going to sleep with eyes normal and waking up flat-faced!”
The creatures she came to know in her explorations of Nonsuch opened her to an entirely new world of possibilities.
That first summer, dredging in the deep waters, they brought up a fish shaped like a large tadpole called a melanostomiatid and managed to transport it to the lab alive. It was quiet, nearly motionless at first, but when Hollister reached in to transfer it to a shallow dish, it whipped around and sank its fangs into her fingers. She jolted at first, but the bite was not painful. She held 20up her hand with the melanostomiatid dangling from her finger. Beebe watched her move it toward the other dish and shake it until it dropped.
She now carried the fish into the next room, submerged in darkness, and set the dish on a table.
She was about to turn away when the fish made a spasmodic movement. The fish leapt from the dish and at the same time two white lights flashed somewhere below its eyes. Hollister felt herself cry out as a row of lights along its belly lit up, casting a silhouette of the fish against the ceiling.
She stepped forward just as the fish dropped back into its dish. She stood over it, looking down as it idled, now drained of color.
Soon she was diving along a reef forty feet below a bare jut of stone called Gurnet’s Rock.
Through her copper diving helmet she caught sight of a large fish and several sharks. She was not afraid of sharks—she was used to them. But allowing her gaze to follow, she lost her footing. Instinctively, she reached out to grab the ladder next to her but found it had disappeared.
She looked up, and there was the ladder being dragged out of sight over the top of the reef. She stopped for a moment to watch, even waved goodbye to it, before turning to assess her situation.
There all around her were the sharks with their uncanny glide. She felt a sense of perfect solitude sweep over her as she stood wondering what to do.
She remembered horseback riding classes, where she’d suited up to trot around on the fine beasts. But before any elegant work could be done, she had to internalize one basic rule. Remain neutral at all cost, her teacher had repeated. A horse senses fear and can take the upper hand.
These monster fish, she thought, might know she was in trouble. They attack their own when under stress. 21
She quieted herself to take stock of her options. There were only two ways to escape this lonely, unsympathetic world: either tear off her helmet and shoot to the surface, or climb up the air hose. She decided losing her helmet was a last resort. She’d try the hose. But would it support her weight?
When she pulled, yards of slack fell into her arms, then tangled in the rocks below her.
The boat must be past the reef by now, she thought. And another wave of desolation swept over her.
I will get back, she repeated to herself. I will get back.
When she penciled this story in her notebook later, she wanted to remember her determination, her iron will. But instead she remembered that the moment of crisis had opened her to another temptation: letting herself go.
She thought of all her depressed moods over the years, the many times she’d yearned for escape from the miseries of life. Here was a chance. All she had to do was allow it, and it would be done. Release was as close as the ladder had been a moment ago.
Perhaps she could stimulate the right attitude toward death.
But now, knowing a single misstep or wrong move would end her existence, she found she wanted to live:
“My whole soul wanted to go back to my earth world and carry on.”
She pulled on the hose again and again received an armload of slack. As she drifted closer to the reef, she thought she might be able to climb it in order to get closer to the ladder. Just then a current surged, threatening to carry her under the overhanging ledge. Hanging on, she saw the base of the ship heading toward the rock, as if whoever was on board was not paying attention to where they were headed.
They must be looking off the back, trying to spot her. 22
She made a last effort to climb. She kicked and grabbed and made her way up the side of the reef, and finally reached the lowest rung of the ladder. She hurried up until she reached the ship and climbed on board, just in time to see them careening toward the rock face of a cliff.
When she thought back on the day, she wrote:
“I hope the Gods of Excitement will invite me to the edge of the precipice again. I feel at home with them and a glance over the edge helps this strange, almost irresistible pull that haunts my soul.”
That afternoon on the Ready, Beebe arranged for her to go down in the bathysphere with his assistant, John Tee-Van—a birthday surprise. She crawled into the small opening, listening over the phone to the rhythmic clanging as the ten big bolts were hammered into place.
As she sank she saw a ctenophore wafting so close she could make out its eight rows of cilia. A large ghost-pale umbrella jellyfish trailing four stinging tentacles appeared and disappeared into the bluish green beyond. At two hundred feet, blue lost its yellowness. Colorless shrimps and carangid-like fish butted savagely against the window. Psenes continued to dart around. A long, slender eel-like leptocephalus undulated into view, like a strip of tissue paper with a glistening eye.
The winchmen unrolled four hundred feet of cable before Beebe ordered them to stop. Unafraid for his own sake, he could not stand the possibility that something might happen to his two companions, one of whom had become his other pair of eyes. Hollister begged to stay longer and go deeper, but Beebe was stubborn.
Hollister peered out the bathysphere’s windows into an infinite depth of dazzling purple-blue. This “awful color,” she wrote, held her attention like an indescribable force, calling her to descend deeper and deeper, “down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.” 23
Nothing at All
After Hollister’s birthday dive, Beebe and Barton sent down the bathysphere empty except for a film camera. Through a remote activation mechanism, they shot fifteen hundred feet of film. When it was processed the film showed “nothing visible.”
My Profession Is Ignorance
When Beebe was eleven, his mother took him down to Broadway to see a phrenologist, who found him quick and critical and a good judge of character, but said his body might betray him. Beebe believed this meant he would never be an intellectual because his head was too small.
As a teenager on the deck of a ferry to Nova Scotia, he first saw the spouting and breaching of whales. To him they were primeval and utterly free—he called them “masterless, rioting in the vast expanse.”
It was the first time he understood the boundlessness of the ocean.
In 1903 he punched out the bottom of a bucket and replaced it with glass. He pushed it into the seawater off the coast of Florida and declared what he’d seen miraculous.
He kept a pair of binoculars at the field station, still a rarity at that time. When newcomers arrived, he instructed them to point the binoculars at the moon. Their reaction to the sight told him all he needed to know. Only inarticulate amazement signaled a worthwhile character. Anything less meant the visitor’s life was but a pointless march toward death.
He played the ukulele and the banjo and liked to drink cocktails. To celebrate one colleague’s birthday he shaved off his mustache, donned a frilly dress, and put on lipstick. He taught his friends that 26a scientist could be found leaned back at his desk, feet up, “chatting with a lady about the right costume for the Beaux Arts Ball.”
He was the first scientist to describe birds at play.
In 1900 he took Mary Blair Rice to see the new musical revue Florodora, which tells the story of a hunt for a rare perfume on a Philippine island. A character named Tweedlepunch poses as a phrenologist and examines the bumps on the heads of all the young women, looking for the bump of love. All the while, a chorus line of six high-kicking girls sings Hey! Hey! Alack-a-day! Our loving hearts asunder.
After they married, he and Blair, as she liked to be called, set off to travel the world chasing pheasants, but as soon as they got back to New York she ran off with a neighbor. Years later, she published a novel about white people exploring Harlem, with a thinly disguised version of Beebe as a dry and dedicated man of science.
He met Helen Ricker, the twenty-six-year-old novelist who published as Elswyth Thane, as she was finishing up Riders on the Wind. It was the story of a young woman named Sandy who leaves a boring academic husband to follow the explorer Blaise Dorin, aka Dodo, on an adventure through the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. Dodo is in search of a ritual robe of woven gold encrusted with topazes, which he’s promised to a sketchy dealer in New Orleans. The pair of adventurers dodge bullets and outwit swordsmen. They make it through one close call only because Sandy impersonates the goddess Shir Shan. They have the robe in their hands, but lose it at the last second, barely escaping with their lives.
The New York Times predicted the book would be read “long after the social analyses and adult confessionals of the majority of our owlish young men have disappeared.”
And while her heroine thought of marriage as “some pagan ritual,” like “being shut up in a box,” Thane married Beebe a year 27later. The wedding took place on an extravagant yacht called The Warrior, with Edith Roosevelt as honored guest.
But Thane, unlike her heroine, had little patience for continent-crossing adventures and preferred to live alone in New England. Later she moved to London to prepare the staging of her play The Tudor Wench. Beebe went with her and introduced her to his English friends. He chose Nonsuch as the site for his field station partly because he thought she would enjoy Bermuda. There was an octagonal house on Nonsuch meant to serve as her studio, and there was a bit of high life he thought might hold her attention. She sailed with him to the archipelago and spent a few days in the octagonal house, but quickly returned to New York. Island life was not for her.
Through their decades of marriage, Beebe and Thane rarely saw each other. Thane described their arrangement, approvingly, as modern. In 1939 she wrote a novel called Tryst about a woman in love with a ghost. 28
The Engineer
Otis Barton was an engineering postgraduate at Columbia University when he came across an article by Beebe describing a plan for a submersible to explore the deep ocean. Beebe had dreamed up the vessel with Theodore Roosevelt—a steel cylinder that could be lowered into the depths.
Barton’s mind lit up. He’d had the same dream. It had first occurred to him watching pearl divers in Asia—how far down could we go? Back home, he built a makeshift submersible and explored the shallow depths off the coast of Massachusetts, at first hanging so much weight around himself he was nearly torn in half. He understood something critical about Beebe and Roosevelt’s cylinder: under the huge pressures below the sea it would be crushed like a tin can underfoot.
Barton devised a simple sphere that would evenly distribute the pressure. It was elegant and ingenious. And Barton had money—he’d inherited a fortune from his father—that he was willing to sink into the project.
He wrote Beebe to propose a partnership. But Beebe received hundreds of crackpot proposals from amateur enthusiasts, and Barton’s letter landed in the same pile. When Barton wrote again and offered to pay for the project himself, Beebe agreed.
In the design of the bathysphere, Beebe readily admitted, he could contribute only his enthusiasm. But Barton was envious 30of his fame and was known to murmur misgivings about his colleagues at the Department of Tropical Research—Gloria the Amazon, Beebe the diva.
The engineer was particularly flummoxed by the presence among the staff of what he thought of as girl scientists.
Perhaps amusing to look at, Barton thought, but suitable only for cataloging and organizing.
Was he expected to take them seriously?
Barton insisted he be inside the bathysphere for all its major dives. It was this condition that kept Beebe from taking Hollister, who could have verified what he saw, added to his insights, or made her own discoveries.
Barton was no life scientist, and busied himself checking battery and gas levels, fiddling with the blower, or making attempts at undersea photography. And as the bathysphere bobbed and swayed, he grew nauseous, often losing control and beginning to retch in the tiny, cramped space.
On one such occasion, Gloria Hollister heard Beebe’s shouting voice through her receiver on the deck of the Ready:
‘Oh God, Otis—Not now!’
And the staff repeated it, giggling with delight—Oh God, Otis. Not now!
Contour Dives
This time they were towed by the Freedom, a vessel that could support the bathysphere and still motor forward, so Beebe could track the descent of the shoreline and observe changes in marine flora and fauna at different depths. During these dives, which they called contour dives, the steel ball dangled, drifted, and swayed with the water and the movement of the ship above. As always, Barton checked instruments, levels, tried unsuccessfully to take photographs. Beebe called up to Hollister.
Spectral Visions
Linophryne arborifera
I saw a tremor run through the body—the fin waved two or three times, the tree-like growth of chin tentacles … a tangled snarl, then stretched wide to many times their contracted length, the mouth opened and partly closed, and the light went out of the great, staring eyes. What would I not have sacrificed to have been told what those eyes had seen in the black depths, what that great mouth had engulfed, what enemies had been avoided, what part might have the luminous head bulb played in courtship or in war, why the huge fangs should be luminous, why a great tree of hundreds of medusa-tentacles was necessary—why? why? why?
Instead of which there lay my lifeless little dragon, perfect in all his parts, with his secrets hidden.
Beebe, on a scrap of white paper, undated.
Animal Light
On a dark night twenty-five hundred years ago, a young Greek philosopher was out rowing off the city of Milet, near the mouth of the Meander, when he noticed swirls of light set into motion as his oars stroked the sea. Anaximenes, as he was called, was a student of the philosopher Anaximander, who had taught him that everything in the universe was made of the same indefinite substrata. Anaximander called it apeiron, but his own teacher Thales had taught him it was regular water that was the origin of things. Considering the swirls of light within the water, Anaximenes suspected it might be air that was condensed into water and eventually stones and animals and clouds and everything else. How else could there be light in the water?
The writers of the Sanskrit Vedas and early Chinese odes described the luminous bodies of insects and worms, but such creatures were rarely mentioned in the Mediterranean. Pliny wrote of strange glowing creatures called nyctegretos or nyctilops, but it wasn’t until the thirteenth century, when the Andalusian botanist Al-Bayṭār described an animal called al-hubahib—a winged insect that lights up at night—that fireflies appeared in the history of the West. Al-Bayṭār recommended collecting their shining bodies, grinding them in rose oil, and dropping them into the ear to stop pussing wounds. 39
Books of medieval science soon filled with glowing animals. The forests of Bohemia were reportedly full of waxwings whose red-tipped feathers shone like the sun. Fiery vapors gathered around temples and especially cemeteries.
Alchemists like Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus recommended burying the glowing abdomens of fireflies in manure and allowing the mixture to ferment. This produced what was called liquor lucidus, a glow-in-the-dark ink only visible at night or in pitch-black rooms.
The Swiss editor Conrad Gesner thought all glowing creatures were powered by the moon. He collected a thousand drawings of lunar animals before he died of the plague in 1555.
Twenty years later an English professor of divinities named Stephen Batman published an encyclopedic work on the natural world that contained an entry on the glowworm, a little beast that “shineth in darkness as a candle, and is foule and darke in full light.” Batman believed all these strange glowings were works of the devil and wrote about them in his book The Doome Warning All Men to Judgment.
Luminous fish appeared in the Margarita Philosophica of George Reisch. Glowing lamb’s flesh was reported in Padua. There were glowing eggs, glowing stones, and glowing clods of earth.
Francis Bacon saw light in the snap of a sugar cube, and Descartes believed cats could beam light from their eyes. The linens of honorable men, it was said, luminesced when removed in darkness.
Athanasius Kircher described sea creatures that could be rubbed on sticks so they glow like fire.
He had seen it himself in Marseilles and Sicily.
Thomas Bartholin claimed that humans, too, have been known to shine, especially when full of desire. His examples included Theodoric, King of the Goths; Carolus Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua; and an Athenian sex worker called Lampyris. 40
There were luminous minerals like the diamond, ruby, and carbuncle; there was the light emitted by dried cod. Light erupted when a woman combed her long hair in the dark. And all this was the result of fermentation. Sand on the beach was fermenting, cat’s fur was fermenting. The sun was a giant fermentation pot, a model to meteors and the air around the high masts of ships.
But unlike the sun, this light gave off no heat. Cool light, like what shone from the mixture of sulfur and acid, was a matter of grave paradox. Light was an exhalation of effluvium mixed with air, the attrition of gems; light was a corpuscular material body. There was cold fire confined in ætherial globules, calcined belemnites, in the boring mollusk brought to Bologna by Marsigli.
That light was a kind of matter was proved by the electroluminescence of evacuated vessels or mercury shaken in a glass tube. There were pyrophores and there was phlogiston; there was the phosphorus of Kunkel in the Torricellian void. Light shone from borate of soda, sulphate of argil, tartrite of potash, and silicious stones.
Bronislaus Rodziszewski found that compounds containing the triphenyl gloxaline ring give off light when dissolved in alcohol and shaken with air.
In 1799, Alexander von Humboldt stimulated a jellyfish.
Darwin contemplated the bright thoraxes of Elateridae and the shining abdomens of Lampyridae. He thought animal light served to attract mates and food and confuse predators. MacCulloch thought it was to see in the darkness of the deep ocean.
Afloat on a small boat near Haiti a few years before, Beebe had noticed phosphorescence in the water and sent for a shotgun. He fired straight down, then marveled at what looked like a comet of glowing shot, arced into the deep and swept by a “train of trembling paleness.”
When he saw bioluminescent fish darting outside the bathysphere, they looked to him like “stars gone mad.”
The Blue Light of the Sea
The incandescence of animal light thrilled Beebe, and the chance to see exploding shrimp and glowing tentacles alive and undulating in their liquid home was one of the great thrills of the dives. But it was the luminous blue water, its ceaseless frequency like a maddening hum, that transfigured his being. He had read that below two hundred feet, blue was gradually replaced by violet. Below four hundred feet, violet was said to be dominant. But when he arrived at that depth, he didn’t see any violet. Instead, the blue deepened and became even more brilliant. He knew this was impossible, but he knew that’s what he saw.
He read over an experiment where a scientist had shone ultraviolet light through a chunk of black glass. When light struck participants’ eyes, most saw a violet haze and were unable to see anything else. But others did not see the haze. Instead, they saw clear blue. It sounded like what happened to Beebe at depth.
Was it an aberration? An ability or disability?
Beebe was not looking through a chunk of glass but the entire ocean. No laboratory could reproduce such conditions. It was up to him to form and measure a reality as they descended.
What actually happened to the light as they fell?
Beebe had the inside of the bathysphere painted black, and on the next dive, he resolved to pay close attention to changes 42in the spectrum of visible colors. He did this with the help of a spectroscope—a small telescope-like device with a prism, lens, and meter registering values—and by holding up color cards, trying to match what he saw with his eyes.
Hollister was back on deck to record Beebe’s observations, which began as soon as the steel ball hit the water:
Violet and blue same as above.
Green dim but almost as wide.
Rest dirty yellow with brown edge.
300Psenes silvery white with no blue at all Whole spectrum dim.
Yellow-green almost gone, its dirty brown edge towards red end.
Violet narrower than at the surface.
350Brown edge of green gone completely.
50% of spectrum blue-violet, 25% green, 25% colorless pale light.
Red all gone.
450Still see #30 at lowest aperture faintly.
Blue all gone. Nothing but violet and faint faint green.
