IN A WORLD WITHOUT CASTINGS


Would Oceanic Exploration Reach New Depths?


When naturalist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton began a col- laboration to explore the ocean in the 1920s, humans had ventured only 500 ft. below the surface. By 1930, the two settled on a spherical design for a vessel called the bathysphere (from the Greek words for “deep” and “sphere”) that would be raised and lowered by a cable. Te Watson Stillman Hydraulic


Machinery Co., Roselle, N.J., initially cast 3-in. thick steel walls for the sphere in June 1929. Te first iteration was too heavy to be lifted and placed in the ocean, so a modified design with 1-in. walls was cast. Te initial craft mea- sured approximately 4.75 ft. (1.5m) in diameter and weighed 2.25 tons. Te two conducted a number of


dives in the summer of 1930, reaching a depth of 803 ft. Over the next four years, Beebe and Barton continued to descend deeper into the ocean and eventually reached a depth of 3,028 ft. (928m) in 1934, a world record that stood for 15 years.


22 | MODERN CASTING January 2016


Photos courtesy the Wildlife Conservation Society (www.wcs.org).


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