christian penitence did it by wearing hair shirts and imagine thelating themselves. today in the modern religious movement they do it by imposing taxes on flights and forcing everyone to use crappy, flickery, yellow lightbulbs that give you a headache. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> coming up next on booktv, ben hellwarth talks about the navy experiment launched in 1964 to study the ocean floor and test the limbs of our ability to -- the limits of our ability to live underwater for long periods of time. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. [applause] >> thanks, everybody. thanks for coming out on a mostly, mostly sunny saturday afternoon here in santa monica

where, as was mentioned, i grew up surfing the beaches, and i realize sometimes it's hard to stay inside on days like this, although it's a little bit cooler today, so great day to talk about books. like sea lab, which i have written. it is -- i, i'm going to jump in -- well, let me just say, you guys know the book's called "sea lab." [laughter] i should say that for the record, though, america's forgotten quest to live on the ocean floor which maybe is a little bit of a mouthful, but i was pleased when the book came out that the subtitle was recognized as subtitle of the week by publishers weekly. [laughter] so i took that to be a compliment, and i figured that the main title is kind of short, so it all kind of balances out for the best and tells you what the book's about. i am often asked how i got the

idea for this book or where it came from, and so i think i'll just start from the beginning there, and then i will talk about the story of sealab and introduce you to some of the principle characters. i've got some rare audio and some video to share with you to kind of show you what this was all about, and, of course, we'll have time for your questions at the end which would be great. so if questions occur to you as i'm going along here, hang on to them and be glad to answer them at the end. um, sealab was -- the seed for sealab was really planted when i was working not far off the coast here in santa barbara for the daily newspaper and writing about lots of different kinds of things in that area as daily newspaper writers do, and somebody suggested once that i attend a gathering of commercial divers that was going on. there's a big commercial diving

community in the santa barbara area, and one of them was being feted, a guy named lad handleman who actually was a longtime diver and wound up co-founding one of the biggest diving companies in the world. so the idea was, well, they're having this party known at handleman's place known fondly as lad's pad in santa barbara, so i decided this sounded like a place i needed to go. so up to lad's pad to kind of see what was going on and the idea being, as it often is, to dredge up some stories for the newspaper. and really what happened was i was in this crowd of old-time commercial divers, most from southern california and elsewhere, and just wound up hearing all these crazy, alien-sounding stories about working underwater and accidents and the weird things that go on when you're underwater much like when you're out in space, although space is sometimes more familiar to us than working upside water.

underwater. so i came away there this event thinking, um, wow, what another world. and one thing that somebody said that really stuck with me was a diver i was talking to, and he spoke of doing very deep dives where the dives were so deep and the gas was so pressurized that it was like breathing peanut butter. and i just thought, what? breathing peanut butter, what is, what is that about? that sounds completely sci-fi, weird. i don't understand that. so kind of filed that away. i never, i never did wind up writing about this party for the paper as i recall, but it was a lovely evening though. [laughter] and met a lot of nice people and be actually got some connection for some other stories, so in case any of my old bosses are watching, it wasn't completely time squandered up there. [laughter] not just drinking up there at lad's pad with the old commercial divers. so i had also at that time

gotten it in my head that i'd like to take on a work of book length nonfiction. i'd done, you know, the newspaper-style feature writing and journalism, you know, to the lengths that are allowed for that format, and so i was kind of on the lookout for ideas that might be worthy of a book-length story, and you can kind of see where i'm headed now so that when i got out of the daily newspaper business and we restructured our family and moved back east, i basically went to the library, and with my idea that had vaguely to do with deep diving, commercial diving, weird stuff that goes on underwater. so i'm starting to do searches on these things, and the name sealab starts popping up. i was like, wow, sealab, what's that? that sounds pretty fascinating and interesting. there must be at least several books about this, so first thing i should do is find out what's been written so far about it. and can the answer was really nothing had been written about it. and this was sort of mind blowing because how could, you

know, if this thing, the u.s. navy project in the 1960s, pioneering underwater science, exploration, where's the book? and what i found mainly were a couple of memoirs that had been written by key participants who we'll meet in just a moment here, and those were great background, but nobody had sort of put all the pieces together here of what sealab was, what it meant and this legacy that's with us here today in terms of what people are able to do in the ocean as workers and as researchers and scientists and everything else. so great news for a journalist, you know, i'm just alone in a library somewhere going, hey, i think i've got something here with this sealab thing. so i start doing the preliminary research, and indeed, sealab is the focal point of -- in much the way the mercury project was

of an effort to really break some barriers that had existed for a long time not in the sky in this case, but in terms of human ability to go underwater. so there was a kind of science and exploration aspect of it that was fascinating and a good sign that there was a story there. and the other was the central character named dr. george f. bond who seen here in his coonskin cap and trench coat, you might wonder what does this guy have to do with the ocean? you know, where's the diving gear? dr. bond was, actually, started his career with a rural practice, thus the hat and what not, in the backwoods of the blue ridge mountains serving a small community there. and i'm going to read you just a short piece from the book here to introduce, introduce captain

bond, tell you a little bit about where he came from. and you can kind of see where i found him a fascinating character, already kind of an unlikely one to be somebody who was going to become considered the father of sealab. this is bond in the 1940s, and jumping back george was not quite 10 years old when his father died late in the summer of 1925. but the summer -- but the family could still afford a nanny, summer camps and private schools. as a teenager in pennsylvania, bond worked on the school's monthly literary magazine and became known as the class poet. he took up pipe smoking as a teen and developed what would become a lifelong fondness for bourbon. his nickname would not have shocked his navy bosses. his schoolmates called him rebel. after graduating in 1933, a few years into the great depression, bond enrolled at the university of florida. his course list revealed his divided interests between

letters and sciences, though he did better in old english and imaginative writing than general chemistry. his literary side won out, at least initially. he went straight into a university of florida graduate program for a master's degree. he studied english, and for his thesis wrote about the appalachian dialect spoken around a hamlet about 10 miles from the family's summer home near hendersonville in north carolina. bond had gotten to know the speck of a town named for a nearby catch that was a seasonal home for nearby bats when he went to summer camps in the years after his father died. he continued to live with his mother, a stern the, college-educated woman as the family moved between florida where bond mostly grew up, although the family was originally from ohio, and the more modest home in chestnut

gap. bond loved the rocky and wooded bat roads and neighboring hamlets like chimney rock. he spent lazy days hiking, horseback riding and fishing with his two best friends. both were products of far less privileged and formal education, but that made no difference to bond. fate himself served as one of bond's 13 master''s thesis subjects. he made notes on such appalachian pearls as i'll take no back sass often you, and my mash went blinky on me. [laughter] bond was inspired by the simple, rustic ways of the mountain people. he once lived with a couple for the better part of a month on a little tributary near the head of the broad river. the wife was wiry, snag l-toothed and get gaer gregarious. early on they said, george, why

don't you go to school, make a medical doctor and come back here. we've never had one, and we need one bad. [laughter] bond decided he should go down the professional trail that he had been urged to follow. he knew firsthand there was a real need for a doctor in the mountains. with his sights set on medical school, bond enrolled at the university of north carolina at chapel hill in 1940 and spent the next 13 months shoring up his science background and got a good ribbing for riding a horse to campus. [laughter] so there you have a guy that i'm learning about and thinking, okay, i think we may have a story here. so, um, so bond does follow that medical path that was suggested, spends a good part of his early career serving this community of about 5,000 people around bat cave, very primitive circumstances, a very

challenging, demanding kind of work running around in his jeep sometimes having to persuade people to take shots and modern medicine in an area where people were not always trusting of those methods. and people loved him, and he got quite a lot of attention for what he was doing there. so much so that he wound up as a featured guest on the popular 1950s tv show, "this is your life," which some of you may remember which, i guess, it was sort of like the "american idol" of its day but with a lot less singing -- [laughter] and also at time when not everybody was on tv. i mean, to show up on "this is your life" means you must have done something that was fairly unique and worthy of praise. so, um, by that point bond had actually been in the navy for a couple years, and at the time of the tv show was headed back to his rural practice. but at the time he was in the navy, he discovered that he, he

really was fascinated with diving. he spent his time in the navy as a submarine medical officer which also required him to be trained as a diver, and he got fascinated with diving. and wound up turning his rural practice over to another doctor and staying in the navy where he became head of the medical research laboratory at the u.s. naval submarine base in new london, connecticut, which is a major submarine base in the u.s. and in that laboratory he grew interested in pursueing -- in pursuing the questions that he

had found fascinating in his early naval career around diving which was that conventional diving wisdom was that most dives had to be very, relatively shallow, and they would last a matter of minutes, not hours or days or even weeks. and bond got this idea that the time had come much as humankind was starting to launch people into space and push the boundaries of flight, that the same thing should be happening underwater, and we should be able to dive deeper, and we should be able to stay longer, and why has that not happened. let me explain. on page 16 here.

so he's in the navy, he's running the medical research lab, and he's starting to circulate these ideas that conventional diving wisdom seems rather outdated, that we ought to be able to do better than this, that a diver might even be able to stay down indefinitely and even live on the seabed in some kind of shelter like an underwater version of the space station. this is what he was thinking. but this was thinking a bit ahead of its time. it was a little bit like talking about supersonic flight before that seemed feasible, and what bond was talking about was a type of diving now commonly known as saturation diving. and saturation diving is, in some ways to diving, what supersonic is to flying because with saturation diving you use methods that enable you to make

these longer, deeper dives. so, so he's got this vision, and he's going to meet walt me sony in a minute here, don't worry. [laughter] i guess we'd better go back to bond here. [laughter] there were a couple of fuzzy spots in this grand vision. one was no such seed dwelling had ever been built. even more farfetched than putting a man on the moon. typically allowed for bottom times of captain minutes. the deeper the dive, the shorter the diver stayed. east in the water or -- either in the water or in a dry chamber. the depth limit was far less than bond's initial target of 600 feet. but as a scientist, bond believed it could all be done. as a man of faith, he believed it would, and this was another aspect of his personality was he

believed there was almost a biblical kind of manifest destiny about this based on the, based on the opening of the book of genesis that talks about men having dominion over the fish of the sea. and bond had become quite a religious fellow in his backwoods life. wasn't raised that way, but took up an interest and became a student of the bible the way he was a student of shakespeare in school when he was doing his english major. so, so to finish there, um, and give you a little bit of context to where he was, the sound barrier had been broken a decade earlier in 1947 ushering in the space age, but the depth barrier that dogged divers remained swact although -- intact. depth barrier was not part of the lexicon, and there was nothing specific as the speed of sound to be broken nor anything as dramatic as a sonic boom.

as bond had learned during his navy dive school training, no one had ready answers to what struck him as the essential questions; how long can a man stay down, how deep can a man go? and you might think that like the speed of sound or the height of mount everest that this is just something that's known, how long can you go, how deep can you stay down? well, nobody knew. and nobody was much interested in trying until bond started to gather some people around him at the medical research laboratory and see if this, see if this was really going to be possible or if it would kill you, basically, same as in space. and so with the help of his right-happened man, captain walter mezzoni who happened to be around the lab, the two basically struck up a conversation that i describe in the book, and mezzoni who is not a guy who is easily impressed and really quite a different character from bond as i've just

described him, a real heroic world war ii submarine veteran, veteran with some really harrowing patrols and whip smart guy, all business, um, and sort of the perfect, you know, right-hand man to george bond as chance would have it. and so together without the navy's full approval at this point they begin with -- in their laboratory doing tests with animals. same as was going on in space, as we all know, to see whether the dogs and the monkeys could handle the g forces and the weightlessness and the rest of that, these guys were concerned with prolonged exposure to pressure and breathing artificial recipes of gas mixtures that would be necessary if you were going to breathe them at deep depths. so here you see bond and mezzoni

along the side of a chamber here. that's a medical lock, a small sort of air lock they can pass materials through, supplies through to the people inside although initially it was animals. and bond actually called these early laboratory experiments genesis, and they were formally known as genesis, and that was straight out of his belief that this, the ability to do this was tied up in the, in the early lines of the bible. so, so the genesis experiments they were started with animals to make sure that this was going to be safe for people and then moved on to human test subjects like bob barth who was also around the submarine base at that time. he was a diver, but he was involved with a training program for sailors and submariners at the submarine base, and he

befriends dr. bond. dr. bond was a guy a lot of people really liked, and, um, barth was one of them. so when it came, when bond was looking for volunteers, you know, who wants to be locked up in the chamber for a week that you might not come out of alive -- [laughter] you know, dr. bond was the kind of guy, somebody like barth would say, well, sure, you know? i'll give it a try. [laughter] and so what you see here is bob is getting geared up for a, to spend a week or so in the chamber for one of the human genesis experiments. he's, you know, basically like packing for a camping trip here. these chambers weren't outfitted for long-duration stays, so they had medical supplies and, you know, canned food and be the whole thing and were doing a bunch of tests. there were a couple of others, one was a doctor. they were doing physiological studies through all this to make

sure this was going to be safe. and at this point bond had to get formal navy approval to use human volunteers. he could kind of do the animal stuff a little bit on the down low, but when it came to locking, you know, actual people into chambers, there had to be some paperwork around that. [laughter] and there had to be volunteers. and barth was one of them, and he was involved from the beginning, the very beginning of the program to its tragic end. and barth was also one of the first people i met when i started doing my research and reporting on this project both when i came to the project, barth was alive and well and living in florida, thankfully, and walt mezzoni who worked more closely with george bond than anybody was alive and well and living in san diego. george bond died about 30 years ago, so i never did meet him.

and the work on him became almost like doing a biography, but with the help of good sources like this, um, the job was going to be possible. so one of the things you do when you get started on a nonfiction project like this is see if people are out there and see if they're willing to talk with you because you're going to need a lot of cooperation to get through the reporting and research. everybody said, well, you're going to need bob barth's cooperation if you're going to make this thing fly. so i had some early conversations with him and went down to visit him in florida where he lives to kind of see how it goes. and he's an interesting character. as i describe in the book, a little bit prickly, doesn't mince words, um, a little bit suspicious of people who call themselves journalists -- [laughter] but he said, you know, i could come on down to florida, and we would talk and see how it went. and it went very well. we did one day just a marathon interview of about five hours or something and then the next day he showed me around the experimental diving unit base which is now down in florida,

historically it was in the navy yard in washington, d.c. which is another place you will come to know in the book. and the experimental diving unit being, basically, you know, like the edwards air force base of diving where all the really cutting-edge sort of stuff goes on as the place where the test pilots could be found. so, great, i'm off to a great start. barth is onboard. he refers me to mezzoni, and he seems to be onboard. and then about a less than a month after i had this nice meeting with barth in florida, i call him up because i've got this question about a report i found that suggested that one of the key pieces of diving gear they were using in much of the early sealab experiments called the mark 6 had some problems. and i wanted to understand what those were because that was part of the total picture of the challenges that these guys faced in addition to being in the water and being cold and

breathing strange mixtures of gas and the rest of it. but this report clearly indicated that something was up, and i kind of knew that this was maybe early on in my relationship with bob to be asking about things like this, but i was still just getting to know people. so i went to him and, um, and here's part of our conversation. >> was it your experience and did you guys have -- i read some reports here that talked about quite a few problems or potential problems with the equipment, minor/major malfunctions -- >> no, the mark 6 worked fine. >> uh-huh? >> you had to be careful with it. certain barrels he had to make sure were open, you had to set it up. you had to put a regulator on the bottle and to start breathing, yo i had to set this one up with -- you had to set this one up with an instrument

to make sure it did this and that, and it required your attention during use. like anything else, be careful with what you're doing. >> so you don't remember any, you don't remember any -- >> no, not at all. worked fine. >> -- people complaining too much about that. >> get on the search looking for something -- you must have been in the newspaper business, ben. >> yeah, i think i was. >> yeah, i think so. you're always looking for something to figure out. i'm going to have an expose and find out how the navy fucked up. >> no, it's not that. this is not my thinking. this is a report that was written, actually, about some sort of a after-the-fact assessment, and one of the things it mentioned was problems with the equipment, so i just thought -- >> the mark 6 was designed to go 180 feet like that.

it was designed originally for the eod people. it was nonmagnetic. >> so you can kind of hear my voice like, oh, my god, i just went to florida and met this guy, and i thought we had this great understanding, and now he's getting off on me about doing an expose on the navy, and i thought we were clear on this. what i kind of learned, that's how bob is even with his friends. [laughter] so i really, i got -- things like that would come up, and they did, i realized that i was just developing a valuable friendship here and should take that sort of thing as a badge of honor. and as you hear, he goes on to explain as he did many times, long conversations about how different pieces of gear worked, and you could hear him start to explain about this mark 6. now, he didn't personally have a problem with it, but i did have this report that i had to deal with and go follow some better leads so that i could better explain what some of the challenges were there. but anyway, that, as i said, bob

was not a guy who minced words. but that attitude was definitely out there. so i'm still kind of a then-young journalist. that conversation is from ten years ago, actually. [laughter] and i'm just getting started. i don't have a book contract yet or anything, but i thought i had an understanding and some people onboard here to help me out, so he freaked me out just a little bit with that conversation. [laughter] and later in the conversation he apologizes and says i didn't mean to get on your ass, ben, don't take me too seriously. but, boy, the patience involved with people, you know, to pull off a work of nonfiction like this, i mean, you don't even want to see the list of conversations i've had with him over the years; e-mails, follow-up questions. so, you know, we're all sort of, certainly as an author, you're indebted to these people for working with you on these projects. anyway, they pull off the human

laboratory experiments. people seem to survive, they're testing at depths of up to about 100 feet. that seems to work. it worked with the animals, and so the next push was, well, let's get this thing out of the laboratory and get it into the sea and see if it works, you know, see if we can really house people on the ocean floor. so that they did by building the very first sealab habitat which you see here. there's a guy standing to the left so you can get a sense of scale here. it's not a huge thing, but it was built to house about four guys. it looks a little bit, you know, kind of primitive, not real slick looking. and, in fact, the budget was very low. and it's, in fact, made out of recycled old mine-sweeping floats that they sort of welded together and were going to put just about 190-some feet down off bermuda.

and at this point bond had met jacques cousteau who needed no introduction, obviously, but i point this out because cousteau just ahead of sealab had gone ahead with his own undersea experiments which i describe also in the book because it's part of the history, inspired at least in part by george bond who he met in the late 1950s, and they had some conversations in which bond was giving him the, his, his bit about how really we ought to be able to live on the ocean floor. my laboratory experiments with animals are looking like this is possible. cousteau jumps ahead and sets up some projects of his own which was actually good news for bond because it was great advertising. hey, look, jacques cousteau's doing it, you know, how crazy could this be? [laughter] ..

i challenge people to find this one. i never have, but that's the day that these guys swam into this

first american base at nearly 200 feet which was a substantial debt even for a standard except they were going to stay there for three weeks, which was absolutely unheard of, and presented, possibly not even safe because who knew. so, you can see -- there's dr. bond, lesser andy anderson, dr. robert thompson, they have a doctor down there interest in further studies and keep an eye on things and diverse sanders tiger manning for an elevator takes them down to the deck and

from there they have to swim freely 25 for 30 yards or so to get into the lab and i will explain in a minute how that worked but we wanted to play for you is the audio and one thing i saw early on is there's no neatly catalog charnel this was in people's doors and something like a case of an unmarked if anybody remembers who the real format these tapes have now been from a realtor real and digital cassette, so they are getting a pretty good right there. but there were a wonderful window into what these guys were doing, and the point i was going to make is that some of this archival material so familiar to us from space that the conversation between houston and the astronauts and the mercury project up to the moon landing

and neil armstrong and one small step for man and a giant step for mankind, that moment comes to americans sitting an outpost on the seafloor and you will hear what it sounds like, and you will also hear the affect of helium on the diverse voices because one of the things they had to do is bring the gases that are high and helium. if you've ever taken a hit off of a helium balloon you know it does funky things to your voice and that is something else they had to contend with and so let's hope we get the volume on this. >> [inaudible]

[inaudible] a pretty good swim, wasn't it? >> [inaudible] >> as long as you made it. [inaudible]

>> dr. thompson is in the loud, so that's the voice of george bond, as you might have guessed who is in the control than which is on the surface on a kind of large acting like a kind of mission control coming and you can hear that a little bit of the come artery that goes on a very serious enterprise on the way they are kind of joking around and you can hear the guys can help wrapping in the background even though they've heard it before and informality of that there's no particular order who is next? i think manning and thompson and then it turns out dr. thompson comes next so she's the second one in the lead of and at the beginning to hear george bond say i believe q m c anderson. whoever. it's good. so that's the early days.

its successful the navy is buying into this, the program is getting more formalized to the point it even has its own logo much like nasa has its familiar red read victor, they now have an emblem sign of the rising prestige, and also you can see the more significant refined looking habitat that doesn't look quite so much like it is made all of recycled floats or whatever. you have some uniforms, the sealab emblem on there and you can see the logo on the top so a great deal more private and of money and things are happening now. this is the first of what would be the three teams to live in the lab over the course of several weeks. the astronaut scott carpenter

has joined the program buy now and we will talk more about him in a minute, but he is the second from the left on the front row right there and there is scott carpenter and i'm going to play a brief clip. these tapes haven't even been heard since they record it. i was dusting them off of boxes and they were unmarked and i had to listen to all of them to find out what they were, learning more myself along the way. but again, this ase as a younger man who had been through all of these experiments and completed sealab one and is now on one of the team's for the sealab and during a press conference the question is asked why did you volunteer for this program, and you will hear him kind of reach for the question to bart at this

point. >> he's been in the operational longer than any of their man. would you care to puzzled over why you're here? >> ago started with the program working with dr. bond. i don't recall when i volunteered. [laughter] we just work at an organization out there, started new work on the idea of a man living under pressure that the time, captain blonden and myself and a few others of us sitting around right now and ran for genesis and on to see love to and we had a permanent job and like i said, i can't remember volunteering. [laughter] of that was a very good question

and then a funny way another challenge for me is you for the first person to do some high risk pioneer stuff, tell me about it. you get an answer like this, the genesis and those guys over there and now we are here. [laughter] so you need to do extra digging with someone who has done something that significant and modest. tataris scott carpenter where he actually found out about dr. bond and what he was doing through jacques kosko and carpenter was interested in the underwater experiments that he was doing and he basically says

you don't speak french, and you've got the dalia navy, you're own service is doing this anyway, so why don't you talk to him? they did. they hit it off and of course bond is quite pleased to have somebody with the stature of an astronaut like scott carpenter who you remembers the second american to orbit the earth and 92 tataris carpenter a few years later getting in on sealab, and what i'm going to do is because of the miracles of the various technology is take you inside of sealab to come as a you can kind of see what it looks like because this is all and familiar in the compartment all going into the hatch water stop, the doorstep so let me see if we can get to the scene. can we see that all right?

may be dim the lights little. >> [inaudible] >> i think we can see that. it will go all right. inside the glove there is scott carpenter. it's a prototype. the second one built. there's wires hanging around everywhere, there's about as much space to side of the camera going that that way. there are ten guys on the team so it is a good crowd for a small space like that and it's hot and humid and that's why you see guys in bathing suits and mabey t-shirts, and i'm going to play this along. >> the sophisticated technology of our age. >> so carpenters' going over the daily plan, his designated the team leader here.

there is diving gear which looks like scuba gear if you are familiar but pretty old school stuff. high-tech for the time, designed to give them longer durations than it would have allowed outside of the lab so once they got out they could stay longer and you can see the open hatch and this is the whole idea if we can get the highest on their living any time might or day they can go in, the water is there, they have a shelter where they can stay and in and out they go to do experiments or whatever it is they please on the ocean bottom. so out he goes. it's a little bit right in here to see this but let's see how we do.

well the water is pretty dark. that was part of the challenge, just keeping them warm was a big part of the challenge. they're driving that night, so it's extra darkened a lot of potential to get lost and had other problems but it gives you a feel this is not your caribbean diving vacation, this is some pretty tricky stuff and they have flights around the lab which helps and i will show you you can see his name he's helping. the kind of things they learn the hatch wasn't big enough, they needed to make a bigger one was too small to space. the testing goes on, the of the galley and you can do certain amount of cooking and have

coffee, hot showers which is critical after a cool swim and here is dr. bond entertaining the crew below with a vestige of a harmonica and you can see the reaction has been schultz of the we come back and here he is, scott carpenter, as you probably have never seen him before placing the ukulele in the helium atmosphere. ♪ >> they got dolphins involved to potentially act as saint bernards for the divers if they got lost or inju

tuf. a dolphin named tuffy but if the diver gets lost or injured he can attach a leash to the dolphin and get lit back to the ll been safety. you can see it on a daytime done av like this the visibility is a good it wouldn't take long to get lost so they use tethers and things to keep their bearings and to conceive the dolphin swims away it's not long before who knows where it is. i will move along. dr. bond, a sea-land prayer. >> of the work be done from our labour for its time to come we ask all this in the name of

jesus christ our lord. >> so that is something that not all of the guys were into but for dr. bond if you want to read a prayer on sunday that's fine and people respected him and liked him and some people enjoyed the service as well but respectable of this church service dr. bond had been a preacher back in the mountains where he worked so this was just a part of his habit and something that became a part of the sealab experience for those guys who were down there. i want to get to the q&a pretty quickly here but i want to also just run this through. there's the young man helping a diver get down. the reason they are not wearing

the gear in swimsuits and i don't know if we can see this year were not to read what me back up for a second here. they are swimming over to the pressure must elevator here which looks like this comes of this is another prototype come only the second one that's ever been built. locmalo inside and it has to be completely sealed to the decompression chamber and you can see the chamber right here, the side of it, but what i want to point out is this could be a little bit of a dicey operation and if you move the seal and lose your pressure then everybody dies in sight. it's that simple, so this is quiet and it doesn't look like that much of a rocket taking off but if they don't do this right they would have had tended dead guys, not a pretty - either with the explosive decompression that would happen, so these were critical moments in the things

that they were going to do to make this safe and if this stays in the program that could be really bad for the program. and you will see as the sealab moves around it starts to look less primitive and gillmor modern shall we say. so that's the chamber where the aqua lots are going to spend 33, 45 hours just living in a chamber to decompress but with saturation driving the idea was that it was worth spending that many hours to decompress because you were just able to live on the ocean floor indefinitely rather than going up and down the shore dive as was done through the history of dieting so in a way it was a small price to pay for the amount of time to be down in the water.

>> became known as the father of the sea lab and the we've got a uniform on there and this is at the time of sealab ii come and just a couple things more to cover and one was i want you to hear the voice of dr. bond we heard snippets on the radio before. this is the press conference after sealab ii is complete and it's been largely successful and you can hear bond answer questions about health holding went and hear his understandable pride, his confidence in the whole idea, and even a little bit of bravado of some people in the navy who just a few years before haven't felt any of this was such a good idea.

>> captain bond, would you cite some of the achievements and highlight the achievements of this experiment for us? >> i suppose for the investigators point of view of the major achievement is sending 28 men down and getting back 28 men. that is not, i say that not with my tongue in my cheek this is a high-risk program, as high risk as the material gains are concerned and it is extremely hazardous. they are in hazzard 24 hours a day, extreme hazard, and so is the prayer of sinfulness i see them return to the surface. that is a highlight. the second highlight is confirmation of the suspicion some of us would have for eight years at least that it is possible indeed if you provide the satisfactory environment and breathing mixture it is possible

to put man under high pressures and in a totally hostile i'll environment, and have him do useful work, gaining his place on the ocean bottom where perhaps man has a right and come back successfully. this was highly contested some years ago. i think now with sealab ii which it demonstrated opposition that this can be done. the men in this room a cumulatively have given you three and a half man years of life on the ocean bottom at 200 feet, and it could well have been 600 feet, and it will be 600 feet before it is over. that is a gross highlight. i think the third highlight to me is that also we have no criteria of selection in the proper sense of the word, nor did we go to the talented sources or special tests to

select our dhaka -- aquanauts these men work in good manner without friction, without jealousy, without all of the characteristics, which seem to plead mankind when we are working together on the surface. i think there are common bonds. one is they're all diverse, and they are taught to care for their buddy but i think second, this all the same goal and worked in that direction so there's a highlight. i think finally probably the greatest highlight is what i see here today. something this started in the fashion in the dark corner of the laboratory and work being done on the weekend sometimes

without official sanction, being done enough the face of cry is that this is madness and the inevitable question that came from people in the bureau what is the social significance of any work such as this? you are wasting your time and the navy's time. those questions i think a better answer today. i am satisfied we now have a navy program that will go on and has support and the energy and the interest of the people of the united states. we have seen the program grow, and we've seen it grow into a healthy child. this to me is a personal highlight i will never forget. those are the three that i would have. >> captain george pond, great american character who it's been my privilege to kind of introduce and get people better

acquainted with. he was right, it would go on. there would be sealab iii, which ended prematurely and tragedy which i described in my book for the first time there was an investigation and ultimately the navy decided shot program down. dr. bond also spoke of having the support of the people of the united states. i think there was a little bit over -- overstated. she was hoping that was the case and as i said just in the book the media around sealab was always kind of limited and buried in the headlines. was greater in the time of sealab chu and iii that had the people of the united states rallied behind c love i think we might be seeing more today but that wasn't the case. after the nisha program down after sealab iii and the tragic

events around that that were like apollo 13 we all know apollo 13 and a trip to the moon and how it barely kind of needed back, there was sort of like sealab iii but with a less happy ending and won the resulted in the investigation that at the end of the program but the program didn't end of the fact that they learned a lot about this about the deep diving and as i said at the outset, the fundamental change in the relationship with a c and this technology is still with us. the navy went on to use it for the clandestine deep diving operations and the offshore oil industry picked up on it right away because it was moving into deep water at that time sealab was coming of age and it needed underwater work force to basically construction workers that could work for long hours and a deeper depths than ever before. this is how we do it and they

are out there today doing work we don't see or know and crazy places like the bottom of the north sea and rather in same conditions. they are there as descendants of this program, and there is only one remaining u.s. sponsored sea bass in existence which probably most people don't know or can't name is the underwater version of the international space station essentially. it's owned by the national oceanic and atmospheric administration, noah and managed by the university north carolina wellington and it's off the coast of florida and it's been in operation for about 20 years for scientific purposes largely come and it's a descendant of hasim -- sealab and there were

several in between sealab and aquarius but that is another story and i'm going to leave it at that i think for now. just to make sure, we will segued into the q&a. i hope you have some, and i can't resist playing this. do we have a volume? ♪ >> extra points for whoever can tell me where that music came from. with that -- somebody?

>> your personnel, you are not allowed to answer. a conflict of interest. yes, yes, the pop culture vestige of sealab, estimates series called sealab, 2021, which is a very catchy theme song by the band calamine. you see, the legacy continues not just in military, not just in scientific or industrial but pop culture, too. questions. >> a understand the challenge in this endeavor but as i began reading your book one of the first thoughts occurred to me, are we late in the science and was given that mankind or explore the oceans from the

memorial north of the ocean and traveling and so forth and it seems if we had just begun to explore, question is are we truly late in the science? >> it depends on the course of human history. it's never too late to start but late in the sense, yeah they had a kind of a running start in the 60's and use of the bases like aquarius and people are talking about creating more bases because the scientists find it incredibly valuable to be around the clock on site with their observations and experiments much like jane goodall went into the jungle to live with the chimpanzees the same advantage can be made for scientists who don't have to limit their diets to 20 minutes or half an hour so there's a huge potential to do

all sorts of things down to a variety of debt scum and that is just a question of will through government funding are clever industry and there's some of that that's trite this to do more but the methods and the technology, are there. as i mentioned in the bucket you've gotten that far, a figure for starting. if a robotic technology has gotten good as you can keep people out of harm's way completely and deutsch things you would want to do but to them remotely with robots and not put people in the picture. there is also a new generation of diving suits that's been in the works for a while which is almost like a space suit and that you remain contained in your house surface and atmosphere and don't even deal with the saturation diving elements but you have a suit that is flexible enough and meet the fall of the right mixes of

ingredients and metals and what not but it's almost as if you are a free swimming diver but you are not exposed to the elements. so, yes, there's a variety of things that could be done, and it's just a lot of programs, money kind of dwindles and so yes there remains much that can be done that it was desired. so, microphone? >> of the family members doing, have they left the ocean business? >> the family carries on the tradition. if you know anything about it, there's been good books written about it and a very complicated family there were two families as it turned out, almost a

shakespearean situation. if you do google there's a couple of good biographies that described this better than i can but their role largely in different areas and ocean activities. he wrote an ice blurb for my book based in santa barbara has an organization called the ocean future society that's doing the work around the ocean and he is one of the suns from their original marriage and family and then there's another family that was also involved in ocean works, not everybody gets along so well so there are complications there. but yes, the name goes on in a lot of re and it is anonymous to us with the ocean research and exploration. it's really quite a powerful brand as you would say in the

21st century. >> i don't know if the microphone was on. there's a lot and they have no pressure with the gas mixture. to questions about that. if they come up to air temperatures and pressures, are they okay and second, our any studies focused on the biology of those materials and how they resist that sort of environment? [laughter] >> that as a whole area of oceanography i'm not going to pretend to be an expert on but a lot of questions about the fish and animals some of them are still mysteries, a lot of them are understudies. my emphasis is on the people and the year and getting this stuff done, so i can't talk knowledgeably about that that is related, and they did have issues with fish unexpectedly during sealab ii.

they had shark cages built around the hatches which you saw that they come and go through just in case any shark's show up and there is a gate that can run around and hide, that is the kind of forward thinking they were doing, trying to imagine what kind of problems they might have in these ocean environment. sealab ii i should mention that took place off the coast of san diego in 1965 and they get on intentionally because the conditions were more dark and dyer and cold and of the first experiment was in bermuda where the water was recently warm and clear and they didn't want a star of the most vocal succumbs to enzus. there was a more hostile environment, including the cameo that wound up giving our friend scott carpenter quite a staying and i guess i don't want to give that away because it is in the

book but you never know what you will find out there in the ocean. it is a dynamic environment and that is one of the things that makes it different. once you are out in space you can be pretty sure what is going on. but any time you leave an ocean floor habitat you can't guess what's going to happen so it is another aspect of the challenge. >> you were gathering the data research were you giving it all to the needy or was it public domain? >> was the research done primarily for the navy? >> the navy had nothing to do it. >> i mean, the navy -- i talked a few times to get some documentation or information. i have the freedom of

information act requests behind this, too of the three denied the appeal, so there was a kind of bureaucratic indication but my information came from things like the case interviews of people as i say i spoke with somebody in the library of congress early on to scirica score at the archives to say where is the sealab archive and as far as anybody could tell there wasn't one, so i had to go on and dig up. >> i must have let you in the wrong direction. because from your research -- from their research at sealab, did they send information directly to the navy? was it secure information on the research? >> the first couple were run by the office of the naval research said they were producing reports and they were learning

everything there was to learn from the project to enhance their own driving capability which stated in the navy to sealab and the discontinued the public spaces of sealab and some of the scientific work that was going on the had some civilian scientist divers from the institute of oceanography involved to get them on board and see what kind of experiments and things they could do working from the lab they couldn't do as conventional fighters but all of this was shared information with the navy and so they were learning very much from less. >> this story seems to have a lot of elements for a great film. has anybody expressed any interest in the movie rights? >> no, not that i know of.

james cameron is in the audience it's funny that you lost because there were a lot of nonfiction books, to act, some underwater challenges with of this one although i think people have seen movies like the of this and in a journalist or creative sense, i think that in some ways i hate to say it but a better movie could be made out of this than the book but do it of creative license but the movie and in a way that i didn't writing this book. so when you have a couple of great characters like george pond and marked who were pretty different characters we know a fair amount about george pond and you put them in some of the situations that they were in and you are able to create a dialogue is and bring other characters into the situation

you have a great set up for the movie i think, so bring them on. >> in all seriousness for me a big part of this exercise is getting the story out. it's the thing that somehow got lost on the historical radar so anything that brings like the book or what we are doing that has more understanding to it is a good thing and in that respect a major motion picture would be welcome and quite good i think, too. >> first off i want to say i'm about 50 pages into the book and you intricately reported three interesting stories i especially liked the stories about hurting boats around the navy bases. i was curious to know how did you get interested in doing this? >> count leggitt interested in

doing the book? >> and the divers and the whole subject. >> did you miss my should feel at the beginning? >> i did what in a little late. >> i told you i get asked that question a lot. i think for the benefit of those that are here we will refer you to the end of the tape but the short story was it was my journalistic curiosity it was piqued basically out of the reporting that i was doing in santa barbara just off the coast here and one thing led to another and that was sealab and there was no record or a book about what this was about that became my job to tell that and i got -- i didn't mention earlier but i got the publisher interested in the contract and i went back to my desk and went about my journalistic work as i done for years before just a little bit lonelier with fewer neighbors and water cooler

conversations. >> last two questions. >> you describe your early on the circumstances what it's like. can you going to the detail of what it likes to be there? >> and in the breeding peanut butter? dell was a little bit hyperbole on the diverse part to be the that's not really quite experience, but as i described in the book because those questions that george bond asked how deep could a diver go and stay down, the kind of research bond did continued in other laboratories. in england and france and in the united states particularly deutsch university they were back into chambers and there was still government funding and they were trying to figure of how long could a diversity down and how long could they go and it turned out i sort of follow

that question in the book to its end because as i said at the beginning it's something we just know how high amount of risk is and what the speed of sound is it's a given by what you find is because gas has become more dense under greater pressure, it does feel and they describe a sensation like the breeding a liquid they have to mouse breve very deliberately to get the gases in and out so that makes eating uncomfortable because when you're eating you're not really breathing and so there was one of the kind of issues that came out when they get to the depth let's say beyond 1500 feet over some of the experiments that went to over 200,000 feet of death and so infil oilfields now i think 1,000 ft by ofs still happen and

have happened and i tell one of them in the book. there's a whole chapter devoted to that experience to give you the sense of who these unsung heroes are that do this rather difficult work. but the sensation he was describing was a little bit hyperbole for what in fact does happen when you're breathing these gases. it doesn't sound too fun. last question, i hope it's a really good one. how about another question about movie rights? [laughter] >> i'm just saying. [laughter] >> how to protect those [inaudible]