[inaudible conversations].. .. >> and at five, a panel on surveillance and secrets with

lori andrews, annie jacobson and michael shermer. the entire schedule for the weekend is online at booktv.org. >> in his new book, rodney king recounts his life following the video recording of his beating by los angeles police on march 3rd, 1991. mr. king talks about his own legal problems and alcohol addiction as well as the acquittal of four of the police officers in the case which led to rioting in los angeles. on tuesday, he speaks in harlem, new york city. booktv will bring you this event live online. at 6:30 ian, go to -- eastern, go to booktv.org. you can also check our television schedule at book the.org or for -- booktv.org for air times of this event. >> coming up next, ben hellwarth talks about the navy experiment launched in 1964 to study the

ocean floor and test the limits of our ability to live deep underwater for long periods of time. this is about an hour and 15 minutes. [applause] >> thanks, everybody. thanks for coming out on a 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 a great day to talk about books like sealab which i have written. it is -- i'm going to jump in, um, well, let me just say you guys know the book's called sealab, america's -- i should say that, though, for the record, america's forgotten quest to live and work on the ocean floor which maybe is a

little bit of a mouthful, but i was pleased that when the book came out, that subtitle was recognized as subtitle of the week by publishers week weekly. [laughter] so i took that to be a compliment, and i figured the main title is kind of short, so it 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. sealab was -- the seed for

sealab was really planted while i was working not far up the coast here in santa barbara for the daily newspaper and writing about lots of things, 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 ladd 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 at handleman's place known fondly as ladd's pad, so right now i figured this sounded like this was a place i needed to go, especially when you're on assignment. how bad could it be? so out to ladd's pad to see what was going on and the idea being, as it often was, to dredge up

stories for the newspaper. really what happened was i was in this crowd of old-time commercial divers 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 pace, although space is sometimes more familiar to us than working underwater. so i came away from this event thinking, 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? 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 i met a lot of nice people and 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 drug up there at ladd'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 the newspaper style feature journalism, you know, to the lengths that are allowed for that format, so i was kind of an the lookout for ideas that might be worthy of a book-length story, and you can see where i'm headed. when i got out of the newspaper business and we restructured our family and moved back east, i basically went to the lie bare with my -- library that had vaguely to do with deep dyeing, weird -- deep diving, weird

stuff that goes on upside water, 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 fascinating. there must be several books about this, so the first thing i should do is find out what's been written about it. the answer was nothing had been written about it, and that was sort of mind blowing. usa 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 its legacy that's with us here today in terms of what people are able to do in the ocean as workers and researchers

and scientists and everything else. so great news for a journalist. you know, just alone in a library somewhere going, you know, hey, i think i got something here with this sealab thing. so i start doing the preliminary research and, indeed, sealab is the focal point of, in which the way mercury project was, of an effort to 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 that 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 coon skin cap and trench coat, you might wonder what does this guy have to do with the ocean? where's the diving gear? dr. bond was, actually started

his career with a rural practice -- thus the hat and whatnot -- in the back 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 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 known as 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 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, though he better did classes in imaginative writing than in general chemistry and histology. his literary side won out, at least initially. bond earned his bachelor's of arts degree in 1939. he studied english and for his thesis spoke about the appalachian dialect spoke in bat cave, near the family summer home in western north carolina. bond had gotten to know the speck of a town named for a nearby cavern that was a

seasonal home to migrating bats when he went to summer camps in the area after his father died. in those formative years, george, his older sister and brother had leved with his -- lived with his mother as the family moved between florida where bond mostly grew up -- although the family was originally from ohio -- and the more modest home in this chestnut gap. bond loved the rocky and woody roads. he spent many 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 15 master's/thesis subject. bond made notes on pronunciations and such appalachian pearls. [laughter] bond was inspired by the simple,

rustic ways of the mountain people and their independence. as a kid, he once lived with ben and doogie connor for the better part of a month near a tributary near the broad river. doogie was wiry, snag l-toothed and gregarious. she early on said something like, george, why don't you go to school, make a medical doctor and come back here. we've never had nary one, and we need one bad. bond decided he should go down the professional trial that doogie had urged him 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 early 1940 and spent the next 15 months shoring up his science background and got a good ribbing from fellow students for riding a horse to campus.

so there you have a guy that i'm lening about and thinking -- learning about and thinking, okay, i think we may have a story here. 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 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 practice, but at the time he was in the navy, he discovered that 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 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 sort of circulate these ideas that conventional diving wisdom seems rather outdated, we ought to be able to do better than this, that a diver might even be able to sea down in2ke689 -- 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 bit like talking about supersonic flight before it was feasible. 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 in a minute here, don't worry. [laughter] i guess we better go back to bond here. there were a couple of fuzzy spots in this grand vision. one was that no such sea dwelling had ever been built. the other made the whole concept of living and working in the sea seem even more farfetched than putting a man on the moon. a deeper the dive, the shorter a diver's stay.

no one spent hours or days in the sea, nor did they spend long periods exposed to high pressure. the depth limit for most navy drivers was far less than bond's initial target of 60 feet. 600 feet. but as a scientist, bond believed it could all be done. as a man of feat, he believed it would -- of faith, he believed it would, and this was another aspect of his personality. he believed there was almost a biblical kind of manifest destiny 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 to finish there 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 depp barrier that dogged divers remained intact. depth barrier was not part of the rex con, and there was nothing as specific as the speed of sound to be broken nor anything as dramatic as a sonic boom. as bond had learned, 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-hand man, captain walter mesdoni -- mezzoni who happened to be around the lab, the two basically struck up a conversation that i describe in the book, and mezzoni was not a guy who was easily impressed. n he's a real heroic world war ii submarine veteran, veteran with some harrowing patrols and whip smart guy, all business 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 what's 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 mazdone along the side of a chamber here. that's a medical lock, it's 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 just straight out of his belief that the ability to do this was tied up in the early lines of the bible. 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 the 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 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 that somebody like barth would say, well, sure. i'll give it a try. 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 camping trip here. these chambers weren't outfitted for long duration stays, so they had medical supplies, you know, canned food, the whole thing and were doing a bunch of tests. there were a couple of others. one was a doctor, they're doing physiological studies through all this to make sure this is 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 mazzone 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, 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 if thai willing to -- they're willing to talk with you, because you're going to need a lot of cooperation to get through the reporting of this. everybody said, well, you're going to need bob barth's cooperation with this if it's going to fly. so i had some early conversations with him and went down to florida to see how it

goes. he's an interest being character, as i describe in the book a little bit trickily, a little -- prickly, a little bit suspicious of people who call themselves journalists. but he said i could come on down to florida, and we could talk, and we'd see how it went. and it went very well. one day we did a marathon interview of about five hours, and the next day he showed me around the experimental diving base which is now down in florida. originally it was in washington, d.c., and the experimental diving unit being, basically, you know, like the edwards air force base of diving where all the cutting-edge sort of stuff goes on, as edwards was the place where the test pilots could be found. so, great, i'm off to a good start. barth is onboard. he refers me to mazdone, mazzone seems to be onboard.

and about less than a month after i have this nice meeting with barth in florida, i call him up because i've got this question about a report i found that suggested one of the key pieces of dive canning gear they were using in much of the early sealab experiments called the mark vi had some problems, and i wanted to understand what those were because that was part of the total picture of the challenges 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 this was a little early on in my relationship with bob to be asking him about things like this, but i was still just getting to know people. so i went to him 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, just -- >> no, is mark vi worked fine. you had to be careful with it, anything certain valves you had to make sure were open, you had to set it up. you couldn't put a regulator on the bottle, you had to set this one up with an instrument to make sure it did this and did that, and it required your attention. during use. like anything else of use like that, it required you to be careful about 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. >> you guys all get on the search looking for -- 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 here

and find out how the navy fucked up and did that, you're not going to get it out of me. >> no, not that. this is not my thinking. this is a report that was written, actually, about some sort of after-the-fact assessment and one of the things it mentions was problem with the equipment, so i thought i'd ask you about it. >> the mark vi because designed to go like 180 feet, like that, it was designed originally for the eod people. it was nonmagnetic. >> so you can kind of hear my voice, oh, my god, i just went to florida and met this guy, and now he's getting off on me about doing an expose on the navy, and i thought we were clear about this. what i kind of learned is that's sort of how bob is even with his friends. [laughter] so i really, i got -- when things like that would come up, and they did, i realized that i was just developing a valuable 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, you know, how different pieces of gear worked, and you could hear him go and start to explain about this mark vi. now, he didn't personally have a problem with, but i did have this report that i had to deal with and follow some other leads so i could better exchange what some of the challenges were there. but anyway, that, as i said, bob was not a guy who minced words. that attitude was definitely out there. i'm a kind of then still-young journalist. that conversation is from ten years ago, actually. 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 hitting bit with that conversation. [laughter] and later in the conversation he actually apologized and said i didn't mean to get on your ass, ben, so don't take me too seriously. but, boy, the patience involved

with people, you know, to pull off a work of nonfiction like this, 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, today pull off the human laboratory experiments. people seem to survive, they're testing at depths of up to about 200 feet. that seems to work. it worked with the animals. and so the next question 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 thick, but it was -- thing, but it was built to house four guys.

it looks a little primitive, not a really slick-looking thing. 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 be at this point bond had med 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 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, how crazy could this be? so though they did not, you know, all the research showed that their association was not close, but they were friendly, kind of knew what each other was doing and, in fact, cousteau had a couple of observers that were invited to hang around during sealab i and just see how it went and learn some more about how it was working. this is bond and cousteau at a conference they had both attended. not the only conference that, on underwater activities as they were often called that the two were at together. so these are your first american

aquanots. you can't name 'em, you've never seen 'em, but july 20th, 1964, also a date you'd be hard pressed to find in the sort of, like, you know, 100 greatest moments of science and exploration of the century -- [laughter] i challenge people to find this one. i never have. but that's the day that these four guys swam into this first american sea floor based at nearly 200 feet which was a substantial depth even for a standard dive, except that they were going to stay there for three weeks which was absolutely unheard of, unprecedented, possibly not even safe because who knew? so you can see that, i mean, you can't see too well. but there's bob barth on the left, dr. bond, lester anderson, dr. andy thompson.

bond wanted to have a doctor down there to keep an eye on things. hospital corpsman and diver sanders tiger manning and so on this date they swim into the lab from a pressurized elevator, essentially, that takes them down to the depth and from there they have to just swim freely 25, 30 yards or so to get into the lab, and i'll explain in a minute more about how that worked. what i wanted to play for you here is kind of the audio from some rare reel-to-reel tapes i came out in my research. there was no neatly cataloged sealab archive. stuff was in people's basements and drawers and something like a case of unmarked reel-to-reel tapes. if anybody remembers the format, in fact, these tapes have been from reel to reel to cassette to

digital now, so they're getting a pretty good ride there. but they were a wonderful window into what these guys were doing, and the point i was going to make is some of this kind of archival material is so familiar to us from space that the conversations between houston season and the astronauts, of course, right up to the moon landing and neil armstrong and one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind, this is kind of that moment when it comes to americans really setting up an outpost on the sea floor, and you'll hear what it sounds like. and you will also hear the effect of helium on the divers' voices because one of the things that they had to do was breathe gases that were high in helium. if you've ever taken a big hit off a helium balloon, you know it does some falsetto, funky things to your voice, and that was something else they had to contend with here. and so i hope we get the volume on this, i i -- i think.

>> sealab one, this is sealab control. i hear you loud and clear, and i believe that is robert barth. am i correct, over? >> [inaudible] >> you're the first one in? >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> well, congratulationses. were you able to hold your breath all the way, or did you have to breathe some water? >> [inaudible] >> that was a pretty good swim, wasn't it? >> yeah -- [inaudible] [laughter] >> as long as you made it. now, in what order are they going to come down, andy?

>> manning -- [inaudible] >> dr. thompson. >> and then barth. >> and then barth. [laughter] >> i'll wait for 'em. >> dr. thompson -- [inaudible] >> dr. thompson is in the lab. so that's the voice of george bond, as you might have guessed, who's in the control van which is up on the surface on a kind of barge acting like a kind of mission control. and you can kind of hear a little bit the camaraderie that goes on with bond there, i mean, a very serious enterprise underway, but they're kind of joking around, you can hear the guys can't help laughing in the background at the helium voice even though they've heard it before, and informality in that there's no particular order. these are the first guys, who's

next? i don't know, i think manning and thompson and wart, and then it turns out dr. thompson turns up next. so he's the second one in the lab. at the beginning we heard george bond with, believe that is robert a. barth. no, it's anderson. oh, anderson. whoever, it's all good. so that's the early days of sealab. it was successful enough that it, the navy was buying into this more, the budget was getting bigger, the program was getting more form aalized to the point it even had its own logo much like nasa has its familiar blue orb with the red vector through it. the she iran -- sealab now had an 'em rem, a sign of its rising prestige, and also you can see here you've got a more significant, repine -- refine refineed-looking habitat. you have some uniforms, you've

got the sealab emblem on there, you can see the logo on the top of the lab on the counting tower, so there's a great deal more pride, some money, some things are happening now. this is the first of what would be three teams to live in the lab over the course of several weeks. the astronaut scott car pepper the has joined the program by now, we'll talk more about him, but he's second from left on the front row right there. there's scott carpenter. and i'm going to just play you a brief clip here again from the reel-to-reel tapes. these tapes haven't even been heard, i think, since they were recorded. i mean, i was dusting them off out of boxes. i had to listen to all of them just to find out what they were, listening for nuggets, learning more myself along the way. but again, this is barth as a younger man who has been through all these genesis experiments

and completed sealab i and is now on one of the teams of aquanauts for sealab ii. and during a press conference a question is asked, well, why did you volunteer for this program? and you'll hear dr. bond kind of refers the question to barth at this point. >> bob barth has been with the expeoplal program -- experimental program and the operational perhaps longer than any other man in it. bob, would you care to pass on a word why you are here? >> i got started with the program working with dr. bond in new london. i don't really recall when i volunteered. i don't believe i have yet. [laughter] we just worked at an organization up there that started o work on the idea of man living under pressure for a long time with captain mazzone,

captain bond, myself, a couple of doctors and ran from genesis on to sealab i to sealab ii, and i just had a permanent job. like i said, i can't remember volunteers. >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> obviously, that was a very good question. go on to the next question. >> so, again, you can hear kind of the camaraderie, and bond -- very modest -- and this was, you know, in some funny ways another challenge for me was, hey, you were the first person to do some pretty high-risk, pioneering stuff here. tell me about it. and you get an answer, well, you know, genesis, a few guys at the lab, mazdone and bond and those guys over there, chambers, now we're here. [laughter] so that's, um, you need to do a little extra digging when somebody who's done something really that significant is that

modest. and so he and scott carpenter, the astronaut turned aquanaut actually found out about dr. bond through jacques cousteau, and carpenter was interested in the underwater experiments and living that cousteau was giving. goes to cousteau, and cousteau basically says, well, you don't speak french, i can't pay grow, and, hey, you've got a guy in the navy who's doing this stuff anyway, so why don't you a go talk to him? bond and carpenter hit it off, and bond's quite pleased to have somebody with the stature of an astronaut like scott carpenter which was the second american to orbit the earth in 1962, so here's carpenter just a few years later getting in this on sealab. and what i'm going to do is through the miracles of various technology if they're working here is take you inside sealab ii so you can kind of see what

it looks like because, again, this stuff is all kind of unfamiliar, this business of a pressurized compartment, and going in and out through a hatch where the water stops at the doorstep. and so let me see if we can get to the, get to the scene here. all right. can we see that at all? maybe dim the lights a little? >> we'll take what we got. >> all right. i think we can kind of see that, huh? yeah, it'll go all right. inside the lab there's scott carpenter. you see, a prototype, really only the second one that's been built. there's kind of wires hanging around everywhere. there's about as much space to this side of the camera as there is going that way. that's the bunk area in the back. there were ten guys, so this is quite a crowd. it's quite hot and humid, that's

why you see guys in bathing suits and maybe t-shirts. and i'm going to play this along here. >> had work with the the most smith candidated technology of our age -- >> carpenter's going over the daily plan, he's designated team leader here. there is diving gear which looks a little bit like scuba if you're familiar with scuba but pretty old school stuff. high-tech for the time, designed to give them longer durations, dive times than scuba would have allowed outside the labs, so once they got out there, they could stay longer. and then you can see the open hatch here, and this is the whole idea, this is the whole sealab concept. if we can get guys down there living anytime of night or day, they can go in and out of this hatch, the water's there, they've got a shelter where they can stay and in and out they go to do experiments or whatever it is, whatever it is they please

on the ocean bottom. so out he goes. this is the little bit bright in here to see this, but let's see how we do here. well, i guess it's clear the water's pretty dark. and that was part of the challenge, just keeping these guys warm on these longer dives was a big part of the challenge. this is, they're diving at night here, so it's extra dark. a lot of attention to get lost, have other kinds of problems, but it gives you a feel, this is not your caribbean diving vacation here. [laughter] this is some pretty tricky stuff, and they've got some lights around the lab which

helps. and i'll show you -- and there's barth right there. you can see his name on the sleeve, he's helping another diver up. the hatch wasn't big enough, they needed to make a bigger one that was too small. physiological testing goes on throughout sealab. you have a galley, and you could do a certain amount of cooking, coffee, hot showers which were critical after a cold swim, and here is dr. bond entertaining the crew down below with a vestige of his mountain days on the harmonica. and you can see his pleased reaction as the shouts of glee come back. and here is scott carpenter as you've probably never seen him before playing ukelele in the helium atmosphere. [laughter] ♪ ♪

>> they got dolphins involved to potentially act as st. bernards for the drivers if they got lost or injured. a dolphin named tuffy who was trained to do this and had mixed success, but the idea was a diver gets lost or injured, dolphin goes and gets him so he can attach a leash to the dolphin, get led back to lab and safety. and you can see even on a daytime dive like this, you know, the visibility's not great down there. it wouldn't take a lot to wander off and get lost, and they used a lot of tethers and things to keep their bearings. you can see as the dolphin swims away it's not far before who knows how far it is. i will move along here.

this is dr. bond is -- well, let's hear dr. bond. he's reading the sealab prayer. >> you might somehow control their work and safety as they perform their duties below. grant us all a safe and worthy respite from our labor for a time to come. we ask all this in the name of jesus christ, our lord, amen. >> thus, the 30 days passed. >> so that was something that not all the guys were into, but, you know, for dr. bond if you wanted to read a prayer on sundays, you know, that was fine, and people respected him, people liked him, and, you know, some people enjoyed the service as well. the spectacle of this kind of church service, and dr. bond had, indeed, been a lay preacher back in the blue ridge mountains where he worked, so it was just part of his habit and something

that became part of the sealab experience for those guys who were down there. and i want to get to q&a pretty quickly here, but i want to also just run this through. there's bob barth as a young man there helping a diver jump down. now, the reason that they're not wearing gear and just swim suits, and i don't know if we can see this here or not, no, i don't think we're going to be able to see it too well. let me just back up a second here. they're just swimming over to the compression -- pressurized elevator that's taking them down here which looks like this. this is another prototype. it's only the second one that's really ever been built. the ten aquanauts are inside. it has to be completely sealed to a decompression chamber, and you can see the chamber right here, the side of it. but what i wanted to point out was that this was could be a little bit of a dicey operation. they're on a ship and it's moving, and if you lose your

seal and lose pressure, then everybody dies inside. it's that simple. you know, it's quiet, and it doesn't look like much, not the fireworks of a rocket, but if they don't cothis right, they would have had ten dead guys. not a very pretty death either with the explosive decompression that would happen. so these were critical moments and things that they were learning to do properly, obviously, to make this safe. and at this early stage of the program, in anything went wrong, that that could be really bad for the program. so, and you'll see as sealab moves along, this gear starts to look a little less primitive and a little more modern, shall we say. so that's the chamber where the aquanauts when they're done are going to spend 33, 35 hours just living in a claim puerto decome press -- chamber to decome press. but with saturation diving, the idea was it was worth spending

that many hours to decome press because you were able to live on the ocean floor indefinitely rather than going up and down with short dives. so in a way it was a small price to pay for the amount of time you got to be down in the water. so let's get this out of the way here. all right. well, this is george bond later in life. we saw him in his coonskin cap at the the beginning, but he became known as the father of sealab. he's got his uniform on there, and this is at the time of sealab ii, and we've got just a couple more things to cover, and one was i wanted 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. it's been largely successful, and you can hear bond answer a question about how the whole

thing went here, and it is, i think, his understandable pride, his confidence in the whole idea and even a little bit of bravado and be some ribbing of some people in the navy who just a few years before had not thought any of this was such a good idea. >> channel 10, san diego. captain bond, would you cite some of the achievements, highlight the achievements of this experiment for us? >> well, i suppose that from the principle investigator's point of view, the measure achievement is sending 28 men down and getting back 28 men. that is, that is not -- i say that not with my tongue in my cheek. this is a high-risk program. it's high risk as far as the material gains are concerned, it is an extremely hazardous program. these men are in hazard 24 hours a day, very extreme hazard. and so it is with a prayer of

thankfulness that i see them all return to the surface. so that is a highlight. certainly a second highlight is confirmation of a sneaking suspicion that some of us have had for eight years at least that it is possible, indeed, if you provide the satisfactory environment and be breathing mixture, it is possible to put man under high pressures in a totally hostile environment and have him do useful work, gain 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 we have demonstrated that this can be done. the men in this room cumulatively have given you three and one-half man years of life on the ocean bottom at 200 feet, and it could as well have been 600 feet, and it will be

600 feet before it's over. that is a gross highlight. i think the third highlight to me is that although we had no criteria of selection in the proper sense of the world, nor did we go to talented sources or special tests to select our aquanauts, these 28 men worked at a common purpose and worked together in a fantastically good manner without friction, without yellous sayses -- jealousies, without all of the characteristics which seem to plague mankind when we're working together on the surface. i think there are two common bonds there, one is they are all divers and proud divers. and divers are taught to care for their buddy. but i think secondly they all saw the same goal, they all

worked in that direction. so there is a highlight. i think, finally, the -- probably the greatest highlight is what i see here today, something that started in almost a sub rosa fashion in the dark corners of a laboratory, work being done on weekends, working being done sometimes without official sanction, work being done in the face of cries that this is buck roger-ish, this is madness, and the the inevitable question which came from some rather high people in high bureaus; what is the social significance of anything such as this? you're wasting your time and the navy's time. those questions, i think, have been answered today. i'm satisfied we now have a navy program. it will go on, it has support, it has the energies and the interest of the people of the united states.

we have seen a program grow, and we have seen it grow into a healthy child. this, to me, is a personal highlight that i'll never forget. those are the three that i would have. >> the voice of captain george bond, a great american character who it's been my privilege to kind of introduce and get people better acquainted with -- he was right, the program would go on. there would be sealab iii which ended prematurely in tragedy which i've described in my book really for the first time. there was an investigation and, ultimately, the navy decided to shut the program down. dr. bond also spoke of having the support of the people of the unite. i think that was a little bit overstated. he was kind of hoping that was the case, and as i sort of suggest in the book, the media around sealab was always kind of

limited, a little bit buried in the headlines. it was greater by the time of sealab ii and sealab iii, but, you know, had the people of the united states rallied behind sealab, i think we might see more of them today, but that wasn't really the case. and after the navy shut the program down after sealab iii and the tragic events around that -- which were really very much like apollo 13. we all know apollo 13 and its imperilled trip to the moon and how it just barely kind of made it back. well, that was sort of like sealab iii except with a less happy ending and one that resulted in the investigation and the end of the program. but the program's end did not end the fact that they had learned a lot out of this about deep diving and, as i said at the outset, it fundamentally changed the human relationship to the sea, and this technology is still with us. the navy uses it for as far as -- well, the navy went on to

use it for clandestine deep-diving operations. the offshore oil industry picked up on it right away because it was moving into deeperwater just at the time sealab was coming of age, and it needed underwater work force, it needed, basically, construction workers who could work for long hours at deeper depths than ever before and, oh, this is how you do it. and those guys are out there doing that today, work that we don't know in crazy places like the bottom of the north sea in rather insane conditions, and they are there as descendants of this program. and there is only one remaining u.s.-sponsored sea base in existence which probably most people don't know or can't name. it's the underwater version of the international space station, essentially. it's run, owned by the national oceanic and atmospheric

administration, noaa, and managed by the university of north carolina wilmington, and it's called aquarius, and it's off the coast of florida, florid it's been in operation for about 20 years there for scientific purposes largely, and it's a descendant of sealab. a small one in some ways, but a descendant nonetheless, and a significant one to the people who use it. 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. but just to make sure we'll just segway into the q&a here. i hope you have some, and i can't resist playing this. do we have volume here? ♪ ♪ >> a little more. ♪ that's where you'll find me, underneath the sea.

♪ ♪ .. the legacy continues not just in military and not just signed to a canned industrial but pop culture too. questions?

okay. >> the challenges in this endeavor but as i began reading the book. the first thought that occurred to me was are we late in science given that mankind explore the oceans from time immemorial on the oceans and traveling and so forth and it seems we have just begun to explore. my question is my question is taken for i was truly late in this science? >> lakes depends on the course of human history. it is never too late to start. they had a running start in the 60s and it did peter out. you have bases like aquarius and people are talking about creating more bases because

scientists find it incredibly valuable to the round-the-clock, on site with their observations and scientific experiments much like jane goodall went into the jungle to live with the chimpanzees. the same advantage can be had for scientists who don't have to limit their diets to 20 minutes or half an hour. there's a huge potential to do all sorts of things to a variety of deaths and that is a question of will, either with will through government funding or private industry. there is some of that that have tried to do more. the methods and technology are there. as i mentioned the book if you have gotten that far, thank you for starting. the robotic technology has gotten really good so you can keep people out of harm's way and do a lot of things you want to do but do them remotely with

robots and not put people in the picture. there is a new generation of dive suit that has been in the works for a while that is almost like a space suit and he remained contained in your surface and atmosphere and you don't even deal with saturation diving and the elements but you have a suit that is flexible enough and made of all the right mixes of ingredients and metals and what not but almost as if you are a free swimming diver but not exposed to the elements. so there is a variety of things that can be done and as with a lot of programs money dwindled and there remains much that could be done. so. microphones?

>> what are jacques cousteau's family members doing? have they left the ocean business? >> no. the jacques cousteau family carried on. if you know anything about it there have been good books written about it. very complicated family. there are two cousteau families it turned out. almost a shakespearean situation. if you google there are a couple good fire -- biographies of cousteau. in different areas of the ocean, activities, jean michel cousteau crew rowed a blurb from level is based in the ocean futures society that is doing a lot of interesting work around the ocean. he is one of cousteau's two sons from his own original marriage

and there's another family that is also involved in the ocean work. not everyone gets along so well so there is a complication there. the cousteau name goes on and is synonymous with ocean research. of powerful brand in the twenty-first century. >> the microphone is on. a lot of fish live at that depth who have no trouble with pressure and the gas mixture. two questions about that. if they come to our temperatures and pressures. and how they resist. >> that is a whole area of

oceanography. the fish and animals, a lot are mysteries. i can talk knowledgeably about that but that is a related subject. and the hatches you saw as they come true, in case any sharks show up there is the gate they could run behind, barry forward thinking what they were doing. try to imagine what problem they might have in these notion environments. dark water took place off the coast of san diego here in 1965 and they had gone there intentionally because the conditions were dark and dire and cold.

the water was reasonably warm and reasonably clear. the most difficult circumstances. it was much colder and more hostile environment including the cameo by a fish that our friend scott carpenter got quite a sting. don't want to give that away because it is in the book but you never know what you will find in the ocean. a dynamic environment. that is one of the things that makes it different from space. when you are in space you are pretty sure what is going on. but any time you leave an ocean floor habitat is anybody's guess what will swim by. another aspect of the challenge. >> when sealab -- gathering the data for research were you giving it all to the baby or was

it public domain? >> getting all through the navy? >> all from the research done primarily for the navy? >> for the navy? they had nothing to do with it. the navy -- i talk to a few times to get some documentation or in fermentation -- i had two freedom of information act requests behind this thing. two of the three denied. some appeals. there was a bureaucratic communication that way but my information came from things like take interviews with people like walter sony. i had helped with the library of congress early on to scoured the archives. as far as we could tell there wasn't one. i had to go on as a journalist i was able to dig up. >> 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 secured information on that research? >> one of the navy projects. the first couple sealab's were run by the office of naval research. they were learning everything there was to learn from the project to enhance our diving capability which they did. at the end the public face of sealab and some of the scientific work that was going on they had civilian scientist diverse from scripps institute of oceanography involved and sealab ii to get them on board and see what kinds of experiments they could do working from the lab that they could do as conventional drivers but all of this was shared

information with the navy. they were learning much. >> this story seems to have a lot of elements for a great film. has anybody expressed interest in the movie rights? >> interest in the movie rights? no. not that i know of. james cameron is in the audience anywhere, no. it is funny you ask because obviously a lot of folks -- nonfiction books get turned into films. some underwater challenges with this one though certainly people see movies like the abyss. these challenges have been overcome. what is interesting to me is journalistic for creative sense

-- you'd have creative license making a movie that i didn't in the book. you have great characters like george bond who were described different characters, we learn of fair amount about george bond and put them in these situations that they were in and create dialogue and bring other characters into the situation you have quite a great set up for movie, i think. bring them on. in all seriousness for me, a big part of this exercise has been getting the story of sealab out. this thing that somehow got lost on the historical radar. anything that brings what we're doing here, brings more attention or understanding to it is a good thing. a major motion picture would be welcome.

and pretty good too. >> got a question. about 50 pages into the book is intricately reported, very interesting story. i especially like stories about the navy bases. i was curious to know how you got interested in doing this. >> how did i get interested in doing the book? >> researching c. ladd and the divers. >> did you miss my she'll at the beginning? >> i did walk in a little weight. >> i get asked that question a lot. for the benefit of those here i will refer you back to the beginning of the tape. the short story was it was my journalistic curiosity that was peeked out of some reporting i was doing in 7 barbara. one thing led to another. that was sealab.

the fact that there was no real record or book of what this was all about, that became my job. to tell that. obviously i got a publisher interested in the contract to do it and i went back to my desk and went about my journalistic work as i had done for years before. a little bit lonelier with your cubicle neighbors and water cooler conversations. >> last few questions. >> you describe your early on the sensation you are breathing in those circumstances would it is like. can you go into more detail about what it feels like? >> breeding peanut butter i mentioned at the beginning. that was a little bit of hyperbole on that diver's part. that is not quite the experience that these deaths. the questions george bond asked, at the could diver go, the kind

of research bond did continued in other laboratories in england and france and united states, particularly duke university with a big hyperbaric facility and they were back in the chambers and still some government funding and still trying to figure out how long can a diver stayed down. it turned out. i sort of follow that question in the book because as i said at the beginning is this something we just know like how high mount everest is and what the speed of sound is? seems like at given. it is not. would you find is because gases become more dense at significant deaths under greater pressure it does feel -- divers describe the sensation like they're breathing a liquid. it is so thick that they have to melt the bereaved very deliberately to get the gases in and out so that makes eating