No doubt science would have been served by anyone traveling to a place no human had ever seen. In the late 1920s a wealthy engineer named Otis Barton offered to design and fund a thick, one-piece steel ball for Beebe, on the condition that he got to operate the vessel, to which Beebe agreed. “The yellow of the sun, wrote, ‘can never hereafter be as wonderful as blue can be.’” As he emerged at the surface after that dive, he knew “something in him had permanently changed,” writes Fox. “The world outside the steel ball was blue, blue, and nothing else, slowly fading to black but still bright with a strange brightness Beebe could not put into words,” writes Brad Fox in his splendid, hypnotic ode to wonder and curiosity, “ The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths.” “Blacker than blackest midnight yet brilliant,” said Beebe from the depths, dictating via telephone cord to his assistant and paramour, Gloria Hollister, who listened on the support vessel 1,050 feet above. He did so from a 4½-foot steel sphere with tiny port holes of thick quartz, lowered into the abyss on a cable for the first time in 1930. Beebe was the first human to slip more than a few dozen feet beneath that wonderland, which covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and holds, by volume, 99 percent of its habitable space.
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