On June 3, the birthday of Pietro de’ Medici, we explored some of the typical tropes about rich kids being self-indulgent waste cases. But not everybody born into wealth squanders their lives and fortunes. Consider, for example, Otis Barton, who was born June 5, 1899 into a wealthy New York family and accomplished some remarkable things.
Barton is most remembered for having invented the bathysphere, an unpowered ocean submersible that set quite a few records for deepest dives in the 1930s and 40s. The project began when a naturalist, William Beebe, had a plan to study the sea life in an 8-square-mile area near Bermuda. This was in the 1920s, and Beebe quickly realized that the two existing methods for studying undersea creatures — wearing a diving helmet or dredging everything up from the bottom — were not going to work. He started thinking about a new solution.
Divers could descend to a depth of a couple hundred feet wearing a diving helmet, and submarines existed in the 1920s and had achieved a somewhat deeper mark (over 300 feet), but had no windows. There had been a dive to over 500 feet using an “armored suit,” but it was very difficult to observe anything in such a suit. Beebe’s first design was for a cylindrical chamber he would ride in while it was lowered to the bottom. His plans caught the imagination of the New York Times science writer, who published a story about it. That’s where Otis Barton comes in.
He was already an engineer, and when he read the story in the Times he wrote to Beebe advising him that calculations showed that a cylinder would not be strong enough to withstand the pressure at the depths Beebe needed to reach. He came up with an alternative and wrote about it to Beebe several times, but never received a reply. Although Barton didn’t know it, Beebe habitually ignored mail. Luckily for both men, they had a mutual friend, who arranged a meeting.
When Barton and Beebe met in person, Barton presented his design and Beebe approved. They worked out a partnership where Barton would pay for the diving vessel and other equipment in exchange for accompanying Beebe on his dives.
Barton’s design was for a large hollow steel ball with 3-inch-thick quartz windows. The hatch was bolted on from the outside, and oxygen was provided by compressed-air cylinders. He coined the name Bathysphere, basing it on a genus of fish.
Barton and Beebe tested the Bathysphere in May, 1930 (it worked), and did their first deep dive on June 6 of the same year (for some reason Barton didn’t schedule it on his birthday). They set a record, reaching a depth of 600 feet. They broke their own record in 1934 by diving to 3.028 feet.
Barton appeared in the 1938 movie Titans of the Deep — it was meant to be a documentary but by the time it reached theaters was marketed as a horror film. He wrote The World Beneath the Sea in 1953, after setting yet another depth record of 4,500 feet in a different invention, the Benthoscope. He was also interested in exploring rain forests, and designed (but didn’t build) a jungle spaceship. It was really a kind of blimp he designed to be able to film wildlife in the jungle. You can read more about Otis Barton at the MIT School of Engineering (Internet Archive version).
