THE OCEAN FLOOR

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 3, 5 January 1938, Page 11

THE OCEAN FLOOR

deep sea balloon,

bold scheme of inventor.

buoyancy and resistance

PROBLEMS.

(By PROFESSOR AUGUSTE PICCARD.)

PlecaJd of' r S? < ? n * art,cl * Professor how thi'rtv v ( ..« BP er v fame - explains osterl in y ar ? a ß<> he became interdarko«f ,„„ e "Ploration of the ocean s founrt thr ps the life forms to be machine in which he hope, to ml£e the venture.

My first cabin was a steel casting with an outside diameter of two metres ensl,re solidity, it was ten centimetres thick. Consequently it was eavier than wnter. I swung the cabin from a balloon made of strong watertight cloth with a capacity of 50 cubic metres. This balloon was filled with oil,

which had a bearing fore® of 100 kilograms per cubic metre. There could be no question of filling the balloon with gas of any kind as this would be compressed by pressure of the water and would lose its upward rising force as it went down towards the sea-bottom. It is possible, on the other, to find liquids the compressibility of which is at the same rate as that of sea water. Thus the bearing power of these liquids is constant.

The beginning of the dive is made by means of ballast and the dive is stopped when one has reached the desired depth by releasing some ballast. The dive is continued by allowing oil to escape through a kind of valve. A cable a few metres long will be all that is required to keep the apparatus properly balanced at a short distance from the bottom of the sea. I

It is there that new life will be seen at its best.

In order to return quickly .to the surface, the whole of the ballast is then' released. I must add that throughout! the period of the dive a sort of sea rocket has been released automatically every 15 minutes and sent to the surface, where it explodes and produces smoke and light. The ship of the expedition can easily follow the trail of ' the jrockets, and when the vessel is close to the last rocket to be released it will see the divers coming back to the surface and will be able to pick them up without difficulty. The Diving Sphere.

It will be noted that the ascents into the stratosphere have been copied along these lines. Although I have never concealed my plans, I have unfortunately not yet been able to find someone who might wish to see them carried out, and I hope that this article will help me to find a scientific body possessing a suit-j able ship for this kind of research and ready to carry out my plans. These, I know, do not present any dangers if all the details are carried out with the necessary care and if every possible andj imaginable accident has been foreseen, j Finally, it might be interesting to discuss the changes my plans have undergone recently. In order not to make this article too long, I will only deal with some important points from I which it will be seen that my apparatus i has gained both in simplicity and in t security. J j The most important thing has been effected by the use of light aluminium and magnesium alloys. It is now possible to build a sphere lighter than water and capable of supporting a pressure such as occurs at a depth of 5000 metres without danger to itself. Experimental research would probably show that such a sphere would be capable of resisting the pressure of 1000 atmospheres which exists at a depth of 10,000 metres. It is therefore possible to give up the idea of an oil-filled balloon, since the cabin or sphere will be able to support itself under water. The greater the depth the tougher and heavier must the sphere be designed. In those circumstances, it would be necessary to fit outside the sphere a vessel containing a liquid of lighter specific gravity, but, even ao, this liquid would be far smaller in volume than the quantity of oil required to bear the heavy steel chamber. The simplification of the whole apparatus can easily be followed. The chamber alone will be infinitely less vulnerable and in danger of hitting anything than if attached to a balloon. Perhaps in a Million Years.

A question that deserves very close attention is the problem of ballast. In order to go down rapidly the divers will have at their disposal a large quantity of ballast, which they must get rid of before they can go up. This is the equivalent of letting gas escape from an aerial balloon. The smooth working of the operation thousands of metres below the surface of the sea is infinitely more important, however. It has happened to me that I could not open the escape valve of my balloon owing to the cord controlling the valve having snapped. I was therefore imprisoned in the stratosphere and I remember saying to my assistant, Dr. Kipfer, "In 10 or 12 hours at most the sun will.go down and the balloon is bound to descend." If the ballast apparatus of a diving sphere is not working properly at the bottom of the sea, all we should be able to say would be, "Perhaps in a million years we shall be brought back to the light of day by some movement of the earth's crust." My plan for avoiding all possibility of an accident of this kind is the following: The ballast is made up of small steel shot contained in a brass box fixed to the outside of the chamber. This box is fitted at its base with a tube or pipe wide enough to let the shot run out exactly like the lead shot is allowed to run out of a balloon. In order to prevent the shot from running out too Boon an isolated copper coil haa been

j-run round the tube and a weak electric current is run through the coiL This causes the iron shot to become magnified and thus to remain stuck together within the tube. When ballast has to be dropped, the electric current is cut off for a certain time in order to allow the chamber to go up. If an electrical fault should develop, either in the form of a short circuit or in some other way, the ballast would all run out and all that would happen would be that the sphere would rise quickly to the surface. 1 The Glass Problem.

If in spite of everything the ballast refused to run out, it should be remembered that the box containing the ballast and all other objects that might be attached to the outside of the chamber are holding on solely by magnetism. Each magnet is made up of four parts, namely an armature in mild" iron fixed to each outside body, two stanchions in mild iron going through the wall of the cabin to which they are fixed by a watertight joint, and finally within the cabin, a e-teel cylinder head. All that is required is to" displace this head in order that the magnetic current within the open mild iron circuit should be cut off. The magnet will be strong enough, even if the stanchion is made of iron, if it is magnified while the four objects mentioned above constitute a closed circuit. In my opinion, this system avoids every possibility of a breakdown so long as a man i& within the cabin.

Particular care must be given to the construction of the man hole and of the 'yind'ows. The joints must be absolutely watertight because at a depth of 10,000 metres water would go through a hole at a speed of 440 metreseconds or, in other words, at the rate of 0.44 litre per second and per square millimetre. The question of the watertightness of the joints which once wa& a . ver y difficult one to solve is quite simple nowadays, because pressures of 1000 atmospheres are quite common in modern industry. All that will be necessary will be to follow the systems often successfully tried out by presentday engineers. The strength of glass windows would appear very doubtful at first eight. "Would it be possible, one asks oneself, to trust to glass which has to sustain a pressure of a ton per square centimetre. Engineers answer, yes. All that is required is to give a proper shape to the glass. The glass used by Professor Beebe was made of molten quartz and was five centimetres thick with a diameter of 20 centimetres. The glass that X should use would have ■a thickness of from ten to twelve centimetres. The diameter of the side facing the inside of the cabin would be much smaller than that of the surface facing the water. The glass, therefore, would be conical in form and would be fixed to the cabin along this conical surface. There would always be two window* side by side as in the case of Professor Beebe's bathysphere; one window would be used for lighting the waters outside the chamber by means of a light within the chamber, while the other window would be used for observing the waters. Signals By Rockets.

There is another case in which we shall make use of modern science. I have spoken of the rockets which will guide the ship of the expedition in following the track of the divers. This is one method that I should use, and I may be able to increase the safety of the divers if I can supply them with an apparatus emitting waves as in the case of the echo sounding apparatus of Professor Langevin; thus the fthip of the expedition could always ascertain the direction of the waves emitted by the diver. Furthermore, these waves would have the great advantage that they could be used for sending signals to the ship. All that would be necessary' would be to send them out in the form of Morse signals in order to convey messages, and they might even be adapted for a microphone, thus transmitting directly to the surface the voices of the observers at the bottom of the ocean.

As was the case with Professor Bee be, who used a wireless telephone, it would be possible to dictate to a typist on board the ship, and thus greatly increase the total amount of scientific obeervations carried out, since the observers not have to waste their time in writing. Moreover, if the observers did not have to write down their notes it would not be necessary to light up the interior of the sphere. In "this way a light which might interfere with the observation of objects outside the sphere would be done away with. Many details have, of course, still to be worked out. A number of questions will still have to be carefully studied so as to guarantee- complete safety by the most appropriate and useful means, but I hope that what I have just said will go far to prove the usefulness and the possibility of diving deep down far below the surface of the ocean.—(N.A.N.A.)