Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Life
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Sealab (Transcript)

Joe Richman: You’re listening to Radio Diaries. I’m Joe Richman.

From ancient myths of sea monsters lurking below… to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the ocean has long been both a source of fear and fascination.

And back in the 1960’s, … that fascination led people to try going deeper than ever before

Archival tape of U.S. President John F. Kennedy: To a surprising extent, the sea has remained a mystery. We know less about the oceans at our feet, than the sky above our head.

That’s President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1963.

It was the age of exploration. While NASA was getting front page headlines in its quest to put a man on the moon, the Navy was quietly conducting a series of tests to see if humans might be able to live and work on the deep seafloor. With the goal of someday even building colonies under the sea. They trained a group of men to be “aquanauts” – including the astronaut Scott Carpenter. After a successful experiment in the Caribbean, in 1965 the aquanauts set out to live in an undersea habitat off the California coast for more than a month…

Today on the show… Producer Sarah Kate Kramer brings us the story of Sealab.

Ambi: bubbles
ARCHIVAL: This is Commander M. Scott Carpenter, who is America’s only astronaut Aquanaut. With other divers, he’s beginning an experiment that will test man’s ability to live and work in the sea…
Music

Kris Stoever: My name is Kris Stover. My father is Scott Carpenter, a project Mercury Astronaut, and he was fascinated by the sea. It’s sort of the opposite of space exploration. In an interview my dad said Sealab is not bright and shiny. It was dark, it was cold, it was dangerous.

ARCHIVAL CARPENTER: Work in the deep water is just not as glorious a pursuit in the minds of most people as a flight to the moon, for instance. It’s a cold, dirty, uh, place and that, uh, you can’t see very far. You can’t go down and take pictures that thrill the world.
Kris Stoever: But it was a mission he believed in. For him, the nearness of the ocean. You know, it’s right there and we don’t know anything about it.

ARCHIVAL: Thank you very much. I’m pleased and honored to participate today with you in the dedication of SeaLab, which is the Navy’s experiment in living beneath the sea.

Ben Hellwarth: My name is Ben Hellwarth. I’m the author of a book called Sealab.

ARCHIVAL: Attention all personnel through the Sea Lab area for lowering operations…

Ben Hellwarth: So they build this habitat and tow it out about a mile off the coast of La Jolla near San Diego and sink the lab to the bottom, 205 feet of depth.

Sealab basically looked like a cigar shaped vessel like a submarine with legs like a dinner table on it, so it can be propped up on the ocean floor.
Captain George Bond the man who is responsible for the Sealab program is standing on the navy barge that’s serving as a kind of mother ship, feeding sealab gases, power, water from the surface. George Bond’s idea was we could have these seabases where divers would have shelter and have access 24/7 to the sea floor. Much like a space station in space.

ARCHIVAL: Reporter: Captain Bond, what is the purpose of all this? Bond: The purpose is to determine whether man can exist as on the ocean bottom for the purpose of exploitation and exploration. Reporter: you mentioned civilian applications? Bond: I think we will have underwater agriculture. With our exploding population, we’re just about to, uh, reach the end of our food resources on dry land. I’m just very happy to be on a new frontier.
ARCHIVAL: This is Sea Lab Control. I hear you loud and clear. Congratulations…

Ben Hellwarth: The first aquanauts enter the Sealab. Kind of a huge deal. At this point in diving history rarely would anyone stay at a substantial depth for more than a half hour.

ARCHIVAL OK here’s the order of business. Open the ports…

Ben Hellwarth: And then Bond came up with the concept of Saturation Diving. Which was basically if we allow a diver to stay at depth or pressure long enough at a certain point it wouldn’t matter if he stayed down a day, a week a month, the process of decompression is going to be the same. But that was a pretty far out notion. How deep can a diver go? How long can a diver stay down? No one knew.

Richard Blackburn: They call me Blackie, and I was an aquanaut in Sea Lab. None of this had ever been done before. We all felt like we were the lab rats. But we were all young, foolish, gung-ho, and thought we were invincible.

ARCHIVAL BOND: Dictating, dictating 8:30 12 September, 1965.

Ben Hellwarth: Inside the habitat, they basically are in what would feel like a recreational vehicle, a toilet, a shower with hot water pumped in from the surface. They really stocked the inside of Sea Lab, with bread for sandwiches and cans of Chef Boy R dee.

Ben Hellwarth: They also had a kind of closed circuit TV set up so that those at the surface, could kind of watch what was happening.
ARCHIVAL: We have your picture. Smile. You’re on candid camera, Hell yeah.

Ben Hellwarth:You can’t breathe ordinary air at certain depths because air is ⅘ nitrogen, and nitrogen causes a kind of drunken affect when you breath it at depth, just one of the weird realities of breathing underwater. Helium had been found to be a good substitute, and so as you can hear, they all sound like some falsetto version of Donald Duck.

ARCHIVAL: Goodnight Irene in helium voice

Kris Stoever: My dad had the ukulele, and he decided to sing in his helium altered voice.

ARCHIVAL: good night irene chorus.

Ben Hellwarth: I should say that deep sea diving is dangerous all the time anytime. You’ve got the pressure. The gas recipes, the temperature of the water, the currents, the creatures who may be around. If you were to surface too quickly, your insides would be like a shaken soda can that got popped open. Bubbles would emerge everywhere and you’d be dead before you reach the surface.

ARCHIVAL: commence 6 hours of intense physiological investigation…

Ben Hellwarth: All of this is very different than being in a submarine because the submarine is protecting you from the pressure of the water outside. Now you can’t leave a submarine. So the idea for sealab is you’re living in this pressurized atmosphere and you are free to come and go from this environment as you please through a hatch that’s left open in the floor. Water does not rush in because the pressure inside is the same as the water pressure outside.

AMBI: BUBBLES

Some of the guys would just free dive outta the sea lab and just experience the wonder of being 200 feet down in the ocean at night.
The divers would tell you they had a blast.

ARCHIVAL Aquanaut Richard Grigg: I was, uh, excited, uh, to see things in the ocean that, uh, you normally could not see any other way living on the bottom and making continuous dives over a long period of time. You could see these animals, uh, doing things undisturbed. They, they sort of got used to us.

Richard Blackburn: You got up every morning, went into the ocean. You felt that you were at home. The water was your friend. It got to be where you really wanted to be in the water more than you wanted to be on land. ’cause it was so much more peaceful and so much more beautiful.

Ben Hellwarth: Every minute and every hour, every day, there are obviously opportunities for something to go wrong, and there were close calls, at one point Scott Carpenter went outside the habitat and carpenter’s airline got an old fashioned kink in it, like a garden hose, and all he knew was he couldn’t breathe. He hastily bursts up through the hatch into the lab, just gasping for breath. Had carpenter not had the presence of mind to swim back before he just passed out from lack of oxygen, that might have been a whole different story..

My dad was willing to be a guinea pig, gathering data about what happens to the human body under duress. He felt there’s value in pushing yourself to the very extreme – what can human beings do.

ARCHIVAL: Uh, Scott, can you come up on the unscrambler again.

Ben Hellwarth: Scott carpenter lived and worked for a month, straight on the bottom, 30 days, that was completely off the charts at, at the time, a human body. Surviving at that depth and pressure for that long. And so, Sealab was considered a success. George Bond wants to get Carpenter on the phone with Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States

Archival: helium voice “1,2,3,4,5, how do you hear that operator?

Ben Hellwarth: The White House operators are so confused by the sound of carpenter’s voice. They’re acting like it’s some crank call
Archival: Sir it’s very garbled and we have to have a clear connection for the president.

Kris Stoever: I mean it took 15 minutes for the operator to put my dad on.

ARCHIVAL: Here you are sir. Scott, you read me? Yes sir. Mr. President. LBJ: Scott. Glad to…But whether you’re going up or down, you have the courage and the skill to do a fine job. Carpenter: Well, I think there very much, there were a lot of other people here
MUSIC

Ben Hellwarth: Living underwater now this is not just science fiction, this is a real thing. We could have these seabases for military purposes, for scientific purposes, for exploration. This opens up the door to all sorts of possibilities.

ARCHIVAL: Barry Simmons from Channel 10, San Diego, captain Bond. Would you cite some of the achievements of this experiment for us?

ARCHIVAL BOND: Probably the greatest highlight is what I see here today, something that started in the face of cries, that this is madness. You’re wasting your time. In the Navy’s time today, we have demonstrated operationally that this can be done.

Ben Hellwarth: By 1969, the Navy decides to take this up a notch. to go all the way to 600 feet.

Richard Blackburn: 600 feet. That’s a quantum leap. You conditioned your mind to accept the risks and to try to foresee any problems, but of course there was a lot of unforeseen problems that you just can’t, you can’t predict

Ben Hellwarth: The deeper you go, the more complicated it gets for the health of the human body. Yeah, every 33 feet, you add another atmosphere worth of pressure. So 66 feet, two atmospheres, 99 feet, three atmospheres, and so on down to the bottom of the sea.

Archival: Communications check…Here at the experiment site, aquanauts make final preparations, sealab is lowered into the ocean

Richard Blackburn: The morning of the dive we got everything ready to go. And then we found out that the lab was leaking.

ARCHIVAL: I’d like to get all members of team 1 over here…

Ben Hellwarth: The lab is leaking but the navy decided to go ahead with this experiment. We can still do this, is the feeling. One of the ways we can address this is to get aquanauts down there and having them attend to the leaks

Richard Blackburn: Now they started the lowering process to get us to the bottom. Took about an hour,

Ben Hellwarth: So they’re sitting in the pressurized elevator and they realize right away that they’re really cold.

Richard Blackburn: There was no heat. It was supposed to be heated. You get 10 times colder breathing helium than you do air. The cold was so bad that our bodies were shaking like we were in convulsions. Once we got on the bottom, we didn’t do the kind of detailed checklist we normally would have done. Just, let’s get in the water and get that thing fixed.

ARCHIVAL: With their elevator on the ocean floor. Aquanauts Barth and Cannon Head for the habitat. The problem is apparent to them as they approach. The light helium oxygen atmosphere of sealab is bubbling out to the sea.

Richard Blackburn: Bob and Berry swam out to the lab. Berry had the responsibility to fix that electrical problem. At the same time Bob was trying to push the hatch open. Then all of a sudden we hear a scream. John and I look at each other and say what is that?

ARCHIVAL: He sees his partner Barry Cannon, in trouble on the ocean floor. He rushes to Berry’s aid. Cannon is shaking. His mouthpiece has come loose, allowing his vital breathing gas to escape.

Richard Blackburn: When I reached Barry, his mouthpiece was floating above his head and tried to jam it into his mouth. I couldn’t, couldn’t get it in, so I went arm over arm.

And the three of us were able to pick him up and get him in the diving bell. I gave him mouth to mouth, but as, uh, the time went on, he got colder and colder and colder, and we gently as possible laid him out on a bunk, closed his eyes and we all just sat there and looked at each other.

ARCHIVAL: Good evening, a civilian US Equinox, taking part of the nation’s most ambitious underwater living experiment to date, died today in water 600 feet deep off the southern California coast. The Navy says it will suspend diving operations until it’s known exactly what happened.

Ben Hellwarth: After Barry Cannon’s death, there was this investigation to try to assess blame, figure out what went wrong. And ultimately the Navy decided to abandon C Lab altogether and quietly canceled the program. Certainly the Navy divers were all greatly disappointed.

Their divers felt that Barry Cannon himself would’ve said, Hey, we all knew we were taking risks here. And sometimes you gotta just push on. Even in the case of a fatality, just because we lost someone doesn’t mean we should lose this whole program.

Richard Blackburn: I mean, it was depressing. I would’ve liked to have seen the Sea Lab program go on. But that wasn’t the priority for the big picture.

Kris Stoever: I think my dad felt that it was inevitable given, uh, the death of Barry Cannon and the war in Vietnam. The Navy just didn’t have the bandwidth to do Sea Lab.

MUSIC
ARCHIVAL: Captain Bond, is it possible sometime in the far distant future that we may have cities under the sea, men down there mining, things like that? I don’t predict that we will have cities, but I think we will have colonies of people living on the ocean bottom, year round.

Ben Hellwarth: George Bond’s dream, that you should be able to house people in the oceans. That vision kind of died with Sealab.
Nowadays, we know things about galaxies billions of light years away, but there are huge swaths of the ocean floor that are unexplored. There’s still a lot of mystery to it.

ARCHIVAL:good luck to you and Sealab. That’s it for now. Thanks very much for joining us and until next time. Good evening.

Archival Music: Goodnight Irene helium version

BACK ANNOUNCE:
Joe Richman: The Saturation diving techniques pioneered by Sealab were later used by the Navy for undersea espionage during the cold war. Many of the aquanauts, including Richard Blackburn, went on to work as divers in the oil industry’s offshore drilling projects.
This story was produced by Sarah Kate Kramer and edited by me.
Thanks to Ben Hellwarth, who provided us with a priceless box of cassette tapes – and handwritten notes – with never-before heard archival recordings of the Sealab experiments. And special thanks to our intern Sonya Gurwitt, who listened to hours and hours of those tapes for this story.
Also thanks to Mathias Bossi and Stellwagon Symphonette for some of the music in this story.
The Radio Diaries team includes: Nellie Gilles, Alissa Escarse, Mycah Hazel and Lena Englestein. Our editors are Ben Shapiro and Deborah George.
We’re part of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best independent podcasts around. You can find all the shows at radiotopia dot fm.

We have support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and from listeners, like you.

I’m Joe Richman, thanks for listening.

MUSIC OUT
Archival From Scott Carpenter/White House Operator phone call:
Scott Carpenter’s helium voice: Alright. 1,2,3,4,5.
Operator1 : Now I, yes, we can understand you. Can you, ma’am?
Operator 2: No.
Operator 1: Uh, well he says that’s the best he can do. Uh.
Carpenter: Alright. I, I, I …
Operator 2: We wouldn’t be able to understand. It’s all garbled.
Carpenter: Well, keep in mind operator, but my voice will sound quite different. I’m in a chamber with a helium atmosphere, so the frequency of my voice is quite high.
Operator 1: Yes it is.

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