The use of helium, which the U.S. Navy demonstrated during the Squalus rescue in 1939, was introduced commercially in the early 1960s to meet an increasing need for deeper, clearheaded dives, especially along the coast of Southern California, where the sea floor typically slopes downward much more precipitously than along the Gulf Coast. The early diving companies sometimes took approaches similar to that of Hannes Keller, devising their own methods—novel breathing gas mixtures, revamped decompression tables, customized gear—in order to maximize the brief bottom times possible when making deeper conventional bounce dives from the surface. A few companies continued to push the bounce diving limits down to depths of four or even six hundred feet or more, for jobs that were not terribly time-consuming. Yet for deep jobs that would take hours or days to complete instead of minutes, there was a case to be made for this new method called saturation diving. A marine version of the space race, fueled by business interests, got off to a fast start.
As Sealab II was getting under way in 1965, the first commercial saturation dives were about to be carried out by the Underseas Division of Westinghouse. Westinghouse engineers took a tip from the work being done for Sealab and built a saturation system called Cachalot—French for a deep-diving whale. The main difference from Sealab was that the Cachalot system consisted of everything but a sea floor habitat. For the jobs Westinghouse had in mind, there seemed to be no reason to go to the trouble and expense of housing saturation divers underwater. The divers could live, austerely and under pressure, in the kind of decompression chambers used on the Sealab support ships. Then, rather than living in a sea floor habitat, they could just commute to and from their underwater job site in a pressurized diving bell.
The Cachalot system, with its special bell that could be mated to a chamber, was first used in 1965 to make repairs to the Smith Mountain Dam in central Virginia. A Connecticut outfit called Marine Contractors Inc. supplied a team of eight divers who rode inside the bell in pairs to the foot of the dam at locations as deep as two hundred feet. There they worked on damaged trash racks, the large steel grates that filter water as it passes through the dam. Within three months the Smith Mountain saturation divers, with only a few close calls, had successfully demonstrated the usefulness and efficiency of saturation diving in the commercial sector. By more conventional means, this job might have taken two years and cost a lot more.
Westinghouse’s initial enthusiasm for saturation diving eventually faded as its corporate focus changed, but in the meantime the company got another early jump on the competition. The next year its Cachalot system was used to make the first commercial saturation dives at sea. Working at depths down to 240 feet in the Gulf of Mexico, three pairs of divers from Marine Contractors were saturated for six days each to dismantle the remains of two Gulf Oil well structures that Hurricane Betsy had torn apart as if they were Tinkertoys. The hazardous and otherworldly demolition job required the divers to close eight wells with cement, attach hooks and explosive charges, and do ample cutting to clear out the tangle of debris.
A year later, in 1967, Westinghouse staged a demonstration forty-five miles off Grand Isle, south of New Orleans, in which two divers were saturated at 350 feet. As part of the demonstration, they were lowered in their bell for an excursion dive and the divers cracked another barrier by working for an hour at a daunting six hundred feet before returning to 350 feet. Other companies soon followed these examples, and a few years later when Doc Helvey made his inaugural saturation dive in the North Sea the bell-and-chamber approach to commercial saturation diving, without any habitat, was the standard.
The friendly rivals Bond and Cousteau had set the stage for saturation diving, yet neither of them jumped headlong into the offshore industry. They preferred undersea projects that focused on science and exploration rather than commercial applications. For Ed Link, however, industrial interests were never far from his entrepreneurial mind and by 1964 he helped set up a new company, Ocean Systems Inc., to develop a whole range of underwater equipment for commercial use, and to provide services like saturation diving.
Ocean Systems was an early corporate entrant into the modern offshore industry and a direct outgrowth of Link’s Man-in-Sea program. Rather than disband the loose-knit team of divers, scientists, and engineers he had assembled for his experiments, Link transformed his team into a company and formed partnerships with Union Carbide, which was chiefly concerned with pressurized gases and their uses, and General Precision Inc., the parent company of Link Aviation Inc., Link’s original enterprise. Among the Ocean Systems personnel that inaugural year were a number of former Submersible Portable Inflatable Dwelling participants, including Jon Lindbergh and Robert Sténuit. The Linde Division of Union Carbide, at Tonawanda, New York, would be home to the new company’s diving research facility. It lacked a test chamber, however, so in a somewhat symbolic passing of the torch, Link had the chamber aboard Sea Diver moved to a vacant Linde building. There, the staff would soon begin to take some shots at the depth barrier, such as with an experimental day-long dive to 450 feet, with Robert Sténuit serving as one of the subjects.
To broaden Ocean Systems’ business ties Link had recruited as a top manager his old friend E. C. Stephan, the admiral who headed the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group and was soon to retire from the Navy. Link would be a board director, a marine consultant, and a minority stockholder, but he refused to take a regular desk job with the company. He had turned sixty-one that summer and wanted to be able to spend time living aboard Sea Diver, developing and testing his own inventions.
George Bond, who once accepted foodstuffs as payment from his impoverished backwoods patients, didn’t have Ed Link’s entrepreneurial drive. After the Sealab program ended, Bond would mainly stay involved in deep sea diving through a smattering of activities more in the mold of Sealab that were focused on scientific ventures and living in the sea. Project Tektite in the Virgin Islands, where Bond paid a visit after the demise of Sealab III, was one such example. But Bond’s influence, and that of Sealab and saturation diving, loomed large, not just in terms of methods or technology but in terms of people, especially divers, who migrated from the U.S. Navy to the offshore industry. Like a next generation of pioneers, some brought specific knowledge of saturation diving with them and became leaders in the industry effort to crack barriers and enable divers to work deeper. Among the most notable migrants were Dr. Robert Workman and Ken Wallace. Workman, Bond’s learned, low-key decompression maestro, and Wallace, a Navy master diver, had both been assigned to the Experimental Diving Unit when Bond and his New London acolytes showed up in April 1963 to run their week-long, one-hundred-foot chamber test—the second of the three human Genesis experiments.
As a Navy master diver, Wallace understood and appreciated the work of a commercial diver. Diving was practically a Wallace family business. As a teenager he had quit school to work in Boston-area shipyards with his father and four older brothers. After his brothers joined the Navy during World War II, Wallace did, too. He was sworn in on his seventeenth birthday in 1943, and took part in the Normandy invasion the following year. He got out of the Navy after the war but rejoined in 1950, and this time was trained as a diver. By the early 1960s he made master diver, an achievement he considered the most significant of his life.
Both Wallace and Workman were involved with the experimental dives and research being done as part of the Sealab program, bolstering their own knowledge along the way. Others, too, with experience gleaned from the Unit and from Sealab would migrate offshore, including Bob Barth. The Unit itself remained an important research hub, and because it was a public entity it passed along findings about methods and equipment to interested commercial operators, including engineers from Link’s Ocean Systems.
By the time of Sealab II, in 1965, Dr. Workman and Wallace were working on the side as consultants to Taylor Diving & Salvage Co. Their friend Mark Banjavich was a retired Navy master diver who had cofounded Taylor in the late 1950s with anoth
er former Navy diver, Edward Lee “Hempy” Taylor, and Jean Valz, a colorful French émigré. Valz was not much of a diver but his personable manner and skills as a classically trained pianist opened some important doors when the three set up an office in New Orleans.
After his partners moved on, Banjavich became Taylor Diving’s president and mainstay. He had no personal experience with saturation diving, having left the Navy just as George Bond arrived. But he was a smart and savvy entrepreneur who could plainly see its potential in the oil patch, and that was one reason he brought in Dr. Workman and Ken Wallace. Taylor’s rapid growth, and its ability to spread the gospel of saturation diving, came in large measure from its early partnership with the venerable Houston construction company Brown & Root, whose marine group was building offshore oil-drilling platforms and pipelines. Brown & Root turned to Taylor for divers, thanks to the efforts of the genial Jean Valz. While Valz was eking out a living by playing piano at Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, a famed French Quarter watering hole, he got to know some company managers who frequented the bar and talked up his Navy pals and their excellent new business, Taylor Diving & Salvage.
Similar diving outfits were popping up along the Gulf Coast, all eager to supply underwater manpower to the offshore industry. Some early diving enterprises came and went; others were “mudhole” companies that worked the mucky fringes of Gulf marshland. They often had no more than a dozen employees and limited themselves to shallower jobs that could be handled with basic gear and conventional dives. By the early 1970s there were about a hundred of these smaller companies, but the bigger jobs and deeper dives required a level of expertise, equipment, and resources that only the larger, well-financed dive companies could afford.
With its lucrative ties to Brown & Root, Taylor grew swiftly and the partners moved their headquarters from the Jesting—an old schooner that Banjavich and Taylor had fixed up and sailed from New London—into a building near the boat’s dock on Lake Pontchartrain. By the early 1960s they had installed a pressure chamber, similar to those at the Unit, for training, testing equipment, and cracking depth barriers. At the time of the Smith Mountain dives in 1965, Taylor was almost finished building a bell-and-chamber system similar to Cachalot—so similar that Taylor, then a mere David to the Westinghouse Goliath, sued Westinghouse for allegedly copying its design. The companies eventually settled out of court. This was business, after all, not just a friendly rivalry or some experimental fantasy, and words like “proprietary” were seeping into the lexicon. Taylor Diving tried out its own saturation system in the Gulf of Mexico in the summer of 1967, just as Westinghouse had launched its demonstration off Grand Isle. Ken Wallace and Bob McArdle, another Navy master diver who was among the early Taylor recruits, trained company divers at Taylor’s test chamber and then supervised the company’s first working saturation dives, which reached depths of 220 feet.
Two years after Taylor’s Gulf debut, the company deepened its stake in saturation diving with the opening of its Hydrospace Research Center, a multimillion-dollar pressure complex at its new headquarters in Belle Chasse, on a canal just south of New Orleans. The new complex had chambers that could simulate depths to 2,200 feet, deeper than any private or military manned test facility in the world. Whether divers would ever be able to work at such depth was an open question, but with test chambers like this one, the answers might be found, and more barriers broken. The research center was also a place for training divers, testing equipment, and doing demonstrations to sell clients on Taylor techniques.
In 1970, a year after the Hydrospace Center opened, Dr. Workman retired from the Navy and took over as full-time head of Taylor’s burgeoning research division. Ken Wallace, who had already retired from the Navy and joined Taylor full-time, had risen to vice president of the company and within a few years would take the reins from Banjavich as company president. Taylor, with its many Navy ties, would add many former Navy divers to its payroll. Yet at Taylor and elsewhere there were also plenty of divers trained in civilian diving schools, and others who, as Ken Wallace once did, learned on the job in commercial settings. The bigger companies usually required a period of apprenticeship, even for a first-class Navy diver like Doc Helvey. Clannish tensions occasionally bubbled up between ex-Navy divers and those who came up through the civilian ranks, but everyone knew that in the water cooperation was essential.
Whatever the background of their personnel, American-based diving companies like Taylor, Santa Fe International, Sub Sea International, Ocean Systems, Oceaneering International, J. Ray McDermott & Co., and Martech International became some of the biggest providers of underwater manpower. But there were others emerging around the world, including a formidable company founded by a onetime protégé of Jacques Cousteau named Henri Germain Delauze. As an adventuresome young diver in the early 1950s, Delauze had seized an opportunity to offer his services to the celebrated explorer. He spent several years with the Cousteau team, but personality conflicts developed as the tenacious and ebullient Delauze angled for a higher-profile role. Delauze did not fit the mold of Cousteau’s inner circle of skilled sailors and divers, many of whom stuck by their famed boss for years. They were grateful to be part of the burgeoning Cousteau legend and the adventures that came with it. They also tended to be a modest, easygoing bunch, or were at least temperamentally unfazed by living in Cousteau’s long shadow. Henri Delauze was not hardwired for life in a shadow. When the Calypso sailed on the journey that would become the basis of The Silent World, Delauze was left behind at the office in Marseille.
Delauze gave up on the Cousteau team and at age twenty-seven took a post with a big French civil engineering firm, making a name for himself while running the underwater operations for the construction of a highway tunnel under the port of Havana, Cuba. Delauze received a prestigious Fulbright scholarship and spent a year studying at the University of California at Berkeley. By 1961 he was ambitiously preparing to parlay his diving and engineering experience into an offshore enterprise, perhaps even a legend, of his own.
Delauze met again with Cousteau, this time in Monaco, where Cousteau had by then been director of the Oceanographic Museum for several years. Delauze told JYC about his plans for a company specializing in diving and other services for the offshore industry. Cousteau countered with a tempting offer to put Delauze in charge of U.S. Divers, the American manufacturer of the Aqualung and other diving gear. It was a legitimate opportunity and few would have said no to Cousteau, who had just made the cover of Time magazine. But Delauze had his own plans, which began with renting a couple of small offices and a warehouse near the Old Port in Marseille, not far from the Cousteau team’s main research hub. The Old Port offices would be the first headquarters for Delauze’s company, the Compagnie Maritime d’Expertises, or COMEX. Now Delauze would take diving to depths that Cousteau could only dream about.
Where the cause of pursuing deeper dives was concerned, Delauze was not strictly business; he indulged his pioneering streak. The ability to send divers to work at deeper depths might prove to be good for business, but for Delauze depth barriers were there to be broken, and he relished the prospect of having his company break them first. He lured some key Cousteau team members to Comex, most notably Dr. Xavier Fructus, a top French physiologist who did work for Conshelf and brought to Comex’s research program the kind of intellectual heft that Dr. Workman brought to Taylor’s.
Like Taylor Diving and Link’s Ocean Systems, Comex had its own test chamber to run experimental dives. Researchers at Comex and elsewhere were taking more direct aim at the thousand-foot barrier. How to get divers safely to such depths and beyond was still unclear. Human subjects had broached the thousand-foot barrier only a couple of times since the tragic Hannes Keller dive, and only briefly. The U.S. Navy made its first thousand-foot saturation dive in early 1968, at the Experimental Diving Unit, as part of the preparations for Sealab III. Soon thereafter Walt Mazzone supervised a thirteen-minute excursion dive from 825 to 1,025 feet, also at the U
nit. By the end of the year, the first substantial duration at a thousand feet was reached during a three-day test carried out by the Navy with scientists at Duke University, one of the world’s top hubs of hyperbaric research. As experience began to accumulate, researchers could see that when approaching simulated depths of one thousand feet, both human and animal subjects exhibited troubling symptoms, like some new form of nitrogen narcosis—except that it seemed to have something to do with breathing all that helium.
British researchers at the Royal Navy Physiological Laboratory working on deep submarine escape methods in the mid-1960s first observed some unexpected reactions in their test subjects as they reached simulated depths of between six and eight hundred feet. Most noticeably, the subjects began to shake. Their arms, hands, and sometimes their whole bodies twitched and jittered uncontrollably, as if they’d been left out in the cold. This phenomenon was initially called “helium tremors,” and researchers puzzled over what was happening, among them Henri Delauze, who personally volunteered to be locked in a chamber for one of the early experimental dives. This would be the first of a series, called Physalie, run at the Comex hyperbaric center beginning in mid-1968. It marked a starting point for studies that zeroed in on the physiological effects of crossing the thousand-foot barrier. Joining Delauze in the Comex chamber was the American hyperbaric researcher Ralph Brauer, who signed on as a collaborator with Comex investigators, one of whom was Dr. Fructus, Cousteau’s former medical adviser. As Delauze and Brauer hunkered down for their journey across the thousand-foot barrier, the pressure continued to rise, but before the duo got to the equivalent of about eleven hundred feet, Brauer began to experience the telltale signs of muscle tremors and visible shaking. They reversed course after a matter of minutes at their maximum depth.
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