In the late 1920s naturalist William Beebe, working from Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, wanted to study a column of ocean two miles deep, but diving helmets and submarines of the day could not do it. He announced plans for a cylindrical vessel, which engineer Otis Barton recognized as a death trap. Barton designed a sphere instead, paid for it, kept ownership, and insisted on joining every dive. The steel ball had an interior about four and three quarter feet across, weighed over two tons, and had three inch fused quartz windows and a 400 pound hatch bolted on from outside. Soda lime and calcium chloride scrubbed the air, stirred by palm leaf fans, while Gloria Hollister took notes over a phone line and John Tee-Van ran the deck.

The first casting in June 1929 was too heavy and had to be melted down. On June 6, 1930 the two men reached 803 feet, and Beebe watched red and yellow light vanish into blue. In 1932 a flooded unmanned test fired the hatch bolt 30 feet across the deck, yet on September 22, 1932 they dove to 2,200 feet during a live NBC radio broadcast, battered and seasick. National Geographic put up 10,000 dollars, and on August 15, 1934 they reached 3,028 feet with every foot of cable unspooled, surfacing after just five minutes. The record stood for 15 years, but critics doubted Beebe’s new species without specimens, and Barton’s resentment spilled into the film Titans of the Deep.

• An unmanned test brought the sphere up with its hose wrapped around the steel cable 45 times.
• Gloria Hollister set a women’s depth record of 410 feet.
• Beebe met Auguste Piccard at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, which pointed him to National Geographic funding.
• The bathysphere later sat under the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island until it was restored in 2005.
• Beebe’s dives inspired Jacques Piccard’s bathyscaphe and influenced the design of the submersible Alvin.