[NARRATOR:] In the spring of 1964, Scott Carpenter was preparing for a new mission.
The second American to orbit the earth,
he had become one of the most famous men of his day.
Now, he would be embarking on another, equally dangerous undertaking.
This time, Carpenter would not be an Astronaut but an “Aquanaut,”
venturing into the deepest parts of the ocean,
a vast and forbidding domain every bit as daunting as outer space.
Divers who attempted to chart its depths
faced barriers that had thwarted mankind for centuries
near total blackness,
bone-jarring cold,
intense pressure that could disorient the mind and crush the body.
Carpenter and his fellow pioneers would attempt to break through those barriers
going deeper and staying longer underwater than anyone had done before,
seeing if it was possible for humans to live on the bottom of the ocean.
At first, their daring exploits were captured the nation’s attention,
but tragedy would consign their ground-breaking work to the shadows
and obscure the accomplishments of the men of Sealab.
On the first of October, 1959, the U.S.S. Archerfish glided to a stop
322 feet beneath the waves, off the Florida coast.
Two Navy divers were about to test
whether it was possible to escape from a submarine at this depth
something no one had ever tried before.
The men took a single lung full of compressed air
and stepped out of a hatch into the water.
They were immediately lifted upwards by their inflated vests
traveling at six feet per second.
As they rose and the water pressure decreased,
the air in their lungs kept expanding,
forcing them to exhale a continuous stream of bubbles.
53 seconds after leaving the Archerfish,
the men burst onto the surface
and took their first lungful of air.
The daring test was known as a “blow and go,”
and at its center was a pioneering researcher named Dr. George Bond.
[HELLWARTH:] George Bond was the kind of guy that when he walked into a room,
big tall guy with a deep resonant voice,
and a kind of visionary air about him,
people liked him.
Even his...even people who didn’t agree with him,
couldn’t help but kind of like him.
And it made him the kind of leader people wanted to follow.
[BARTH:] If he said, "Tomorrow we’re going to go to the moon,"
all of us would have said, "Let’s go."
He was just that type of guy
[EARLE:] George Bond was out there in the thick of things himself.
He was a personal guinea pig.
He’d try things out before he’d expose others to the risks.
[NARRATOR:] He was a broad-shouldered former doctor from Appalachia,
whose backwoods brogue and southern courtliness
masked a driving determination to save lives
and change the world.
Bond had grown up around the small town of Bat Cave, North Carolina
and returned there at the age of 31,
as the region’s only doctor.
Within a few years, he had been named Doctor of the Year
and was profiled in a film by the American Medical Association
honored for his tireless work serving 5,000 people,
scattered across 500 square miles of rugged backcountry.
Bond was drafted into the medical corps near the end of the Korean War.
In March of 1957, he was assigned to the Medical Research Laboratory
at the U.S. Naval Submarine Base in New London, Connecticut.
The lab was a center for studying the effects of diving on the human body,
and training submarine crews in escape techniques like the “Blow and Go.”
Bond fell in love with what he called “The Diving Game.”
Shortly after arriving in New London, he submitted a research proposal to the Navy,
outlining his vision for man’s future below the surface.
[BORNHOLDT:] He was dreaming about people living on the ocean floor
and farming and building houses and civilizations
and actually feeding the population of the world
from, you know, those activities.
It was more of a vision than a, sort of, scientific paper.
Bond was thinking of military, industrial, scientific possibilities,
the whole world that might open up
if only man could live in the ocean.
[NARRATOR:] Covering 70% of the earth’s surface,
the ocean remained an alluring but forbidding realm
that had fascinated humans for centuries.
“Breath-hold” divers had long sought pearls on a single lungful of air
but could only stay below the surface for minutes at a time.
By the 1920s, treasure seekers, salvage operators, and Navy divers
began to descend in so-called hardhats,
breathing air pumped through hoses from the surface.
The clumsy rigs allowed them to roam the sea floor,
but their umbilical lines could easily become fouled on obstructions.
Eventually, pressurized vessels extended man’s reach into the depths.
The first modern submarines were developed during the Civil War
by World War I, they had emerged as a terrifying new weapon.
Then, in the 1930s the American naturalist and marine biologist, William Beebe
lowered his pressurized iron bell,
known as a “bathysphere,”
almost half a mile below the waves,
glimpsing for the first time,
the strange life forms inhabiting the inky blackness.
Twenty-five years later
a reinforced “bathyscaphe” called Trieste
descended an astonishing 35,000 feet
– almost seven miles --
to the deepest part of the ocean.
By the time George Bond arrived in New London,
nuclear-power had made it possible for submarines to remain submerged for weeks,
cruising hundreds of feet down.
But humans remained confined to airtight capsules,
unable to swim freely at such depths.
In the 1940s, a new system known as scuba
allowed divers to breathe compressed air from tanks worn on their backs,
but the further down a diver went,
the more dangerous the undersea world became.
