Books, Posts, Podcasts, & Mini-Docs – PAUL ANDREWS
Contrary to popular myth, Japan’s version of Adolf Hitler was not the Emperor Hirohito, but rather its infamous Minister of War, Hideki Razor Tojo. But who was this ruthless and powerful man so few outside Japan know of? He rose to power in the 1930’s, began World War II in the Pacific, and was responsible for the deaths of millions of his own people and the Allies.
The terrible Johnstown Flood of 1889 was more of a man-made Tsunami. Yes, there was flooding at first. The ‘Storm of the Century‘ rains arrived in the deep Pennsylvania valley on Memorial Day, 1889. The two rivers that flanked the steel mill town began to swell. But it wasn’t until the aging South Fork Dam burst that the REAL tragedy occurred. The dam, owned by a wealthy country club, held back the waters of Lake Conemaugh, just14 miles upriver from the unsuspecting people of Johnstown.
If you drive north on Route 61 in northeastern Pennsylvania, U.S., you will come across an innocent looking detour at the top of a low mountain. Thinking nothing of it, drivers follow the signs around something unseen, perhaps road construction up ahead or a bridge repair. Upon closer inspection however, it seems to be a permanent closure of the road to Centralia.
You’re soon back on the highway and greeted by an eerie site, the ghost town that is Centralia, Pennsylvania. Vacant, weed-filled lots occupy a grid of empty streets. Sidewalks remain, but all the houses are gone. Here and there, tufts of grey smoke appear to be coming from the earth itself. In some cases, a ring of chain link fences circle the smoke holes.
In began innocuously enough in May 1962, when a careless trash fire was started in a landfill that was also an abandoned, coal strip mine. The fire department doused the pit with water for hours and they thought the fire was out. Unfortunately, it was not. This is the Pennsylvania Coal Region, once home to hundreds of deep anthracite mines, now largely abandoned. The fire snaked underground along old coal veins, sucking in air and venting hot smoke up through cracks in the earth.
Eventually, it followed those coal veins and slowly crept underneath quiet Centralia itself. The fire began venting poisonous gases up through the basements of homes and businesses. With a slow horror, residents realized that the underground fire had reached their town. Worse still, it could not be extinguished, or even burn itself out in the near future — not until ALL the coal under the mountain was removed or consumed.
The fire slowly worked its way under row after row of family homes and businesses. Vent holes of white smoke appeared in backyards. The threat of house fires, asphyxiation, and carbon monoxide poisoning became a daily fact of life. For the next two decades, the town attempted to battle the fire. The fire company flushed the mine holes with rivers of water. They excavated the burning veins and dug trenches. The state back-filling the vent holes to try and suffocate it. They dug AGAIN and AGAIN in an vain attempt to find the boundaries of the fire.
By the 1980s, the fire had affected over 200 acres of Centralia. Residents had to abandon their homes as carbon monoxide had reached life threatening levels inside. A study concluded that the fire could burn for another 100 years or more and spread over 3,700 acres of the mountain. The state government eventually became involved and declared Centralia municipalis non grata. Route 61 had to be permanently detoured around the borough.
Properties were condemned, citizens relocated, and their homes demolished, all costing about $42 million. The town hoped to dig a 500-foot deep trench completely across the hilltop on which Centralia sat, holding back the fire and saving half the town. To no one’s surprise, the expensive trench was never dug. A few die hard residents remained in their homes, their hopes pinned on continued efforts to contain the blaze.
Ironically today, the Centralia Fire Department is the only modern building still remaining, along with two houses. The Assumption BVM Church sits up on the mountain side overlooking the ghost town. 522 homes are gone in all. The hillsides are peppered with holes spewing noxious gases. Large cracks and pits make most streets through town undrivable. Though there are no visible flames, you can feel the heat radiating from the breaches in the earth. Tall metal pipes emerge from the ground about 8 feet tall, ringed by small protective fences. In winter, like the geysers at Yellowstone National Park, snow never sticks because the ground is too warm around the smoke vents.
Over 62 years and 42 million dollars later, the fire still burns on several fronts underneath Centralia and the surrounding mountain. But the cracked sidewalks, vacant streets and empty, weed-filled plots remain, along with a handful of aging holdouts. By 2000, the fire had moved into Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery, with white smoke eerily wafting up around the silent, grey tombstones. In 2004, the PA Department of Environmental Protection explicitly discouraged visitors from stopping in and exploring Centralia.
Curious people like myself irresistibly come anyway, renaming it Helltown USA, drawn to the eerie, empty streets, peppered with fissures oozing white smoke. Thousands of visitors covered the old road into town with graphic graffiti becoming Graffiti Highway. A PBS Documentary on the mine fire was made in 1982, interviewing several Centralia residents. In 2013, the seven remaining elderly residents reached an agreement with the state allowing them to remain in their beloved homes until they died. By 2020 only 5 remained. That same year, Graffiti Highway was sadly covered with a thick layer of dirt, ending a decades-long attraction.
I grew up just a few miles from Centralia, Pennsylvania. As a young boy, I witnessed the citizens rebellion against the state, the sad evacuations of homes, and the slow demolition of this quaint little mountain town. The poor residents certainly did not deserve this unfortunate end. But when mankind plays recklessly with nature’s resources, leaving a hazardous mess behind, nature has a way of fighting back.
Actor and producer Orson Welles caused a nationwide panic in the U.S. when he broadcast his “War of the Worlds” radio play on Sunday night, October 30, 1938. It was so realistic, listeners who tuned in late after 8:00 PM thought they were hearing horrifying news accounts of an actual Martian invasion of Earth! There was no television yet in the 1930s.
Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater Company decided to present a modernized version of H.G. Wells’ classic science fiction novel on CBS Radio. It would be take place in the present, however, rather than last century. His Mercury Theatre on the Air had already put on successful radio plays of Julius Caesar and Oliver Twist. Welles was already internationally famous in radio as the sinister baritone voice of “The Shadow,” a hit mystery program.
Sunday evenings in the 1930’s were prime-time in Radio’s Golden Age of listeners. Millions of Americans had their large console radios tuned in, with the entire family gathered around. If you happened to tune in late and miss the introduction of the play, Welles’ program began innocently enough, with peppy Big Band dance music, supposedly from the Hotel Park Plaza in New York City.
But then an announcer broke in to report that a college professor watching at an observatory had detected strange explosions on the red planet Mars, earth’s neighbor. This was followed by another yet urgent interruption in which listeners were told a large meteor had just crashed into a farm in Grovers Mills, New Jersey near Princeton! Then came more infuriating dance music as the audience listened and waited.
The Martian War Machine then fired a “heat-ray” disintegrating the reporter and all 7,000 National Guardsman! The radio went deadly silent for an entire minute. Next, another voice somberly announced the deaths in Grover’s Mill and reported that other “Martian cylinders” were now landing in Chicago, Buffalo and St. Louis! More National Guard troops were being deployed. Oh my God! listeners thought, IT’S AN INVASION! The radio actors were VERY good at their job, portraying terrified announcers and using plenty of creepy alien sound effects. Announcers reported widespread panic had broken out in all major US cities, with thousands of families desperately trying to flee the oncoming Martian havoc.
In fact, that’s what was exactly happening. The United States was already on nervous edge, with news of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Army threatening yet another world war in Europe. As many as a million radio listeners believed that a Real Martian Invasion was actually occurring. Panic broke out across the country with terrified families jamming the highways to escape the cities, calling confused police departments and begging for gas masks. Others showed up with rifles and shotguns, ready to fight and defend America against the Martians.
Phones began ringing constantly at the CBS Radio Studio in New York City. When news of the real-life panic reached Welles in the studio, he was shocked. He personally went on the air and broke into the show to remind listeners that it was just a radio play, and that none of it was real. The spell was broken for those listening. For those already fleeing, the news would slowly trickle in. Can you imagine the reaction? As word reached the streets, confused and beleaguered Americans turned around and went back to their homes.
That night, mayors across America wanted Welles’ head and the police wanted him arrested. They stormed the CBS Radio Studio in Manhattan wanting to “punch him in the kisser.” The entire cast and producers sneaked out of the building via a rear exit. The next day (Halloween by chance), a bewildered-looking Orson Welles held a quick press conference. He stated he never had any intention of deceiving people or inciting a panic. He was just trying to put on a good show for his loyal audience. In fact, the arrogant and ego-centric Welles was quite thrilled with the panic he caused and soaked up the national attention.
As the saying goes, there is no such thing as bad publicity. The fame helped land young Orson Welles a lucrative movie contract in Hollywood, California. He soon left New York and radio behind for a lucrative career in motion pictures. Say what you will of the man, you cannot deny his talent. Just two years later, he directed, co-wrote, produced, and starred in the Academy Award winning movie Citizen Kane. To this day it is hailed as one of the greatest films ever made. It received nine Oscar nominations and won him an award for Best Screenplay. We was quite the skilled story teller and went on to make 17 more films.
The Johnstown Flood of 1889 was more a man-made Tsunami than a flood by Mother Nature. Yes, there was flooding first, when a torrential storm arrived on Memorial Day 1889. The two rivers that flanked the steel mill town swelled and flooded the riverfront. But this was normal for a river town and the residents thought nothing of rolling up their carpets and carrying them upstairs. It wasn’t until the aging dam burst upriver that the real staggering tragedy and loss of life occurred.
The South Fork Dam was completed 37 years earlier in 1852. Lake Conemaugh sat for twenty-two years in an isolated, forested valley, 14 miles upriver from Johnstown. An investor named Benjamin Ruff later bought the lake and turned it into a mountain retreat for the wealthy elite of Pittsburgh. The “SOUTH FORK FISHING & HUNTING CLUB” was born with millionaires like Henry Frick, Andrew Carnegie, and Andrew Mellon as its charter members. For ten years, it was THE summer retreat of choice for the millionaires of Pennsylvania and their families. When the lake was full, the pristine water stretched three miles long and over a mile across. A large clubhouse and numerous luxury cottage dotted the shoreline.
FIRST – large cast iron pipes were originally built into a culvert at the base of the breast to control the level of the lake when needed. A prior owner removed them and sold the pipes for scrap metal! In an effort to avoid costly repairs, the new South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club did not replace them. Though the dam did have a spillway for overflow, this still left no means to ever drain the lake when badly needed repairs were necessary.
SECOND -the Club added a screen of cast iron bars across the spillway to prevent their precious bass and trout from escaping. Sport fishing was one of the draws for wealthy gentlemen, along with small game hunting along the shores. Unfortunately, it also caught all the branches and forest leaves that fell each season. There was no longer any way for them to simply float out, decreasing the spillway’s effectiveness in times of high rains.
THIRD – a minor break in the breast during the Civil War left the dam badly in need of repairs. The owners of the South Fork Club had only the exposed side of the breast repaired in 1881, since the lake could no longer be drained. They had their workers only patch it haphazardly with rocks, hemlock, mud, hay, and even cow manure! Plus they chose a gentleman from Pittsburgh with no engineering credentials to lead the repair.
By 1889, the middle of the breast had dipped by about two feet lower than either end.
FORTH – around the same time, the Club owners actually had the entire breast of the dam lowered three feet to accommodate a wider carriage road across the top. You see, the owners wanted it wide enough for two carriages to be able to pass each other going either to or from the Clubhouse. This would be so as not make their wealthy guests have wait in line at either end of the dam. Heaven forbid there be such an inconvenience!
FIFTH and finally – the Club owners had two unqualified steel mill inspectors come to Lake Conemaugh and examine the dam a few years before the collapse. This was because local witnesses were increasingly alarmed the dam’s shoddy state. The ‘inspectors’ stated that “The South Fork Dam was perfectly safe to withstand all the pressure that can be brought to bear on it by the waters of Lake Conemaugh.” Well, history tells us how inaccurate those 2 men were.
That spring, the lake was already full from a heavy winter snow melt coming off the Allegheny Mountains. When heavy rains that weekend from a mid-west ‘Storm of the Century’ finally brought the waters up and over the breast, it was only a matter of time before disaster struck. The aged dam finally burst, releasing 20 million tons of water in a matter of minutes. John Parke, the Hunting Club’s young engineer galloped his horse to the nearby village of South Fork to warn the residents.
At 4:00 pm on a Memorial Day weekend in 1889, a tsunami of lake water 35 FEET HIGH travelling 45 MPH rushed down the narrow South Fork River valley like a runaway train. It collected miles of deadly debris along the way, wiping away a railroad trestle and four smaller villages. Just before Johnstown, it took away a large rail yard and even a barbed wire steel mill before finally slamming brutally into the city and its unsuspecting citizens.
The wave hit Johnstown hard. It destroyed hundreds of homes, killing thousands of residents, and wiped entire city blocks off the map. Those who didn’t die instantly, drowned in the rising floodwaters laced with the remains of the bridge, steel mill and railyard. A mountain of wreckage jammed like a second dam at the thick arches of the Stone Bridge over the Conemaugh River just outside of town. The wooden debris eventually caught fire due to numerous gas leaks. Whirlpools formed due to the steep mountainsides surrounding the city. Johnstown became in essence a second swirling Lake Conemaugh.
By the time the sun rose the next morning, the dazed survivors discovered a mangled city covered in mud, debris and corpses. Over 2,200 souls lost their lives, including 400 children and 100 complete families. Clara Barton and the newly formed Red Cross rushed in by train to help the hungry, homeless survivors. Reporters swarmed to the scene and the entire nation was in shock over the sheer cope of the disaster. Bodies were found downriver in Ohio as far at Cincinnati.
Oh, and what of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club and its wealthy Pittsburgh owners? Surely their part in the Johnstown Flood led to them paying a heavy price. Well, think again. Thanks to some high-priced Pittsburgh lawyers, they were never held accountable. Not for the deaths or damages by what was legally deemed by judges in the courts “an Act of God.” Pennsylvanians considered them Robber Barons who had gotten away with murder.
The remains of the South Fork Dam still exist today. The flanking sides of the old breast are a carefully preserved National Memorial managed by the U.S. Parks Service. Railroad tracks now run through the valley that once held the Lake Conemuagh, next to the quiet South Fork River. If you are ever in Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, take time to visit both the memorial and the rebuilt, modern city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
In May 1939, 937 anxious Jewish refugees fled the horrors of Nazi Germany, aboard an ocean liner named the SS St. Louis. Most were German citizens, with Jews from other countries like Poland and Austria. The passengers planned to reach Cuba first, then ultimately seek sanctuary the United States. They would tragically never make it.
General Andrew Jackson won the nasty election of 1828 and was elected President of the United States. At this time, over 125,000 Native Americans still occupied millions of acres in the American southeast – land they had lived on for generations. In a little over a decade, thanks the Indian Removal Act, there would be few left alive anywhere east of the Mississippi River. Many would have died along the Trail of Tears.
Drawing the Middle East’s modern borders on a map with a ruler certainly seemed simple. Perhaps that’s why the lines, set in 1916 by Englishman Sir Mark Sykes and Frenchman Francois Georges-Picot were straight ones. The infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement was a pact between Great Britain and France, in the middle of World War I (with the Russia Empire’s blessing). With it, they planned to completely dismember the centuries-old Ottoman Empire. It led to the division of the Turkish-held Middle East into 5 French and British-administered countries – today’s Syria, Lebanon, Israel (then called Palestine), Jordan and Iraq. During World War I, the Turks had allied themselves with Germany and Austria-Hungary and basically faced a war on three fronts.
Sykes & Picot were both colonial aristocrats who believed in the quaint notion that Second & Third World counties were incapable of self-rule, and far better living under their European masters. They had carved up African colonies in a similar fashion. Plus the warring sides of World War I were still oblivious to the fact that the Middle East sat upon the largest hidden oil reserves in the world. At the time, all the two allied nations desired was open shipping routes to Russia (via Istanbul), and a secure Suez Canal connection through the deserts of Egypt to India.
So the two men literally drew straight lines on a map, dividing up territory ruled by the Ottoman Empire for over 400 years into brand new countries. Syria and Lebanon, which would be under French control in the north. Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine which would be under British control in the south. Beneath them all sat all of Arab controlled Saudi Arabia. Following the end of World War I in 1918, the deed was done and signed into the 1919 Versailles Treaty between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire.
For you see, the Sykes-Picot Agreement had MANY problems. The first lay in those damn straight lines, which failed to take into account any sectarian, tribal, or ethnic divisions. Sykes & Picot envisioned Lebanon as a Christian haven, Palestine with a Jewish community, and Syria, Jordan & Iraq with the region’s Muslims. That of course never happened. Old racism and hatreds, suppressed for decades under strict Ottoman rule, came boiling to the surface without Turkish control.
Second, the agreement was made with NO Arab input of any kind … NONE. AND it ignored a promise Britain made to the Arabs that if they sided with them, and rebelled against the Turks in World War I, they would finally gain their independence. When independence did not materialize after the war, Arab politics gradually shifted from constitutional parliaments to militant kingdoms. This led to the rise of dictatorial regimes that dominated many Arab countries for decades, to this very day.
During World War I, Britain was willing to recognize and support Arab independence. The Arabs fulfilled their part of the agreement and revolted against the Turks, fueled in part by the contribution of famous British archaeologist Lieutenant TE Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia.” Britain, however, did not live up to its side of the deal. Lawrence later wrote that the Arab Revolt was useful, as it marched in line with Britain’s aims, i.e. the break-up of the vast Ottoman Empire. But, he also warned the Arab tribes were even less stable than the Turks, a ‘tissue of small, jealous principalities, incapable of long term cohesion.’
During the 1800’s, the Ottoman Sultan had taken a hands-off approach to governing the Middle East, and did little to promote progress. At the first sign of any tribal identity, the Turks beheaded the movement’s insolent leaders. The Sykes-Picot Agreement was a blatantly imperialistic solution. It took no account of the wishes of the people, ignored Arab and Kurdish boundaries, and provoked conflicts which continue to plague the region to this day. No other region on earth has seen so many border wars, civil wars and deadly coups in recent decades.
The Ottoman Empire was finally defeated by the Allies, carved up like a tired bull, and split among the victors in the1920 Treaty of Sevres. Instead of the nation-states Britain & France had promised the Arabs, the victors divided the Middle East into countries which, because of those damn straight lines, are still among the most difficult to govern on earth. The strains unleashed on the Arab World after World War I remain as acute as ever, 100 years later.
The Middle East still finds itself living with a 1916 map that ignored the region’s Islamic and ethnic realities – there were Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Jews. The nations and borders are still seen today as illegitimate by many of their own governments and citizens. World War I spilled over in World War II with little change to the Middle East. This was followed by: the founding of Israel in 1948, the race for Arab oil in Iraq, 3 Egypt-Israeli wars, countless Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish conflicts, 2 Iraq-Iran wars, 2 Persian Gulf Wars, the Syrian Civil War, and the rise and fall of Al-qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas.
With the exception of the 1978 Camp David Egypt-Israeli Peace Accords, negotiated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter, no lasting peace in the Middle East has stuck. The result has been seemingly unending conflicts amongst Arab nations, Arab factions, and with Arab neighbor Israel, that have yet to come to an end, a century later. Plus they show no signs of ceasing any time soon. All due to a few straight lines drawn on a paper map by two European men, over a hundred years ago.
It is true the infamous Chicago Fire started in the barn of Catherine and Patrick O’Leary on Sunday night, October 8th, 1871. They lived at 137 DeKoven Street on Chicago’s West Side. But poor scapegoated Kate O’Leary was not milking a cow at the time, as was later popularized by the relentless press. They were looking for a scapegoat, someone to blame. She and her husband were instead fast asleep in their bedroom after a long day of work. They were morning laborers you see, up at the crack of dawn to milk their 5 cows and make deliveries to their neighbors. By 8:30 pm, after feeding both their barn animals and their children, they were legitimately exhausted.
Some also blamed Daniel “Peg Leg” Sullivan for starting the blaze. He was the first person to shout “FIRE! FIRE!” in the streets that fateful night. But no, Daniel was simple strolling by the O’Leary place, listening to fiddle music drifting from a neighbor’s house, who were hosting a party. He noticed the first lick of flames shooting out of the O’Leary barn roof. The loft was packed with 3 Tons of Hay for the winter and went up like a bone-dry tinder box. Peg Leg Sullivan in fact risked his life to free the O’Leary’s terrified animals. A shed next door unfortunately held 2 tons of coal, also stockpiled by a neighbor for winter. That quickly ignited next.
Across Chicago, a fierce, gusting prairie wind blew from the southwest all night long. In between the tightly packed wooden houses were lines of wooden fences and wooden sidewalks. By the time Patrick and Kate O’Leary emerged sleepily from their home, two of their neighbors’ houses were already ablaze. Chicago had been experiencing a terribly hot drought that autumn. The winds would eagerly thrust the fire from house to house … and then street to street, throughout the long night. Neighbors would first try a bucket brigade, but it would be all for naught.
Due to fire signal confusion by the fire department, the first Firehouse Steamers would not arrive for OVER AN HOUR! Even when a dozen more arrived, entire city blocks were now on fire. It was too late to contain it just to the rural West Side. You see back in the 1800’s, nearly every structure, including the sidewalks, was made of wood, not brick or stone.
The winds freely tossed huge firebrands the size of livestock clear across the dark Chicago River to the South Side, where warehouses and the business district waited. There the wind-fed inferno charged along, consuming dozens of factories and lumber yards. Then it swept into city center, burning luxury hotels, banks, department stores, and even the Opera House and the cupola’d City Hall. Tall grain silos on the edge of Lake Michigan burnt like monstrous Roman candles. Panicked residents crowded onto bridges across the Chicago River. City officials made a feeble attempt at a fire break by dynamiting a few South Side buildings. It had little effect. Only the waters of Lake Michigan halted its ravenous eastward march.
Within hours, the fire jumped the river again to the heavily populated North Side residential area. The Fire Brigades, with their tiny steamer engines, were not equipped to handle such a massive conflagration. Dozens of city blocks, filled with mansions, homes, schools and churches all went up in flames. All Chicagoans could do was watch in horror and dash away in panic, ahead of the advancing front of flames. Even ships docked in the river and the wooden bridges that crossed it eventually caught fire and were consumed. In the middle of the night, dazed refugees huddled in Lincoln Park, or waded into the shore of Lake Michigan, praying to God for deliverance.
What was left of the city resembled Hiroshima after the atomic blast. Over 300 souls perished in the mighty blaze. Thousands of survivors were left homeless. The entire nation was shocked that one of their largest cities could literally go up in smoke. In the week to come, Kate O’Leary and her famous cow, were merely made unfortunate scapegoats. The papers went so far as to publish a now infamous sketch of her milking a cow that kicks a lantern into the straw. They drew her as an old, witch-like hag when in fact she was only thirty-five, with several young children to take care of. She and her family eventually had to flee the city due to numerous death threats.
So who Really started the famous fire that consumed a bustling American city? Having spent 2 years researching the Great Chicago Fire for my historical novel, FIREBRANDS, my theory is that it was not Catherine O’Leary or Peg Leg Sullivan. The most likely, though never proven culprit, was one of the O’Leary’s neighbors, from that rowdy party next door. If you had no cow, it was common to steal free milk from your neighbor’s barn under the cover of night. The drunken thief from the party likely had a candle that tipped over and fell into the hay. It starting the barn’s brittle, dry straw to blaze, and the shocked robber fled. After that, the rest is history. It would indeed be a “Hot Time in the Ole Town Tonight!“
Source: https://greatchicagofire.org/
A decade before the Apollo Moon Missions, two aquanauts, traveled to the last unexplored place on Earth, the deepest point under all the Earth’s oceans. On 23 January 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, in the bathyscaphe Trieste, descended down to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, 7 miles, (11 km) beneath the water surface.
The lowest point on our planet is deep underwater, in the western Pacific Ocean near the island of Guam. It’s here where converging geological plates crash together, forcing one plate down beneath the other, forming the formidable Mariana Trench. The deepest portion, at nearly 11,000 meters was discovered in 1951 by the British survey ship Challenger, hence the name “Challenger Deep.”
The Trieste bathyscaphe was named after the Italian city of its birth. A bathyscaphe (deep boat) is a type of mini-sub with a bathysphere attached to the bottom for piloting and observation. Auguste Piccard, a visionary Swiss inventor and aeronaut designed the Trieste, a precursor to today’s modern submersibles. Piccard was already famous for setting the record for the highest altitude balloon flight ever in 1932.
Trieste’s two-man crew would be working inside a 6.5 foot (2 meter) wide pressure sphere on the underside of the submersible. To withstand the intense pressure at the bottom of Challenger Deep [8 tons per square inch!], the bathysphere’s walls were 5 inches (8 cm) thick. To see outside, the crew would rely on a single window made of a solid cone of Plexiglas.
The rest of the nearly 60-foot (18-meter) long Trieste was primarily a 50 ft. tank. It was filled with 33,350 gallons (126,240 liters) of gasoline for buoyancy, along with nine tons of iron pellets as ballast to weigh it down. (Gasoline is more buoyant than water and resistant to compression.) The Trieste also had the advantage of being controlled by the pilot and didn’t need to be tethered to any surface ship. Piccard developed an ingenious method to control the buoyancy, using both the gasoline and pellets.
During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy realized the ocean depths could be exploited for military advantages against the Soviets. The Office of Naval Research purchased the Trieste in 1958 and hired Auguste’s son, Jacques, as consultant. The dive was not just about setting a new record, the Navy wanted to prove the feasibility of human exploration at such extreme depths.
Piccard’s radical design would be put to the test in January 1960 at the deepest place on Earth, with none other than his 38-year-old son Jacques as one of the 2 crew. So the U.S. Navy carried the small sub to the Pacific for its historic dive into the Mariana Trench. 31-year-old oceanographer Don Walsh, a U.S. Navy Lieutenant, would be the other “aquanaut.”
Floating over the trench, the 2 men waved one last time to the crew of the mother ship. They then climbed down through the Trieste, into the bathysphere underneath. It took 4 hours and 48 minutes to drop to the very bottom of the Challenger Deep at a rate of about a yard (0.9 m) a second. One can only imagine the creeping fear and tension the 2 men experienced. They descended slowly and silently into the pitch-black darkness, the bathysphere getting progressively colder and colder.
As if to highlight the peril, after passing 27,000 feet (9,000 meters) the outer window pane cracked, violently shaking the entire sphere! Should they abort? But since no leaks or pressure drop occurred, the brave men decided to continue their decent. Throughout much of the trip, they lost contact with their mother ship on the surface. Nevertheless, Piccard and Walsh successfully reached the bottom of the trench at a depth of 7 miles.
The floor of Challenger Deep was a fine, snuff-colored, oozy silt made of microscopic algae known as diatoms. The explorers were shocked to see jellyfish, shrimp-like creatures, and a couple of small white flatfish, proving that some life could withstand the extreme depths. Unfortunately, they carried no external camera and one of the external lights had imploded from the extreme pressures. Skeptics at the time criticized Piccard’s observations, claiming life was impossible at such depths and they were hallucinating.
Eating chocolate bars for energy, they shivered in the cold. The bathysphere temperature was only 45 F (7 Celsius). They finally managed to speak with their mother ship using a sonar-hydrophone. Travelling at a speed of nearly a mile per second, it still took 14 seconds for a message to travel from the Trieste to the surface and back.
Piccard slowly unloaded the iron pellet ballast and the Trieste began to float back to the surface. The ascent was much quicker than the dive, taking only three hours and fifteen minutes. If you consider that faster, when you are freezing inside a cracked, cramped, and cold dark sphere.
At the surface came cheers and champagne. Both men were celebrated as two of the world’s great explorers. For a time, the Piccard family, father and son, held the record for both the highest altitude balloon and the deepest ocean dive. The historic dive ushered in a golden age of underwater exploration. Men like Jacques Cousteau lead the way, in which submersibles would make amazing discoveries in oceanography and marine biology.
The Trieste was retired by the Navy in 1963. You can view the original today on exhibit at the U.S. Navy Museum in Washington DC. So costly and risky was the descent into the Mariana Trench it was not attempted it again for another 52 years. It’s been repeated only once, in 2012. This time solo done by Canadian explorer and filmmaker James Cameron (of Titanic and Avatar movie fame) in the torpedo-shaped, DeepSea Challenger. And this time, Cameron was sure to take copious videos, enough for an award winning documentary of the same name.