Ben Hellwarth > Quotes

“To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man’s lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“Throughout the mission the divers were going to be shadowed by a new remote-controlled device that everyone called a “flying eyeball.” These unmanned orbs, operated from the surface, were about the size of a big beach ball, functioned as mobile klieg lights, and were equipped with cameras so that topside supervisors could watch subsea operations for themselves rather than rely exclusively on garbled Chipmunk narrations.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“But what most Sealab personnel didn’t know was that Sealab III was not an end but a beginning, and Mary Lou Cannon’s grief-infused thoughts about hoaxes and secret missions were not as far-fetched as they might have seemed.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“In the 1690s, Edmund Halley, the English astronomer known primarily for tracking the comet that would be named for him, built a barrel-shaped diving bell out of wood and lined it with lead. It had greater girth than Link’s cylinder but about the same interior volume. Halley devised a system of barrels and leather tubes that channeled fresh air from the surface to give the bell’s occupants more breathing time. During one trial, Halley wrote that he and four others stayed in the bell for an hour and a half at a depth of about sixty feet. The men couldn’t do much while submerged, although Halley had ideas for supplying air so that divers could work outside the bell. No one suffered any ill effects, but Halley and his crew had no way of knowing that with the depth and duration of their dive they narrowly averted getting bent, or worse. Nonetheless, his innovative bell and record stay in the sea made diving history, even if Halley’s Comet would become better known than Halley’s bell.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“It had taken more than six hundred hardhat dives and almost four months to complete the rescue and salvage of the Squalus. A diver’s typical bottom time had been twenty minutes. Nearly twenty years later, at the dawn of the space age, an underwater job similar to the Squalus recovery would have been handled much the same way.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“As Bond would find out for himself, there was much more to hardhat diving than tramping along the ocean floor like an undersea gladiator, as might be inferred from the movies. The Mark V helmet alone weighed some fifty pounds, the lead-soled boots twenty pounds each. Together with the rubber-lined canvas suit and a belt of lead weights held up by leather suspenders, the hardhat diver wore nearly two hundred pounds of gear. On dry land he could hardly walk.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“Once the base was lowered to the bottom, the divers filled critical roles as ringmasters, and one of their first jobs was to guide two dozen steel piles, one by one, into individual “sleeves,” a vertical length of pipe affixed at intervals around the base. The piles themselves were six hundred feet long, seven feet in diameter, and weighed thousands of pounds. Each one had to be carefully dangled from the surface and slid into its designated sleeve. A pile driver, which the divers helped swing into position, hammered the pile into place, nailing the base to the sea floor.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“With filmmaking and photography in mind, the oceanauts wore unusual silver-hued wet suits, instead of standard black, with matching air hoses and gloves. The silver suits made them look like a cross between oversized sardines and spacemen from a Buck Rogers–era movie.”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor

“As a diver for Cognac, Helvey would gross almost a thousand dollars a day”
― Ben Hellwarth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor