 Perhaps something of the true wonder of our native Earth struck the men who sailed the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria beyond the gates of Hercules. And perhaps there are those today who pause before the miracles of traveling to space and beneath the sea. For this is an age of wonder. It'll produce, in the bigger perspective of time, new Columbus's and Magellan's, that men will remember when our own age of exploration is history. Sea Lab One is part of that adventure, a beginning part in our own times. A free swimming diver moves through the realm that was once called a silent world. If only because there were no men to hear the sounds and understand the message from the deep. On his back, the scuba gear proclaims him for all his presumption, an outlander to this realm, an alien. In times beyond the telling, all that lived upon our planet were native to these waters. Waters that cast their blue light as far into space as the size of this planet Earth, and its sun-reflected light permit. Earth, this only place in all the universe where man is discerned liquid water. This rarest of ingredients in the cosmos. What is rare in the known universe, like it's our hometown world, the planet Earth. Some 70% of it is covered by the seas. The continental shelf alone, this water-covered plateau that surrounds the continents, is the size of Africa, or three times the size of the United States. Explorable, as we see. Exploidable too. And how much more so it would be if man were a freer agent, like these individuals. At least an immigrant. A kind of resident. If only he didn't have to come up for air so often. But he has to come up. Sooner or later. For purposes of ocean exploration, the later the better. As long ago as the 1870s, Francis Paul Burt discovered the formula, that is the E equals MC squared of the diver. He can prevent the possibly fatal bends by slowly decompressing at the rate of 20 minutes for each atmosphere of pressure. In 1915, Professor Thompson of MIT mentioned to the Bureau of Mines that helium should make a good gas for breathing under the heavy pressures of the undersea waters. This was a breakthrough indeed. Let us now, for the sake of getting to the point, pass over those dreamers and tinkers, those scientists and technicians, those curious types of many lands and generations who brought the state of the diving art to the scuba and beyond. Our present chronicle begins in late 1963, when two Navy doctors, Captain George Barned and Commander Robert Workman, supervised Project Genesis. In which human beings remained in a highly pressurized chamber for two weeks. That they could do so with reasonable comfort and imperfect safety was a tribute to Barn's eight years of research on the feasibility of breathing gas mixtures rather than normal air. He and Workman verified the usefulness of helium as a substitute for nitrogen to prevent the dangerous narcosis that high underwater pressures could cause. Let us now leave forward in time to mid-summer 1964. The Office of Naval Research, inspired by Project Genesis, had designed a strange-looking capsule, the work of Lieutenant Commander's Roy Landfair and Arthur Gross. It was nothing less than a laboratory for living men to observe themselves and their environment beneath the very waters of the sea. Can man indeed live within the sea as an inhabitant rather than a brief visitor? It takes a heap of logistics to bring the normal world into an abnormal place, but that perhaps is what exploration means. So imagine if you can all the planning and thinking, conferring and designing, research and construction that took place in the months and years before this particular Navy tug began to tow this unique orange capsule. The place America's man-made structure called Argus Island, in the waters 30 miles southwest of Bermuda, the time July 1964. The occasion, the proof of the pudding for CLAB-1, the protagonist, the U.S. Navy, in the persons of hundreds of scientists, technicians, engineers, divers, navigators and auxiliary personnel. But six men, in particular, deserve the main focus of our attention. Take them in. George Barn, Director of the Medical Research Laboratory of the Submarine Base in New London, Connecticut. Commander Roy Landfair and those all selected by Captain Barn, who will enter the strange shape you see before you. Dr. Robert Thompson, Lieutenant Commander U.S. Navy, 36 years old, a native of Los Angeles. And three enlisted men of some special note, expert divers, all of them. Men as much at home under water as men could be, up to the time. Robert Barth, Lester Anderson, Sanders Manning, Navy men in their 30s who were to be the human subjects of the CLAB experiment. Here at the Navy's Oceanographic Station, Argus Island, the heavy logistics proceed. For if four men are to live together at the bottom of the sea for three weeks, you are attempting something more than just a diving expedition of a few hours or so. Anyone, so to speak, can dip his foot into the water, but that's not the same as a cross-channel swim. Comes the time for all the maneuvering and preparations, all the testing and retesting. When you stop cutting bait, then start to fish. In this case, you load up the bins of the capsule with ballast, say 10 dozen railroad axles and about 10 tons of steel clumps, and it will stop floating and start sinking. Simultaneously, you work precisely and even delicately with mooring lines, cables, connections. Fallibility can be fatal in this new seamanship. At this point in oceanographic exploration, a man can still use his umbilical cord. It houses his power and communications cables. Hovering around beneath the surface in the manner of anxious midwives, the divers make certain that all is well. All stations report ready for loading. Argus Control report each foot of descent. 61 feet, I. 62 feet, I. 63 feet, I. 150 feet, I. You have gas enough to go all the way to the bottom. Lab one on the bottom, light bubbling, all conditions normal, all systems going. Pressure, please. 95.1 on the bottom. Sea lab one, our orange capsule has not yet received its complement of mankind. Deep dark blue ocean of Lord Byron is a lot more interesting if you can, in Captain Bond's words, make man a free agent in the sea, not just for a few minutes, but for days. And so four men entered the submersible decompression chamber, or SDC, to take an elevator ride 192 feet down to the bottom of the sea. They entered sea lab one at twilight through the hatch on its floor. Because inside pressure had been equalized with the outside water pressure, the hatch was left open. The gas mixture approximated 96% helium and 4% oxygen, but it was gradually adjusted to 76% helium, 20% nitrogen, and 4% oxygen. The interface of water at the open hatch tended to absorb the nitrogen faster than the other gases. Normal air, of course, contains 78% nitrogen. But at the sea lab's pressure, it would be forced into the bloodstream to create nitrogen narcosis, a dangerous, intoxicating condition. Topside, Captain Bond kept in constant touch with his protégés below. Referring to himself as Papa Topside, and to them as his children, he managed nonetheless to keep the force un-discrental because of their deep respect for him. Hadn't he, after all, taken some hefty dives of his own, including one of 302 feet and 54 seconds back in 1958, wearing only a life jacket? That was about three times as far as experts considered a safe limit. The television monitor topside takes in the spectacle of pooling around with a fishing rod on the back porch. Even in these depths, privacy is not all that easy. The video eye of Big Brother takes it all in. A man can do many things theoretically. He can, for example, assume a certain atmosphere on Mars and then deduce its effect on a human being. But there's nothing like being there. So blood samples from a man 192 feet below the surface of the sea are worth the taking and the logging. Six man hours every day, the foreson devoted to free swimming within a range of 1,000 feet around the capsule. They set up gear for scientific experiments along the bottom land of white coral sand. They squinted at the legs of the Argus Island Tower to see how the welding seams were, to note corrosion, to take in this new countryside just beyond their back porch. Sometimes they mixed with divers from the barge, including photographers and cameramen. Columbus and Magellan did not have such scribes as these. Who, for all their press privileges, must decompress like anyone else if they wish to come up to the surface alive. You take your time coming up. Master Diver Sheets typifies this new breed of explorer technician, Athlete Seaman, who understands the principles of seamanship and the mysteries of the underwater realm. Pressure and decompression. Breathable and unbreathable gas mixtures. And the seamanship of buoyant capsules and lines and rigging and ballast and supply within the deeps. For this too is seamanship. This art and science of man upon the sea and within the sea. And more scuba gear. But for the shorter swims, hookah gear sufficed. This consisted of two tubes connected to sea lab, one to bring them the sea lab's own mixture of helium-centered atmosphere, the other to return the used gas to the capsule. And what the men saw below, for all the tired sophistication that sometimes dogs are civilization, was like a kingdom out of the soaring fancy of the child in the poet, of man and youth and all the ages of this old planet of ours. Emerald green or zenith blue. Depending upon the state of the sky above, the kingdom changes its hue and mood. The angel fish and the grouper saw such visitors as they had never seen before, even in this teeming liquid world with its millions of species. The barracuda, the fearsome creator of one-legged men in the pirate legends, were on their most benign behavior for the tourist invasion. The big fish eat the little fish, said the Latin poet Virgil, and his meaning is literal as well as figurative. The men began to feel close and neighborly toward the fish, so much so that a diver from the barged spearfishing brought forth a cry of protest from Barth. For a man living on the bottom of the sea may see his fish as neighbors rather than as quarry for his hunting. Day followed day. It was a tight life in the sea lab. After four days it became home sweet home, all 40 by 9 feet of it. Minus, of course, space for three transformers and all the other gear, such as six berths, tables, storage lockers, a shower, six electric heaters, a chamber of commerce siren, a hot plate. Cooking, however, was limited to baking and broiling. Frying would create greasy hydrocarbon smoke and gases. There was enough food, water, and gas for breathing to last six weeks. Atmospheric pressure at 86 pounds per square inch was six times that at sea level. The helium in the special atmosphere gave a curious quality to men's voices. Everyone sounded like Donald Duck. Topside, a helium unscrambled and made the men's voices somewhat more comprehensible. Sea lab one, this is sea lab control. Anderson, man the helium unscrambler and give me some test phrases. This is sea lab, man. Let's have the test phrases now, please. That's very good. I hear you loud and clear on the scrambler. The sea lab atmosphere did not contain enough oxygen to light a match, hence no smoking. It also permitted the men to bring water to a heat far above its sea level boiling point, but without a trace of steam or vapor. Open a soft drink and the bottle would suck air in rather than fizzing out. Let us remember these rare moments on the ocean bottom. Manning and Anderson playing cribbage before bedtime. Going topside after a visit to the sea lab, Captain Walter Mazzoni, technical project officer. Mail delivery about as prompt as anywhere else under the American flag, but the dented plastic jug shows what pressure can do. They also serve who only endure day after day and night after night beneath the sea. There was time to loaf and time to read as well as to work. For a man that endures, a man who simply is, is triumph enough 192 feet down. Dr. Thompson keeps a medical mind focused on the others, who indeed are busy enough with their daily swims, collecting bottom samples, checking gas cylinders, and taking pictures for later analysis. Living in the still alien realm of the waters, lost all their fear, began to feel that they belonged where they were, that they could go for a swim without their air tanks. You even forgot you had to go back to sea lab for air, Dr. Thompson recalls. One night I dreamed I was breathing oxygen from the sea. There came forth here beneath the sea a dailiness and a routine that were in themselves a mute tribute to man's power of adaption. If here, why not on the moon? Why not on Mars? And so it went for 11 days, but on the 11th day, intimations for boatings from the look of things, topside trouble brewing in the form of a tropical disturbance, the weather man's tentative euphemism for what later became a full fledged hurricane, hurried conferences, evaluations, decision to abandon operation sea lab after 11 of the 21 program days, from below objections, complaints, but the risk to topside support ships and personnel and therefore in time to all concerned was too great. So began the ascent. The men stayed in the sea lab for two nights and a day while it was slowly raised at the rate of one foot every 20 minutes, at which pace the men within became accustomed to the decreasing pressure as they neared the surface. But at the 84 foot level, trouble. Already the sea upon the surface was churning from the rising winds and the surge carried below, rocking the sea lab capsule back and forth. Decompression pressures could no longer be contained. So at 84 feet, the men transferred to the submersible decompression chamber to rise to the surface, where they remained another 25 hours before they saw, once again, the light of atmospheric day. Decompression took 55 and a half hours in all. Had the men not ascended gradually, reading themselves of the absorbed gas little by little, dangerous bubbles might have formed in their bloodstreams and risen to their brains, a fatal probability. This danger, both said, is the monkey on every diver's back. It's tedious, of course, waiting it out in the SDC. But tedium is preferable to death. Patience is the most important virtue a diver can have. The rising sea lab itself was an engineering feat of some note. Since all under siege, technology is in the nature of pioneering. Scratched by cables rubbing against her, she emerged none the worse for the 11-day wait of the ocean apart her. And when the men have gone, the sea remains. From its teeming deeps are fish and plankton and algae enough to feed the entire foreseeable earth if men will learn how to harvest these fertile waters. The sea remains, rich in minerals of all kinds. Some of them, like oil, already in production. The sea remains for sea lab and her descendants. For those who will go down to the bottom of it and stay long enough to do some thinking and some work. Sea lab one proved that man can take it down below. But if he stays down 24 hours or more, his tissues become fully saturated with helium. Beyond that period, the time required for decompression does not increase however long he remains below. Sea lab was an adventure, a test of man's capacity to survive where survival is the biggest job he has. Beyond survival lies progress and perhaps a civilization of growing permanence. For the sea remains, sea lab one is but an incident, a point in time already in the past. Sea lab one proved that man does not have to decompress between work periods beneath the sea. That he can, under the precise conditions we have seen, remain below indefinitely. What lies before man here on his own planet? Here in the watery inner space that is no less a challenge to his talent and his endurance. Then the space beyond the upper atmosphere. Will he have the genius to harvest the fruit of the sea? Good enough even for the exploding population of the crowded land. Factories to process the seafood? In this less than perfect world, use the underwater realm for military purposes. Will there be manned outposts on the ocean bottom? Fortresses, submarine bases, supply depots. Will he build for the better life? Resort hotels, sightseeing, and scientific buildings within these waters? Will he mine the elements? Everything from iron to cadmium? From aluminum to oil? That rests unexploited within this planet earth, beneath the sea? The words of the late John F. Kennedy. We are just at the threshold of our knowledge of the oceans, he said. Already their military importance, their potential for weather predictions, for food and for minerals is evident. Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it. Sea Lab One is a part of the strange, colorful hardware of our age. An age chock full of wonders, but still a time when there remains unknown realms for men in which to adventure. Adventure, yes, but more important is the knowledge gained from scientific investigation of the unknown. From knowledge comes strength, a step in progress toward the essential strategic goals of the future, which will require increasing utilization of the vast oceanic areas for our security.