Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (45 page)

Battelle policy allowed the engineers to take on outside projects as long as they filled out the proper papers and explained how they and Battelle would benefit from the experience. Tommy had analyzed that provision. After he talked to Hackman, he met with his old boss at Battelle, Don Frink, and persuaded Frink that developing a deep-sea robot would be a good experience for some of the Battelle engineers: They would learn more about working in the deep ocean, and it would cost Battelle nothing. When Tommy had finished his speech, Frink was nodding in agreement. “My people would be learning by what they were doing with Tommy,” said Frink. “My clients would be gaining from Tommy’s contributions.” He approved the papers for his engineers who wanted to work directly with Tommy, and for some of the work Tommy agreed to hire Frink’s department at Battelle, an arm’s-length contract.

Tommy went back to Hackman with a contract for a feasibility study on deep-water tools to cut through decks. “As soon as somebody starts paying me,” said Hackman, “then I must take it seriously.”

“All right,” he told Tommy, “here’s what I need to know, and here’s what I don’t want to know.”

The first thing, the most important thing, was depth. Depth is pressure, depth is handling. “I absolutely have to know the depth as close as you can get it,” said Hackman. “Next, I have to know roughly how far from a harbor. Next, I have to know what the seas are like. Is it like the North Sea or is it calm? Next, I have to know what the target is made of. What do I have to cut holes into or get inside of? And how big are the pieces I have to bring back?”

Hackman compared working in the deep ocean to working in space, except in many ways, working in the deep ocean was more difficult. Salt water ate tools. The other major problem was pressure: The
Thresher
had gone to the bottom in 1963 because a water line broke, frying the electronics so they couldn’t shut off the valves to stop a quick descent. The submarine had gone into an uncontrolled dive, and when it hit two thousand feet, the pressure crushed its two-inch-thick steel like a beer can in the hand of a college boy. Despite the pressure, joints had to bend, bearings had to roll, impellers had to spin, hydraulics had to flow.

Hackman began sketching tools Tommy could use to enter and recover cargo from a sidewheel steamer with oak beams and pine decks somewhere between eight and nine thousand feet deep in the Atlantic Bight. All Tommy needed was a vehicle to get the tools to the bottom.

In January, while John Moore was out in Bellingham working on components for a deep-water vehicle, and Don Hackman was in Columbus conjuring tools to work from it, Tommy heard the first vague rumor through the deep-ocean grapevine that someone else was preparing an expedition to search for the
Central America
.

A
FTER THREE MONTHS
of traveling coast to coast, sounding out engineers in the deep-ocean community, Brockett had five proposals from the deep-water ROV companies, and Tommy evaluated each carefully. Not one offered fresh thinking. Some proposals incorporated equipment Tommy thought of as toys. “It’s amazing what people said they could do versus what I knew they could do.”

Brockett saw this, too; not that the companies made false claims, but they made it sound too easy, “like it was a piece of cake,” said Brockett, “and maybe that scared Harvey off.”

Some engineers told Brockett he needed a manned submersible. “Look at what Ballard did with the
Alvin
last summer on the
Titanic
,” they said. Continuously updated and retrofitted for even deeper water, the
Alvin
was now twenty-two years old. The navy had spent over $50 million to develop it, and the cost of operating the submersible and its support ship was almost $30,000 a day. Despite Ballard’s success, the
Alvin
was still just as slow, dangerous, restricted, and expensive as Tommy had considered it a few years earlier. Ballard could only film and photograph small sections of the
Titanic
from the outside and send the little robot Jason Jr., in fifteen or twenty feet to film the inside.

Ballard himself had told an interviewer only months earlier, “Telepresence is still back in the days of a guy yelling into a tin can on a string. I mean, we’re still using black-and-white TV cameras for crying out loud…. In ten years … when I put you in Alvin you’ll be disappointed because you’re not going to have the freedom of vision that [a robot] can give you. You’ll be looking out a little porthole. Compared to the robot’s eye view, an Alvin dive will be somewhat like crawling
around on the bottom of a cave with a flashlight … and blinders around your eyes.”

The navy’s most sophisticated manned submersible,
Sea Cliff
, was bigger and faster than the
Alvin
and had manipulator arms, but they were so stiff and clumsy an operator couldn’t select an artifact in a debris field; if he could, the jaws likely would crush it.
Alvin
belonged to Woods Hole Oceanographic and
Sea Cliff
belonged to the navy anyhow, and Tommy could not have used them if he wanted to, but they were the best manned vehicles technology had to offer, and they still could not sit on the bottom and work with the intricacy that Tommy envisioned. Much earlier, he had considered them poor choices, and in the intervening years he had grown more adamant. “We knew they would not have the capability to do serious recovery work,” he said, “let alone the cost and risk to life.”

The previous summer, 1985, two robots called Scarab 1 and Scarab 2 had gone down sixty-six hundred feet to film the wreckage of Air India flight 182, recover the cockpit voice recorder and the data recorder, and retrieve twenty-three pieces of the wreck. It was the deepest an ROV had ever performed, and even there, the Scarabs had only imaged the wreckage and either clutched a small piece as a winch pulled it to the surface, or dropped a bridle around a piece, which a crane had raised. Tommy needed to perform work much more delicate and complex and do it almost two thousand feet deeper.

Tommy had talked to Hackman; he had talked to Moore; he himself had investigated systems for working in the deep ocean; and he doubted the companies could do what they told Brockett they could do. He started thinking in his failure mode: What if they can’t do what they say they can do? What if we get out there, ship and handpicked crew on hire for the summer, investors with another $3.6 million in the project, the clock ticking, and a vehicle we can’t use? “The risk factors would have just gone through the roof,” he decided.

Then he worried about security: How does he control information if someone else builds the core of his project? And last, he thought, “It would be real easy for them to try to make money on doing the operation, but not really put their heart and soul into making it work.” And that’s what Tommy wanted, their heart and soul. He didn’t want old machines and
old ways of thinking; he wanted commitment and loyalty and excitement and energy and vision. What he really wanted was an organization like the one he already had, a bunch of mavericks ready to look at things in a new way. “Actually,” he admitted, “I’d been thinking about another way of doing it for quite some time.”

Brockett was still talking seriously to the deep-ocean people, trying to get the dollar figures down to something reasonable, and he had found what might be a workable approach, a combination of two existing vehicles modified with thickened housings and new flotation. He had talked to everyone in the business who knew about these things, and he was convinced the approach would work. “Then one day Harvey called me out of the blue,” recalled Brockett, “and he said, ‘Nope, forget all that, we’re gonna build our own.’ We are starting from absolute scratch, right? ‘Here’s a blank piece of paper, guys. We’ve got to be in the water the first of July.’” Brockett was incredulous. “That was like February or March,” he said. “There’s no way in the world you can start from ground zero and design and build an ROV in a few months. You can’t get a cable in less than six months.”

But Tommy had concluded that no one else out there knew any more about working on the floor of the deep ocean than he did. And that was all he needed to know.

F
OR YEARS, IN
his head and on sketch pads, Tommy had been designing an underwater robot. “I’d already figured out a lot of what needed to be done to get the kind of capability we needed on the bottom, and I had in my mind a concept design of where I wanted to go with it.” Many people had told Tommy that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do; they had tried, or they had known others who had tried. But Tommy liked to retreat to the point where technology branched and all thought on the matter had shuffled off down the path that led to Conventional Wisdom. He liked to travel back to the fork and take another look at the landscape. Maybe somebody missed something.

Science and engineering had reached the fork in the late 1940s, between the deep adventures of an American scientist named William Beebe, and the even deeper exploits of the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard. Diving off Bermuda in 1934, Beebe had descended to half a mile
in a hollow steel ball. The bathysphere, as Beebe called it, hung from a thin cable, and every bounce and roll of the ship as it rocked topside jerked the sphere, but it was the first time anyone had ventured into the pure blackness of the deep ocean.

Beebe had dived in the bathysphere because he was frustrated with the limitations of studying life from the deep sea brought to the surface in nets or washed up on the beach. He wanted to study it in its own environment, and in the darkness he saw the lights of intricate deep-sea creatures twinkling and darting. One creature was bigger than the five-foot bathysphere, a fish that glowed an iridescent blue and had rows of illuminated fangs. But Beebe could not interact with the sea life he saw or explore the bottom. All he could do was hang and watch. If he tried to land, the sphere, attached to the ship by the cable, would slam repeatedly against the ocean floor.

Piccard realized that if anyone was going to explore the deep ocean, the vehicle would have to be free of a cable connected to a rocking ship. He called his vehicle a bathyscaphe and named it
Trieste
. He engineered the
Trieste
by counterbalancing the weight of gasoline, seawater, and iron, so he could control descent and ascent without a cable. Above the observation sphere, he put nearly twenty thousand gallons of lighter-than-water gasoline in a fifty-foot tank, which countered the weight of the steel chamber and made the vehicle neutrally buoyant: In the ocean it would neither sink nor rise. To dive, he filled two ballast tanks with seawater; to rise again, he jettisoned nine tons of magnetized iron pellets and left them on the ocean floor. In 1953, on their first dive off Naples, Italy, Piccard and his son descended almost ten thousand feet to the ooze of a lifeless, featureless bottom.

Intrigued by the Piccards and their success, U.S. Navy scientists in the summer of 1957 persuaded the Office of Naval Research to lease the
Trieste
for fifteen deep dives in the Mediterranean, and eventually the navy bought the
Trieste
. Wanting to go still deeper, navy scientists designed and built a newer version with thicker walls and reduced the size of the viewing ports to barely two inches. In January 1960, Piccard’s son and a navy submariner dived in the new
Trieste
to the deepest point on earth, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench off the Philippines, 35,840 feet below. But the following year, despite protests from scientists,
the navy abruptly stopped further deep-ocean exploration and retired the
Trieste
, until 1963, when the
Thresher
sank and the military had no way to reach it.

Over the decades since Piccard had built the
Trieste
, engineers had found simpler ways than using gasoline and iron pellets to achieve neutral buoyancy, and they had worn a path in that direction, which led to the
Alvin
and the
Sea Cliff
and similar vehicles. Yet nearly forty years had passed, and those vehicles could do little more than the
Trieste
. The path had led to what Tommy perceived as a dead end, with marine engineers piling more gadgets on the front, enhancing individual subsystems in small increments, but never addressing the system as a whole.

Tommy started back at the fork, reexamining the assumptions of Piccard and those who followed. Except for a small group of preprogrammed submersibles, all robots, or ROVs, such as Tommy wanted to build were controlled by a cable connected to a ship. ROV engineers overcame the cable’s tugging effect with a combination of buoyancy and propulsion, but the vehicles remained susceptible to all of the other problems: no reach, no power, no real capability. Those were the problems Tommy separated and analyzed, and after years, he thought he could solve them. He would never reveal to anyone the totality of his thinking, but he would discuss portions so that other creative minds, like Hackman’s and Moore’s, could help him solve the narrow problems, now that he had clarified and isolated them.

Rule Number One in designing underwater ROV work systems was Do As Much As You Can on Deck; keep it all topside—your brains, your power—and send it down to the vehicle on a multiconductor coaxial cable. But a co-axial cable was two inches in diameter, and you still needed several smaller cables to run everything on the vehicle. That was the problem: The central cable alone cost about twenty-five dollars a foot, and each of the smaller co-ax cables ran another five dollars a foot; with design costs included, you could put almost a million dollars into just a few wires and some armoring. And this big wad of cables meant a bigger winch, a bigger crane, and a stronger tow point; therefore, a bigger ship, and a bigger crew, and a more complex handling system was needed to get the whole thing into the water.