Here, under a pressure which, if loosened, in a fraction of a second would make amorphous tissue of a human being, breathing our own homemade atmosphere, sending a few comforting words chasing up and down a string of hose, here I was privileged to sit and try to crystallize something of value, seeing through inadequate eyes and interpreting by a mind wholly unequal to the task.ĭespite his lyrical gift with language, Beebe knew that words could only reach so far in conveying the complexity and wonder of the undersea world to humans whose eyes would never see it and whose imagination had not begun to fathom it. Upon returning from his first dive in the Bathysphere in 1930, Beebe exulted on the pages of the New York Zoological Society Bulletin: Previously unknown giant dragonfish ( Bathysphaera intacta) circling the Bathysphere. The Bathysphere reined in a new era of closer and more compassionate study, making Beebe the first scientist to observe deep-sea wildlife in their habitat, unharmed in their alien aliveness, moving silent and splendid amid a world he saw as “stranger than any imagination could have conceived,” irradiated by an “indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything” known in the upper world. But for all the wonders the Valdiva saw, it could not escape the blind spots of its epoch - the creatures it discovered were abducted from their underwater homes and dredged up for the scientists to study on the surface, lifeless. It had only been a generation since the German oceanographer Carl Chun’s pioneering Valdiva expedition had emerged with stunningly illustrated evidence defying humanity’s shallow imagination, which had long deemed life below 300 fathoms impossible. William Beebe inside the Bathysphere (Wildlife Conservation Society Photo Collection) Very good.“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore,” the poetic marine biologist Rachel Carson wrote as she reckoned with the ocean and the meaning of life, “we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.” Fifteen years earlier, she had invited the human imagination into the wonders of the underwater world - a world then more mysterious than the Moon - in an unexampled essay that later bloomed into her 1951 book The Sea Around Us, which won her the National Book Award and rendered her the most venerated science writer on the landmass.Ĭarson dedicated the book to the pioneering explorer, marine biologist, ornithologist, and Wildlife Conservation Society naturalist William Beebe, who had gone deeper than any human had gone before in his epoch-making 1930s dives in the Bathysphere - the spherical submersible Beebe dreamt up with the deep-sea diver and engineer Otis Barton, his sole companion inside the miniature globe reaching for the bottom of the world. John: The image (head) is 5 1/2” tall, in black, with 4 numerical notes and a scale in the margins (3 pieces of brown tape and 2 pieces of clear to the edges). John: The image (head) is 2 1/2” tall, in black, with 2 numerical notes in the margins, and another note near the image. John: The image (head) is 2 1/2” tall, in black, with 2 numerical notes and a scale in the margins, and another note near the image. Paul: The image (half length) is 9” tall, in black and red (he is saluting), with 4 numerical notes in the margins. Paul: The image (half length) is 9” tall, in black and red, with 6 numerical notes in the margins, one of them deleted (2 pieces of clear tape on the reverse). George: The image (head and shoulders) is 4 1/2” tall, in black, his beard has not been added but space has been left for it, there are 4 numerical notes in the margins, another by the image, his tuba is behind him, and a borderline is in red. Pepper band uniforms, Paul, and John with beards, each on an individual 16” X 12 1/4” sheet of 16 field paper, all in black graphite, and 5 of the 6 with parts of the drawings or the numbering in red. 6 original production drawings for the animated feature film, Yellow Submarine.
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