THE BATHYSPHERE BOOK

A loose history of the bathysphere that’s imbued with the adventurous spirit of science and exploration.

Designed by diver and inventor Otis Barton in the late 1920s, the bathysphere was a spherical, submersible, windowed chamber that allowed scientists to observe marine life in their natural environment. From 1930 to 1934, Barton and the naturalist William Beebe performed record-setting dives off Nonsuch Island in Bermuda, exploring depths and seeing luminescent, phantasmagoric fish that had never before been recorded. While centered on the Nonsuch dives, the book unfurls its tentacles to adopt a strange new form, caught between a biography of Beebe, a collection of oddball anecdotes, and a meditation on the pursuit of knowledge. Fox, author of the novel To Remain Nameless, eschews a traditional chronology for a more constellation-shaped story, jumping among interrelated vignettes. For example, the author connects Beebe’s 1925 adventure aboard the ship the Arcturus to a 1930s production of King Kong (the co-director was coincidentally aboard the Arcturus and likely drew inspiration from Beebe’s exploits). Elsewhere in the book, Beebe visits a friend during a hurricane, which prompts Fox to recount the strange-but-true story of Dr. James Barry, who was born female in 1789 but lived and worked their whole life as a man. Some readers may be frustrated by Fox’s vaguely connected tangents and wish instead for a more linear history, but there’s a method to his pacing. Beebe believed “no action or organism is separate” and that all of life was “underwritten by the same natural forces.” In Fox’s words, “it was not the number of species that mattered, but how they all fit together, and to sense that, you had to feel around at the edges of things…into the immaterial meaning of things.” Fox seeks to not just tell Beebe’s story, but to embody his philosophy, and he explores the vast potential of storytelling and searches its depths for glimmers of life and connectivity.

An enchanting cabinet of curiosities.