Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (14 page)

But a fine line existed in Tommy between calculated antics and true compulsion, and sometimes it was difficult to separate the two. His dorm room at Ohio State glowed like a spaceship just landed, a place of mysticism and metaphysics and hard science mixed with an ample amount of buffoonery. Telephones hung from every wall and sat on the desk and sat on the shelves; he could be anywhere in the room and answer the phone without moving his feet. An old alarm clock turned on the TV, the sun lamp, and the radio, but the radio played through the speaker on the TV. All were perfectly coordinated to go on and off at the same times every day, except that the alarm clock had no hands, so you could never tell when the lamp would flood the room with light,
the radio would go off in the television, or the television would suddenly start to glow.

He crawled through the ventilation ducts from one floor to another and rode up and down on top of the elevator, talking to people through the ceiling as they got on. He persuaded ten dorm friends to chip in ten dollars apiece to buy a 1964 Chevy convertible; no one got a key, but the ten bucks got them each a demonstration on how to start the car with the four wires in the glovebox. So they could find the car easily on the south side of one of the largest universities in the world, Tommy and a few friends decoupaged the passenger side with pictures of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and posters from Peter Max and the Beatles from the
Sergeant Pepper
album and little
National Geographic
portraits, and shellacked the whole thing purple.

Tommy reveled in so much craziness his room became a mecca for other students. “You could always count on Harvey for something off the wall,” said Radabaugh. “He had that wild-eyed look and curly hair, like a nine year old ready to get into anything.”

One night, Tommy shut down all the lights on his floor and formed a long string of students holding hands and winding out of his room down the hall. Then he had the first one grip the terminals of a small generator and the last one cup a neon tube, and as he cranked the generator, electricity flowed painlessly through the bodies of the other students, and the neon tube at the far end glowed brighter and brighter. Another night, he filled balloons with helium and passed them out to everyone stuffed into his room, had them suck some of the helium into their vocal cords, and directed them as a choir, which sounded like twenty-five ducks singing the Buckeye fight song. The other students liked all this stuff so much that five hundred of them elected him president of Stradley Hall.

Then there was the Tommy so deep into his own thoughts and his sense of what was important that his conscious mind made no effort to pull out and see the superficial things so important to everyone around him. At a time when socially acceptable nonconformity in campus fashion dictated that the students wear long hair and knee-popped bellbottoms, Tommy would show up with a beard and his hair poofed in natural black curls three or four inches off his head—groovy
so far—wearing a weird maroon shirt and old flannel dress pants covered with little fuzz balls. “He had shirts you just wanted to burn,” said Ellen Leahy. But that was the real Tommy. He could mix plaids with stripes with paisley prints and socks that didn’t match each other, much less anything else he was wearing. It wasn’t for effect; he just didn’t care.

Ellen Leahy met Tommy in June of 1972, only a few days after she had arrived on the Ohio State campus as a freshman. Tommy was in his junior year, not in school that quarter, just dropping by Columbus to see a friend. They stayed out all night, running around in a warm sticky rain, and then Tommy took Ellen down to the lake and introduced her to his favorite mud slide. “It was so fun to run into someone who wasn’t stodgy and thought at some point you should call it quits,” remembered Ellen. “He never thought there was some point where you had to call it quits.”

Tommy left that day, and Ellen did not hear from him again until August, when he called her from Utah as he hitchhiked across the country with a tape recorder. He had left Defiance with eighteen dollars and a friend who carried twice that amount, headed for California. A circus picked them up on the way to Flagstaff, a gigolo gave them a lift to Las Vegas, and during the whole trip, Tommy talked into his tape recorder about what he saw and what he thought, his views on science and civilization, banking and nutrition, philosophy and stars and life on other planets. When he got back, he had so many theories that Ellen and the other kids numbered them: why movie stars have serial marriages, how we got white bread, when turtles behave like humans. “He was real serious,” remembered Ellen. “He would propose these theories, and you could tell he’d been thinking on them and then out they’d pop.”

Cruising in the purple Chevy with Ellen one day, Tommy spied something that epitomized his very being. It was mechanical, it was silly, it was daring, it was of the water: a cream-colored, German-built, limited edition, amphibious car, the same model used in the James Bond movie
Thunderball
. “God,” said Ellen, “he wanted that thing so badly.” It looked a little bigger and a little boxier than an MGB. It had small fins coming off the back, license plates fore and aft, and an Ohio Boat
registration on the front fenders. The owner was asking four hundred dollars, and without telling his parents, Tommy got a loan from a bank in Defiance and bought the car. From then on he and Ellen spent much of their time together looking for bodies of water to drive into and people to scare the bejeezus out of. Ellen would sit in the passenger seat, and Tommy would drive. The victims would be in the back, top down, everyone taking in the warm summer air. When Tommy got near water, he would say something like, “Isn’t this a nice night?” and then he would start talking about one of his theories, and Ellen would ask the right questions so he could continue bending an increasingly outrageous line of thought until it was about to break, and then all of a sudden he’d leave the road, head across a meadow in the moonlight, still pontificating, and drive through the cattails into a pond. The victims in the backseat would freak, but the key to the act was that Tommy and Ellen had to play it straight, no smiles, no acknowledgment that the car was now afloat in the middle of a small body of water.

There was another side of Tommy that others, including Ellen, rarely saw, and when they did, they weren’t sure what to think of it. Sometimes he disappeared for days, and nobody knew where he was. Sometimes an offhand remark or the look on his face as he talked about his theories made them wonder. “I think a lot of people had the same feeling,” said John Radabaugh. “They weren’t sure, Is he bullshitting me or are we onto something serious here?” One night he mentioned to someone in the dorm that he had to leave with one of his professors early the next morning for Detroit, because they were working together on a flywheel car. No one believed him. “He’s not going to Detroit to work on a flywheel car,” mimicked one of his friends, “he’s just another guy on the tenth floor.” They could believe the goofy Harvey, but they had a hard time with the serious, compulsive Tommy.

O
HIO
S
TATE HAD
one of the largest engineering schools in the world, eight thousand students enrolled in fifteen departments and graduate schools. Like his father, Tommy had gravitated toward mechanical engineering. “I wanted to be an inventor,” he said, “but there’s no college training for that. As close as I could get was the mechanical engineering
school.” He also was determined to be an ocean engineer—out of the entire College of Engineering, the only one heading to sea.

Although Ohio State was landlocked and offered no courses in marine engineering, Tommy had intrigued his advisor, the dean of the School of Mechanical Engineering, Don Glower. Glower saw in Tommy even more than the makings of a creative machine designer; he saw an eclectic mind, as curious about social dynamics as it was determined to make things work.

Glower himself was a marine engineer, and he had emphasized to Tommy that working in the ocean was only mechanical engineering taking place in an extreme environment: In addition to all of the other problems, the ocean was wet, corrosive, and heavy. So he and Tommy designed a major in mechanical engineering with a specialty in machine design and an ocean engineering option, a five-year program, and Glower helped tailor Tommy’s studies to expose him to concepts he would need to work in the ocean: courses in aquatic microbiology, corrosion sciences, marine geology. And Glower got Tommy involved in special studies projects in solar energy, a flywheel car, and pseudo-plastic.

In his third year, Tommy selected a course called Advanced Topics, a one-hour private tutorial three times a week with Dean Glower, during which the mentor and his protégé talked about engineering, mostly engineering in the ocean. During these sessions, Glower conveyed to Tommy that he didn’t have to be what Glower called a “cookbook” engineer: look up the recipe, mix in the same ingredients in the same way everyone else does, and every time end up with the same bridge. Glower encouraged Tommy to take chances, to look beyond what everyone else was doing.

“He didn’t have to say this to me in words,” said Tommy, “but he made me feel real easy about doing things that most engineers wouldn’t think about.”

Glower exposed Tommy to ideas like entrepreneurship, explained to him that an entrepreneur got out of the secure atmosphere of a large corporation or university and tried something on his own; and if his ideas didn’t work, the entrepreneur found other ways, but he kept working at it till he got it right. He told Tommy that inventions were nothing new, that they were just taking a number of things that already existed
and putting them together in a different way. “Einstein didn’t create anything new,” said Glower. “Everything he did on the theory of relativity was already in the literature, but other physicists just didn’t quite see how to put it all together.”

During these tutorials, Glower assigned Tommy research projects, suggesting books and treatises for him to read, some on the ocean, some on engineering, some on other topics. When Tommy came to the meetings, Glower cleared off his coffee table, Tommy spread out the sources he had found, and they talked. Glower’s purpose was to challenge Tommy’s thinking, to help him see the problems others had faced and how they had solved those problems, or failed to solve them, and to encourage his understanding of diverse disciplines. The last was perhaps the most important: Inventing wasn’t good enough; Glower had seen too many inventors who didn’t know how to get beyond that, so their ideas died aborning. As Glower suggested new directions, Tommy kept an ongoing list of research projects, ideas that piqued his curiosity.

Beginning in the fall of 1972, Glower and Tommy met for two years, some quarters only once a week, other quarters three times a week, and Glower grew more and more intrigued with Tommy’s approach to problem solving. The young engineer had a different way of looking at things. One day early in these private sessions, Glower asked Tommy what appeared to be a simple question, yet no one in the world had been able to answer it. “Tom,” he said, “how are we going to work in the deep ocean?”

F
OR CENTURIES, HUMANS
had dreamed of flying through the air, traveling to the stars, and exploring the water world that covers two-thirds of our planet. We had conquered the air, and four years earlier we had put a man on the moon; much remained to learn of the universe, but already we knew far more about other galaxies than we knew about a world that began at the edge of our beaches.

Long before the birth of Christ, divers in China, India, and the Mediterranean, and the
ama
fisherwomen of Japan, had dived in the ocean to one hundred feet in search of pearls, coral, sponges, mollusks, and rare seaweeds. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle recorded that sponge divers could remain on the bottom longer by breathing air lowered in
large kettles. But another twenty-three hundred years would pass before humans could remain below for longer than a few minutes.

In 1942, a French engineer named Emile Gagnan designed a regulator to control the flow of compressed gas into the fuel injector of a car so civilian automobiles in war-torn, occupied France could burn propane instead of precious gasoline. The following year, Gagnan and a young French naval officer named Jacques-Yves Cousteau redesigned the regulator to control the flow of compressed air into the lungs of a human. Though he despised cold water, Cousteau tested the apparatus by turning somersaults in the January waters of the Marne River outside Paris. After minor adjustments, it proved successful, and Gagnan and Cousteau patented the system as the Aqua-Lung. Nine years later, Cousteau breathed off an improved Aqua-Lung while conducting the first complete underwater excavation of an ancient vessel.

National Geographic
called Cousteau and his companions “fish men.” But even fish men could venture no deeper than two hundred feet and remain for more than a few minutes, or during ascent the nitrogen in their blood would suddenly fizz, and the bubbles would lodge in their arteries, joints, and spine, paralyzing and often killing them. Divers called it “the bends.” At those depths the compressed nitrogen also became a powerful narcotic, affecting judgment: Cousteau had once seen a diver offer his mouthpiece to a fish so the fish wouldn’t drown.

Hard-hat divers typically could dive a hundred feet deeper, but they were susceptible to the same problems with nitrogen narcosis and other problems potentially worse. If their air hose broke they drowned; if the break occurred near the surface, the sudden depressurizing inside the helmet would squeeze all of their blood into their brains, bursting the blood vessels and killing the divers. The deeper ocean was no place for humans, unless they used machines to take them there.

I
N HIS WRITINGS
of the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci mentioned a “mysterious vessel,” a “method for remaining underwater for as long a time as I can remain without food.” But he would not reveal his design because of “the evil nature of men” who would use it “to practice assassination at the bottom of the seas.” Refusing to take part, da Vinci had seen the future of submarine technology: warfare.