Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (15 page)

The early submarine designers had three problems to solve: how to sink a watertight vessel, how to propel it underwater, and how to provide air for the crew. In 1620, a Dutch physician named Cornelis Jacobszoon Drebbel built an underwater boat funded by military-minded King James of England. To sink his boat, Drebbel filled pig skins with water, then twisted them closed when he wanted to rise. For propulsion, he used oarsmen rowing underwater. His real secret, however, was his method of ridding his cramped little vessel of carbon dioxide. Witnesses described it as a “chemical liquor” that somehow revitalized the spent air. Whatever it was, Drebbel took his invention into the Thames with four oarsmen and opened the pig skins; the vessel sank, the oarsmen rowed, and so moved the world’s first submarine. Drebbel built two more underwater boats, both bigger than the first, one large enough to seat a dozen oarsmen. In this vessel, King James himself spent an hour fifteen feet below the surface of the Thames.

Before Jules Verne wrote his classic
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
in 1869, at least twenty-five more submarine boats had dived and surfaced successfully, and the technology for virtually every one had focused on sinking, ventilating, and propelling a vessel of war underwater. The idea was to hide and plant a mine or release a torpedo or launch a missile: Yale University student David Bushnell created the
Turtle
and its ticking time bomb in 1776; the German inventor Wilhelm Bauer produced a sheet-iron vessel 50 feet long and powered by four men walking a treadmill and sold it to the Russians in the mid-nineteenth century; in 1864, the Confederate
Hunley
became the first submarine to sink an enemy warship. Within three decades of Captain Nemo’s fantasy voyage twenty thousand leagues under the sea, the United States Navy had committed to a fleet of seven submarines built by the dean of American submarine technology, John P. Holland. One was 105 feet long, carried a fifteen-man crew down two hundred feet, and cruised clandestinely underwater at twenty knots.

Although submarines became a critical component of any navy’s arsenal, and they played a major role in World War II, submarine technology did not advance appreciably until 1955, when Holland’s Electric Boat Company built the
Nautilus
, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine. But the
Nautilus
was only the next step in a long line of
underwater military technology deemed in the interest of national security; and because the military still had no reason to go deep, even nuclear submarines rarely ventured below a few hundred feet, and none could dive below a classified depth of two thousand feet. Yet the ocean at its deepest could swallow the twenty-nine thousand feet of Mount Everest and still have more than a mile to spare. Even if submarines had been built to dive deeper, the military did not equip them to observe and gather information, because the military wasn’t interested in revealing the mysteries of the deep ocean; the military only wanted to hide in its vastness.

Then in 1963, eight years after the
Nautilus
sailed, the navy’s most advanced nuclear submarine, the USS
Thresher
, had imploded on a routine dive off Nova Scotia and crashed into the seafloor eighty-four hundred feet below, and the navy had no way to rescue the crew or retrieve the wreckage. For months they couldn’t even find it. The navy brought in over thirty-five ships and dangled lights and cameras off some of the decks, snapping the shutters at random, hoping to capture the wreckage on film; but with currents between the surface and bottom moving in different directions, no one ever knew where the cameras were. After a month of searching, one camera photographed its own anchor, and the picture was so grainy the navy mistakenly announced it had located the wreckage. After two months, they managed to get images of a few gnarled pieces of the
Thresher
, but they still had no image of the hull. With the search area narrowed, the navy called in the only vessel in the world built to withstand the pressure of the deep ocean, a bathyscaphe called the
Trieste
, a French-built steel sphere, which the navy recently had purchased and modified.

The
Trieste
was the most sophisticated underwater work technology available, but it could hardly move underwater, had only one claw that repeatedly failed to open, and came with viewing ports so small that the two-man crew could look out with only one eye at a time. It made eight dives before the crew even spotted the
Thresher
hull, five months after the submarine had gone to the bottom. After several more dives, the navy returned home with photographs and one four-foot piece of pipe secured after many frustrating attempts with the
Trieste
’s spastic claw.

Nine years later, in 1972, Tommy was meeting weekly with Dean Glower, and the deep sea had remained an inhospitable foe, susceptible to murky images and succumbing to the occasional probe but otherwise unconquerable. And that was the problem Glower presented to Tommy, the distinction between a presence and a working presence: We now could descend to the bottom of the deepest ocean and look; we had yet to figure out how to work there.

Glower and Tommy discussed the problems the navy had faced in trying to find and document the
Thresher
. Glower explained the principles behind what others had tried, and Tommy read whatever he could find on submersible technology. He talked to Glower about saturation diving and underwater habitats, until he realized they would be “enormously expensive.” They talked about the new manned submersibles, but Tommy wondered about the cost and the danger of putting human life on the bottom. He broached the idea of having a mother ship at the surface and sending down robots to explore and to work, like NASA was beginning to do in outer space.

The sessions between Dean Glower and Tommy continued through the winter and spring of 1973, and into the following academic year, and Glower himself found them “stimulating.” “Tommy had a lot of good questions,” said Glower, “many of which I didn’t have an answer for.”

I
N HIS SENIOR
year, Tommy dropped out of school for the fall quarter, moved out of the dorm, and slept in the parking lot in the purple Chevy. For three months, he spent most of his time at the library studying ideas he had always wanted to pursue. He wanted to know how to get beyond innovation and creativity, how to arrange what he called “a good impedance match” between an idea and the environment in which that idea had to survive. “I used to have ideas after ideas after ideas after ideas,” he said. “How are you going to find out which ideas are good and which ideas are bad? Nobody could tell till you did it.”

He decided to extend the research projects Glower had assigned him during the tutorials and pursue at all times seven to fourteen projects, idea sparks that through research he could fan to see if they
caught fire. Some would be long term, thirty years perhaps; others he might conclude in two weeks. Some required his attention for a day each week, while he spent no more than four hours a month on others. As he completed one project, he would take on another, always keeping the number between seven and fourteen, and he resolved that no matter what he was doing, where he was working, how much time he had to spend on other things, he would keep these projects alive to broaden his understanding of science, marketing, technology, business, human behavior, all of the disciplines that come together to make an idea work.

A
T THE END
of Tommy’s fourth year, Dean Glower arranged for him to be the first engineering student to attend the university’s Stone Laboratory at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie. At the lab each summer, graduate students and faculty convened for a program incorporating advanced studies in marine biology and zoology. It wasn’t the deep ocean, but at least Tommy could broaden his knowledge of the aquatic sciences, study corrosion, and work on a sixty-five-foot marine research vessel.

The director of the laboratory, Dr. Eddie Herdendorf, knew to be expecting an engineering student who was to work on some special projects; that was all he knew, but he envisioned the stereotype. “Real scientists,” said Herdendorf, “look on engineers as just … kind of … you know … subhuman. It takes some skill to make the calculations, but it doesn’t take original thought.”

Dr. Herdendorf was at the lab registering students when he saw a cream-colored convertible about the size of an MGB coming toward the island up to its windowsills in the lake. As he and the students gathered by the window and then outside to watch, the car glided over to a small boat ramp and emerged dripping from the lake, its little propellers still spinning. Out stepped Tommy.

“That car caught everybody’s attention right off the bat,” remembered Dr. Walt Carey, Tommy’s other advisor at the lab. “It set the style for that whole summer. Somebody said, ‘If he keeps pulling stunts like that, he’ll be lucky to get off here alive.’ Yet he seemed absolutely fearless. He’d go places where no one else had gone and try things no one
else had tried, but he always knew how far he could take something without going over the edge. It seemed to be an instinct he had.”

That summer, the students measured the rate of algae growth in the lake and monitored radiation around a nuclear power station, but Tommy seemed more interested in the instruments than in the readings. He told the others how he thought the instruments worked, and as he spoke he seemed to be redesigning them in his head. He theorized as much as ever, but here, among the graduate students and professors, not so many wondered if he was bullshitting or onto something serious. When an instrument broke and no one else could figure out why, Tommy would approach it conceptually and isolate the problems. Fred Snyder, a graduate student in marine fisheries, said, “Tom was always unruffled and unstoppable on fixing something.”

Snyder thought of Tommy as an “ornery character,” energetic and ornery, yet always intellectual. “I think he appeared to be undisciplined to a lot of people, but he was disciplined in his own way. People at the lab expected a more quiet, reserved, scholarly type; Tom was plenty scholarly, he just wasn’t quiet and reserved.”

Toward the end of that summer, the students left Put-in-Bay for a field trip back on the mainland. Everyone else took the ferry, but Tommy persuaded Snyder to make the trip with him in the amphicar. “He was kind of a devilish little imp type,” said Snyder. “He had the beard and everything, the wiry hair, real sparkling eyes, and an impish grin. And he had this way of talking me into everything.”

The shallowest of the Great Lakes, Erie kicks up high waves in a storm. That day the sky was so dark that Tommy had on his headlights, his taillights, and his running lights. A northeaster was blowing the length of the lake, packing stiff winds and whipping the water into five-foot hills. “We shouldn’t have tried this,” said Snyder.

They put the top up to keep out the spray, and Tommy steered the amphicar parallel with the ferry, but the amphicar did not bob like a cork, so the waves swelled and rolled over them. “The first time I was ever in anything underwater with its windshield wipers going,” said Snyder. “I was a much more pious man when I got to the other side. Tom was probably worried, too, but he never shows it. He doesn’t get ruffled that easily.”

* * *

A
S
T
OMMY NEARED
graduation, Dean Glower warned him that jobs in ocean engineering were scarce. The U.S. Merchant Fleet was almost nonexistent. At Scripps and Woods Hole and other oceanographic centers maybe five or six jobs opened a year. Don’t go looking for employment in the field, he told Tommy. “Not yet, maybe in another thirty years.” In the future, he saw a huge demand for ocean engineers, because ocean engineers would be mining the deep ocean. “We’ll actually be farming down there, too,” said Glower, “and there’s history down there that’s as valuable, or maybe even more valuable, than the digs in Greece.” But that was still a long way off. Glower suggested that Tommy get a mechanical engineering job near Scripps in California and volunteer on oceanography projects, let them get to know him, and maybe they would offer him a job. Or go to Florida and work as a mechanical engineer and volunteer there. Glower even suggested that the only action might be with the treasure hunters down in Key West. Glower had just read about one named Mel Fisher who had spent years looking for a Spanish galleon and still hadn’t found it.

Tommy went to routine interviews with companies for an engineer’s position, and about the time the interviewer got to explaining the company’s pension program, Tommy’s eyes would unfocus and his brain would start reviewing the seven-to-fourteen. “He said there was no way he was going to work in the factory and pound the concrete,” said Phyllis, “and John said to him, ‘What are you gonna do?’ and he says, ‘Well, I have a pact with some guys,’ one of them was Barry, ‘that we’re gonna meet in Key West after we graduate from college.’”

In January 1976, Tommy stored the amphicar in a friend’s garage and left Defiance, driving a ’63 diesel Mercedes and wondering how he could get the Mercedes’s carburetors to feed on french fry oil without choking.

B
ARRY
S
CHATZ
’
S FATHER
had a successful insurance business in Defiance, but Barry didn’t like business; he wanted to study other cultures and languages and literature. He tried accounting and business courses, but his lack of interest showed in his poor grades. He dropped out of Miami University; he dropped out of Ohio University. He went to Quebec,
then to Scotland, hitchhiking, drifting, and thinking. When he returned from Scotland, he enrolled in Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he buried himself in theater and literature. He got a job with the local newspaper and went from photographer to chief photographer and picture editor to reporter, but by the middle of his senior year at Hillsdale, he felt like he had yet to find a compass. One quarter short of graduation, Barry had quit school and the Hillsdale paper in July 1975 and gone back to Defiance to plan his future. He wanted to team up with Tommy on another adventure they had talked about since high school.