William Beebe : Explored the ocean at new depths

Before there was Jacques Cousteau, there was Beebe, an explorer and naturalist who in the early 1930s pioneered the use of an underwater craft called the bathysphere to explore the ocean at depths no human had ever gone before. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1877, Beebe attended Columbia University then took a job as a curator of birds at the New York Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo), which opened in 1899. He went on to travel the world conducting field research and collecting specimens for the zoo. Beebe, whose friends included fellow naturalist Theodore Roosevelt, developed an interest in oceanography and in the late 1920s met Otis Barton (1899-1992), inventor of the bathysphere.
Beebe and Barton first tested the 5,000-pound, 4.5-foot-wide, ball-shaped steel vessel (which was suspended from a mother ship by a cable) off the coast of Bermuda in 1930. Four years later, the two made a record-breaking dive of 3,028 feet (more than half a mile down) in the bathysphere, whose name was derived from the Greek word “bathys,” meaning “deep.” From the craft’s portholes, Beebe catalogued never-before-seen marine life. The bathysphere’s deep-sea dives received national media coverage, and Beebe himself captivated audiences across America with his radio broadcasts from the vessel. He died in 1962.