i think one of the earliest exposures to deep sea research with a manned vehicle was probably bibi's bathyscaphe which i think was or in the early fifty's at least when i was a youngster i think i saw my first deep sea research was done with rock dredges where they put a big dredge drag along the bottom collect rocks but they never knew exactly where they got those they knew generally where they were dredging but the rocks would be all jumbled together or they didn't have any perspective of how they were in situ relative to one another so in the early sixty's the scientific community was had on the drawing boards and this was more like a more like a sports car than than a blimp or more like an airplane than a blimp much smaller than the tree s much more maneuverable could carry be carried on a  reasonably sized ship and that was called the sea pop and at least on the drawing board and when they threw efforts of alan vine at woods hole oceanographic institution who was a four in the very early days of navigation underwater navigation was a real challenge we had to reference the submersibles position relative to the surface support ship so even knowing where the support ship early on was very difficult because we had just like moran sea navigation in that would sort of move around the position of the sun and we could determine a range in a bearing to the sub basically by in a line hydrophone to the sub would put out a paying every couple of seconds so we try to get a peak amplitude on that's paying with the hydrophone and we had a we would send a signal to the submarine it would respond we would measure the time round trip travel time to estimate the range of course we didn't know exactly what the true sound of a law suit it was in the water so that was sort of iffy so it very difficult to go back actually to any given place but as technology improved stick systems improve very early on early seventies we developed a system where we put try ponder s on the bottom we would survey those and to get a good graphic location in the submarine could interrogate those as well as a ship interrogating those and now we could know with within maybe twenty or thirty metres where the position of the submarine was it was very repeatable within a couple of meters and we could then go back at least any given expedition go back to the same spot to deploy  experiments early on and in expenditure come back later pick those up and sample them there surely scientists were very skeptical about how valuable such a vehicle would be for scientific research because for assignats it's very risky to use a tool that's not been proven to be of scientific value because their livelihood really depends on the quality of their research in the papers they publish and whether the research they do is accepted by the community so without other scientists having a track record of collecting worthwhile valuable samples from something like  submersible it was very difficult in the early years to get funding for the programs and any given crews may be specialized in geology or geo physics or biology more and more of their own they're trying to on to the ship it makes it a little bit more affordable biology and the geology been one of the prime movers the program through the years one of my first actually working dives as a pilot was on the mid atlantic ridge project famous it was called that was a very important cruise because we were diving on a mid atlantic ridge where there's a spreading center these big  and if you're down in a rift like that it sort of complicates the navigation because in those days with acoustic navigation it had to be a line of sight to the transponders and so if you go down over the cliff  transponder is up on a hill somewhere you don't see it so you lose your tracking but the big advantage for the submersible and how that helped that program is that we could go up these cliffs and pick rocks out of the cliff and  precise locations and the science than could to take those back and analyze them and see how they changed in relative to each other and one of the other interesting things on subsequent cruises was we used a magnetometer which  i mean that was some of the first proof that the earth's magnetic field does indeed flop periodic lee one of the other favorite cruises certainly was the discovery of the hydro thermal vents off of the galata go silence so you know here i am looking at these monsters things in otherwise a barren area at the bottom the deeper you go it seems the less variety there is the less numbers of things and the suddenly believe what we were seeing in nobody knew what they were because they were all geologist on that particular cruise for the next twenty years we were studying that phenomenon what were these how did they survive so you know one of the big things was that the show that what they call chemo synthesis that life can live on strictly chemistry without sunlight because prior to that we thought everything every living thing was somehow based on even the things on the bottom of the ocean were living on things that trickled down from the sunlight to exposed air surface of the ocean so and then of course that opened up all sorts of possibilities of life on other them to survive so you know what are the possibilities of similar ecosystems on distant moons of jupiter or whatever and then you know then couple of years later i made a dive up off of mexico on a pacific rise and kind of crossed a structure like a like a termite mound but it was blasting out this black smoke and even from an engineering perspective particularly shocking because i couldn't imagine what that was i thought it was like you know maybe a mud flow or something geyser we had a temperature probe which was like a one eight inch diameter tube with a thermistor in the end of it and it was always very flimsy but we had that on to try to poke in the cracks the measure of these low temperature vents like we'd seen in the galapagos and it was stiffened up with a piece a half inch p tubing so i stuck that in this smoke thing in it and it came out sort of black looking but the temperature the scaling on the temperature sensor was only up to like thirty five degrees or so center grade which from bottom is pretty warm but it immediately went to that sun only left it in there for a few seconds because i didn't know if i would damage the probe so we got back to the surface and discovered that the plastic tube was actually burnt  so that was our first indication that these things were very hot water coming out of the bottom of the ocean which is a tremendous heat sink so it's hard to imagine how you could have anything that hot the other was diving on  titanic and typically the album doesn't work near wrecks because of the risk of entanglement but they've done a pretty good photo survey of it so we pretty much knew where the hazards were so i was on the first dive when we went down to try to find that we were having some battery problems some sonar problems so we're sort of driving getting vectored from the surface of where they thought it was driving along and all was sudden we just  black wall in front of us and stopped and visibility could be a real problem it's all sediments so as soon as we stop this big cloud of dust rolled up and we couldn't see anything and so we basically had to back off and drop our ascent weights a comeback for the surface that deal with the battery problems and whatnot on the submersible but subsequent dives on it i was just amazed that some of the brass like on the top of working off the continental shelf here where there's a lot of lobster and crabbing going on there are a lot of derelict lost lobster pot strings and we frequently would work in a canyon and there may be cables draped across there that are a hazard that could be sucked into your thrusters and get you hung up so that sort of was the biggest safety hazard with sphere which is about six feet in diameter besides the three people is full of equipment and life support systems and whatnot so it is quite cramped and after being down there for eight above freezing there's really not much insulation on the sphere although titanium it's titanium now it's it actually is a fairly low conductivity as metals go so it has a certain insulating value a big advantages to the submersible way of doing biological research is that you can bring up these samples intact where the old method was to drag a net through the water and randomly scoop up whatever got in there the group does a lot of development of scientific instruments and tools based on the requirements of the scientific needs for biology purposes we have insulated large insulated box with a lid on it because we found that biological samples if they had the shallower ones would have a swim bladder in for instance especially and as you bring them to the surface the swim bladder would expand the gases would expand in sort of rupture the fish and sort of mess up the samples the deeper the ones don't particularly have those but they are really sensitive to temperature so when they come up to near surface temperature waters they would tend turn to mush or fall apart whatever so we developed this insulated box so the water would stay cool in there long enough to get the the support ship in the scientists to take the samples out put them in some pretty chilled water and keep them chilled we actually on the ship have a large refrigerated laboratory so they can work with their microscopes and whatnot in a cold environment so the samples would stay intact equipment wise the alvin has two mechanical arms which of improved over the ages over the years and initially it was a single electrically control early hydraulic one which they still use and the electric ones were very much jerky pushbutton this way left right up down where the hydraulic want to just a little joystick you move around in the the m follows so it made dexterity much better for sampling for sampling sediment things we developed simple little push cores plastic two cores so if there was some biology on the bottom you could push that into the sediment sort of capture them without disturbing them bring them up in these core tubes and just you know any variety of prying tools in ways to try to break off  pieces of rock from an outcrop on a cliff or something and so we're very flexible and a lot of the scientists because of the interface capability electrical data interface features of  an instrument and we'd set that out near a hydrothermal vent or whatnot and collect the data feed it directly into the woods data system the imaging systems on the album improve through the years mishler we just had still cameras that would take maybe four hundred pictures for a role film thirty five millimeter very early we had a an early version of what's called a sit camera which is a very low light level system we had put on board when we did work in the go up against rift from national geographic we had one of the first underwater color cameras in a pressure vessel recorded the images in color and eventually of course the the camera technology improves the prices came down and a number of people including woods hole started packaging their own cameras for underwater work so now they're into the high definition fiber optic through the penetrators in the hall so we get really high quality wideband with data to stay in recording systems a typical typical dive would have you know  pilot and two scientific observers and there's no tether or anything between a ship in a sub but the surface ship has always a continuous role in the diving operation submersible every thirty minutes is a minimum if nothing else just to check that they're still ok with our when we go down for about eight hour dive we'd get in the water at eight o'clock in the morning come back about five at night the sample basket would be full of whatever we collected we get that on board the alban group would do occur dive on a submersible and do any work that needed being doing done on a preparation for the next day so our day we were work would start to pre dive like six o'clock in the morning and be work until six or seven at night but when we got the samples onboard then the scientists would go to work on those and they might be working all night long on the ship processing those samples planning what they're going to do the next day based on what they sample today so on board ship it's a twenty four hour operation and a lot of times people wonder i mean is it worth putting people in the deep sea when you can do a lot of things remotely with the high technology remotely operated systems and there is i think a real advantage to the personal perspective the peripheral vision you get by looking at the environment in perspective instead of the sort of narrow field view that you get in a camera and it's like you know why would why would anyone bother going to the grand canyon and looking in there on their own when they're spectacular h d imagery why would anyone go scuba diving on a coral reef when there are spectacular imagery available there's just something there that's a personal impact it's a whole different perspective and couple of examples it really struck me was one of the navy's these curve vehicles they lost that off the coast of san diego and they use this vehicle to search for stuff that they be test them loses off the coast of san diego and they're testing areas and they lost that alvin was in the area they wanted us to go look for so we took along one of their most experienced r o be pilots my gosh i never knew it was it's rugged of the new element many of the components were upgraded to to go to six thousand five hundred meters but not all of them so it can't go there yet sometime in the future hopefully the rest of the systems will get upgraded to to be able to go that deep but some of the our o b systems can go deeper than that some of the woods hole ones and i mean we're remotely operated vehicles  and they do imaging systems they do a side scan sonar sorts of things they can collect a lot of data and they're the intelligence on them is improving so they can you know if they're coming to a cliff they'll know they should stop and they'll start to go up until they can get over the cliff without any human intervention some of them are programmed to to go to a power station i could go over there on their own recharge like a little fishing line but using that you can get real time data imaging off kind of stuff from the autonomous basically autonomous one but now you're steering it driving it like you would multi operated vehicle but you don't have the big heavy cable to drag around so it'll run in either mode either autonomous without a cable or with this fiber optic cable and cost wise you know people think that the more expensive than other systems but in fact it's not i know this because i worked in the budgeting for quite a few years certainly the thomas and our o b systems are obese systems in particular the advantages they can stay down for and until the people get tired of the machine breaks but that requires twenty four hours of operation which means you need basically three crews to keep it going we're all when we have one crew and in the biggest expense of going to sea is actually the personnel costs so in fact they are obese systems at least the big one deep sea ones that have the same capabilities albon are actually more expensive than alvin operation went to college in mechanical engineering and one thing i can say about that in relation to my experience with the alvin is a basic engineering background has just been the untold value to myself in my career you know just basic physics and chemistry and biology i took some electives in  chemistry mechanics strength the materials electrical electronic engineering i found it work with the alban all through the years all of those things played a role in and helping me understand and appreciate what needed to be done in the job so after college i went in the navy is a naval  got out of there out of that and i was thinking about going to graduate school in ocean engineering perhaps and i was living here in the boston somerville area and so i started looking a little research in the library who was the one ocean engineering sorts of things nearby and there were two or three companies down in cape cod so i went down there and put some applications in including woods hole  oceanographic and not looking for anything particular where there were no job postings but you know even if it was work just to get in see what people were doing in the field before i decided to commit some more  quitman suite was very limited on album because prior to seventy one or so most of it was engineering and testing dives so that's what i did for about a month and they said would you like to go to se in see what they do and i said well sure i suppose i need to know that in order to help design tools so you ended up going to sea for the next fifteen years there in i've started out  mostly on the job training i certainly had no marine or submarine experience prior to that but so i started out sort of working with the mechanical section in the group then i started in there pilot training which is basically on a job you go on dives as a copilot intil you learn how things are great and so i became a pilot and things that need to be done at sea during an expedition move ahead expeditiously and smoothly you know i would meet with the scientists in the evening to find out what they needed for the next day get the crew go on working on preparing doing that one of the things i like about the job is i got to travel a lot of places around the world that i probably never would have been able to see you know from central america south america easter island guam site pan japan and france russia st petersburg so that's been a great part of the job even though you don't get a lot of time though to look around once you're in shore the when i wasn't at sea as an expedition leader and it up in management more although i continued to do a few cruises a year as an expedition leader so i spent a lot more time working on the engineering aspects planning certification in the lodge just sticks are tremendous keeping an operation going around the world like that so it's been a very adventurous expose a career exploration and