The bathysphere—bathys is Greek for "deep"—was developed in the early 1930s by William Beebe and Otis Barton, two explorers from the New York Zoological Society. It was a 4,500-pound hollow ...

Meanwhile, Barton foot the bill for the $11,000 craft. They called their vessel the Bathysphere, a Greek word meaning ‘deep sphere.’ The craft was made of steel and its three windows were of ...

To see a “world of life almost as unknown as that of Mars,” two explorers climbed inside the bathysphere and descended into the sea’s cold depths in 1931. After a dive of a quarter-mile ...

In response, Barton, an engineer studying natural history in graduate school at Columbia University, designed the bathysphere to protect against the high pressure of the ocean depths. By the 1930 ...