ILLUMINATING THE OCEANS 



a Steel cylinder weighing no less than two and a half 

 tons, to resist pressure at great depths : the camera being 

 controlled by an operator who remains on the parent 

 ship, taking pictures under the water as the huge cylinder 

 moves about in all directions at a speed of about a mile 

 an hour. 



Numbers of brilliant scientists like Dr. Edgerton — 

 inventor of the high-speed electronic flash lamp, which 

 is capable of brighter-than-the-sun exposures as brief as 

 a millionth of a second — are now devoting their minds to 

 problems of underwater photography. 



Oceanographic science is in its very earliest infancy. 

 All man's researches have taken him down only a small 

 fraction of the distance that separates him from the floors 

 of the deepest ocean chasms. The bathyscaphe descents 

 which have already been made have penetrated the 

 deeps at a few places only, and may be compared with 

 the first ascents into the air in engine-powered aircraft 

 made by the Wright Brothers. It will be some years before 

 man's bathyscaphes (improved beyond recognition from 

 those we know today) descend over six miles into the 

 Mindanao Deep, and release explorers who will walk the 

 sea floor and investigate the life-cycles of the strange 

 creatures which live there. Yet man may well persist in 

 the improvement of his underwater devices until he is 

 able to make his way over the sediments which have 

 been deposited there through uncounted eons of time. 



Illumination of the oceans will continue until larger 

 and larger areas are flooded with light. The impenetrable 

 sea of today may be widely explored during the next few 

 generations. 



Considering the enormous advances in all fields of 

 human knowledge in recent years, our wildest imagina- 

 tive speculations regarding the future exploration of the 

 world's seas may become matter-of-fact reality before our 

 children's children have reached maturity. But the sea 

 will always remain, in some senses, impenetrable. Should 



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