A DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT 183 



When I again visited the bathysphere the physicians of 

 inanimate things had made out a very bad case. The quartz 

 eyes on close examination had shown a strange cloudiness, 

 and minute fractures were visible to all eyes but mine. No 

 one but myself would trust them again, so a test force 

 was brought to bear — physical pressure — and the poor old 

 lenses which had so bravely withstood mighty loads of 

 black water, cracked at comparatively low strains, about 

 900 pounds to the inch. Mr. Gerard Swope of the General 

 Electric Company heard of this and generously ordered 

 new windows of the finest possible material. The copper 

 setting of the door and its central wing-bolt of brass were 

 found to be crystallized and had to be replaced. 



When high officials of the Air Reduction Company 

 viewed our old oxygen tanks and chemical trays, and saw 

 our palm-leaf fans, they said such things were, more or 

 less, contemporary with the Stone Age. They forthwith 

 devised a most effective arrangement — four superimposed 

 trays with a diminutive electric blower at the top which 

 changed and purified all the air in the sphere every minute 

 and a half. The old oxygen tanks were scrapped and new 

 ones made to order and fitted with the latest thing in valves, 

 shiny affairs of nickel and glass. Our former allowance of 

 two litres of oxygen a minute was cut down to one, as 

 quite sufficient. The visible gauge in the valve was a glass 

 bubble which danced up and down in a tube, balanced 

 on a slender column of outpouring oxygen, and adjustable 

 to exactly the right height and the fraction of a litre. 



