190 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



rv 1, 1915. 



square inch and must show no sign of increase of diameter 

 whilst under that pressure. All our hose is armored by a 

 spiral support of tinned steel wire embedded in the texture." 



The helmet is screwed down upon the corselet and made 

 tight by a rubber gasket, and the face plate is sealed in the 

 same fashion by a suitable ring of rubber. I If course this 

 does not cover what might be called the additional features 

 of a liner's costume, which include stout leather 1mm, is. with 

 wooden soles, to which arc riveted lead soles; Uadcn weights 

 Upon his back and chest to carry him to the bottom notwith- 

 standing the air inside of his suit; the telephone equipment 

 inside of his helmet; his lifeline, which has in its core the 

 telephone circuit; the india rubber mittens which he may 

 have to wear when the water is very cold: his submarine 

 lamp; shoulder pad to take the pressure of the heavy metal 

 head dress, and the belt and sheath in which the under-water 

 worker carries his knife and possibly additional lead weights 

 to hold him more firmly upon the bottom against the sweep 

 of a Strong current. 



Should a diver fall so that his body be prone or his head 

 lower than his waist, there is danger that the air may flow 

 from the helmet into the elastic dress and inflate it. In 

 deep water the rubber suiting is pressed very snuglj against 

 the diver's body by the surrounding water and very little air 

 remains there When he loses his balance, however, this 

 state oi affairs might bi changed, to his peril, his suit becomi 

 distended, and the diver floated hastily surfaceward, with the 

 possible chance ..i the dress bursting and the man being 

 drowned or otherwise menaced by the sudden lessening of 

 the water pressure on his way upward. Therefore, the verj 

 latest improvement in diving dresses is one that permits the 

 lacing up of the legs so that the suit is held always close 

 to the body and cannot be filled with buoyant air even though 

 the diver fall. This gives him much greater freedom of ac- 

 tion. He can bend over or stoop, or even crawl along the 

 bottom, if his work require, and he need not fear the inflating 

 and dangerous expansion of his covering. 



It would be hard to tell just how many submarine divers 

 there are in other parts of the world, but their employment 

 is very extensive. In the northern waters of Europe their 

 services are principally for salvage operations and subaqueous 

 engineering tasks; and these demands are many. In the 

 Mediterranean and in the warm waters of the Southern Pacific 

 and the Indian Ocean, sponge gatherers and pearl hunters use 

 diving suits such as we have described, in great numbers, and 

 the Japanese shell hunters in their native waters and in 

 southern California do the same thing. Therefore, it may be 

 reasonably declared that thousands of submarine diving suits 

 are in use, and the manufacturing industry is a large and very 

 profitable one. This is particularly so in England and 

 Germany. 



A diving suit, like any other character of dress, has a long 

 or short life, depending upon the nature of the jobs. The 

 average dress is ^ood for two or three years if carefully han- 

 dled and the demands are not rugged. However, the elastic 

 part of the suit may survive only a few days' or a few hours' 

 stress. In cutting the big hole through the hull of the "Em- 

 press of Ireland." described later, the long spiral steel shav- 

 ings that were made by the drills were particularly harmful 

 to the rubber-canvas leys of the suits and. despite the use of 

 protecting knee-pads, the tough fabric of rubber and oak- 

 tanned twill was so. in pierced. Of course these holes can 

 be patched, but no experienced diver wants to use the dress 

 again for his deeper submergences 



\s most of us know, the "Empress of Ireland" was damaged 

 by collision with another ship and went to the bottom near 

 the mouth of the St. Lawrence river. At that point the river 

 rises and falls at each tide to a normal measure of 16 feet, 

 but under some conditions this change of depth is even 



greater. \s a result, the currents are very swift when the 

 tide is either ebbing or on the flood, and at each change of 

 tid< there is a brief period, of only about thirty minutes, called 

 the "slack." when the waters are substantially currentless or 

 still. Salvage operations could he carried on only for these 

 short periods, and even then the state of the weather deter- 

 mined whether or not work could he done at all below the 

 surface. But there were other circumstances that hampered. 

 The ri\er at the point of the catastrophe is very deep; the 

 waters near the bottom are muddy and well-nigh inky black, 

 while the temperature was as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit. 

 These conditions made the divers' tasks not only difficult but 

 extremely dangerous. However, india rubber, combined with 

 engineering cunning, won out just the same. 



When the "Empress of Ireland" went to the bottom after 



Drvinx the Diver's Dress 



her collision with the "Storstad." she heeled over and rested 

 on her wounded side. There was nothing above the surface 

 to indicate how the ship lay in relation to the course of the 

 river, nor. indeed, anything to show exactly where she 

 rested. The initial task of the Canadian Salvage Association 

 was to find out just where the ship was. and her exact pos- 

 ture. This was not easy. The diver who first went down 

 just managed to catch a projection on the craft's upturned 

 bilge, and then, losing his hold, dropped to nearly 130 feet, 

 where he hung without being able to touch anything. The 

 red paint which discolored his suit told that he had touched 

 the ship's bottom, and his description of the projection to 

 which he had clung revealed its identity as one of the bilge 

 keels. That, however, was only one point of contact, and 

 the next time the diver went down he landed on the hull, 

 just inside of the rail. After that, successive descents enabled! 

 the salvors to make certain of the vessel's position. 



