Popular Science: Before the moon race, explorers wanted to conquer the ocean

From my Century In Motion column on Pop Sci

From Jules Verne-inspired submarines to NASA-backed underwater habitats, the dream of an undersea civilization came closer than most people realize.

In 1916, 12-year-old Edwin Link, Jr., sat in his father’s workshop in Binghamton, New York, and drew a submarine. The detailed sketch echoed Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which transformed how the world imagined the deep via fiction’s most famous submarine, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Based on his annotations, 12-year-old Link wanted to design his own Nautilus to serve the U.S. in World War I against mounting German U-boat threats. His father, who founded the Link Piano and Organ Company, probably disregarded the sketch as a young boy’s fantasy.

After dropping out of high school in 1922, Ed Link followed his father into the family business, learning how bellows and pneumatic pressure—the guts of organs—could be made to simulate movement. By 1929, he used that knowledge to build the world’s first flight simulator, a stubby box mounted on organ bellows that pitched and rolled like an aircraft in weather.

By the end of World War II, more than 10,000 of his “Blue Box” simulators had trained half a million pilots. He sold the company in 1954 and returned to the sea—but not to support war. Link spent the rest of his life trying to prove that people could not only explore the ocean depths, but dwell there.

He wasn’t alone. In the 1960s, for one brief, dazzling decade, it looked as though the ocean might rival space as humanity’s next great frontier. As astronauts circled the Earth, aquanauts moved into seafloor labs. Then America chose space.

Now, with climate systems straining and the seabed coveted for rare minerals that power electronics, the century-old dream of touring and dwelling beneath the sea is inching forward, not with the idealism of the 1960s, but with the sober pull of climate and commerce...

Before the moon race, explorers wanted to conquer the ocean

Many thanks to Sarah Durn, Popular Science Associate Editor.

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