Rube Goldberg, born in San Francisco in 1883, was originally an engineer. In 1904 he graduated from the College of Mining at the University of California at Berkeley.

For six months he mapped water and sewer lines until he couldn’t take it anymore. He then took a low-paying job drawing cartoons for the San Francisco Chronicle.

“What he cared about the most was whether he made you laugh,” said his granddaughter Jennifer George, who we spoke to in 2018. Her 2013 book:Art by Rube Goldberg,” describes his extensive output of cartoons, writing and even sculpture until his death in 1970.

Goldberg left California for New York in 1907 and was hired by the New York Evening Mail. One of his early cartoons for a newspaper featured a badly injured man falling from a 50-story building and a woman asking, “Are you in pain?” The man replied: “No, I sleep with my beauty.”

It was a hit, and over the next two years he drew 449 more in the Silly Questions series. Readers loved to send suggestions.

He also created a TV series called I’m a Guy. It featured statements such as “I’m the guy who put the bum in Hoboken” and “I’m the guy who put the sand in the sandwich”, which started a national fad.

Among his cartoon characters was Bub McNutt.who always managed to screw up when he tried to help someone.

Drawings of Goldberg’s inventions began in 1912 and made him a household name, according to exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

The first of his complex devices was “Simple mosquito repellentclassic Rube Goldberg machine. A mosquito climbs in through a window, walks along a board strewn with small pieces of steak, passes out from the chloroform fumes from a sponge, and falls onto the platform. He wakes up, looks through a spyglass to see the bald head’s reflection in the mirror, and jumps off a diving board in fear, killing himself when it hits the mirror, falling dead into a jar.

For the next 20 years, Goldberg delivered a new car to Rube Goldberg about every two weeks. He continued less frequently until 1964.

Hey invented character Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola Buttswho created his own machines to open screen doors, shine shoes, and find soap that has fallen out of the tub. According to The Art of Rube Goldberg, the character was inspired by two professors Goldberg found particularly boring at the College of Mining: Samuel B. Christie, who lectured extensively on the efficiency of time and motion, and Frederick Slate. who once showed students the “barodic”, an intricate machine designed to measure the weight of the earth.

The invention cartoons satirized the “complex world of machines,” wrote Adam Gopnik in the book’s preface, poking fun at “the broader idea of ​​efficiency.” Gopnik wrote that Goldberg had “the poetic intuition of all great cartoonists”.

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Early on the morning of June 11, 1930, a barge named Ready, carrying employees of the Department of Tropical Research, sailed off the coast of Nonsuch Island in the Bermuda archipelago. Men in white sailor caps and overalls gathered around a four-and-a-half-foot-tall steel ball called a bathysphere as a huge winch hauled it up from the deck. The men stabilized the ball as it rolled outward, dangling over the surface of the sea. It had three forward-facing holes, tightly clustered together like eyes. Suspended and swinging from a cable, he seemed to be looking down at the choppy water.

The Bathysphere will be the first submersible to take people into the depths of the ocean. The plan was to drop him several times in the same place, descending lower and lower, studying the column of water directly below him. What creatures lived below? In what numbers? Will populations shrink as they move inland? The ocean was so vast and unexplored that any understanding that could be gained would mean an epoch-making expansion of biological knowledge.

DTR scientist Gloria Hollister watched winches lower a steel ball into the sea. When he splashed down and disappeared, she sat up, picked up the canvas-bound notebook that served as the expedition’s journal, and prepared herself.

In the photographs, she is shown with a concentrated expression on her face, a telephone receiver in the shape of an old hunting horn is attached to her neck, and a small speaker is pressed to her right ear. She lifted her chin slightly as she listened, spoke, and took preliminary notes. The wire from her receiver ran from the edge of the deck into the water, joining the bathysphere, which was now sinking into the ocean depths.

Inside the ball, curled up and doing different things, sat two skinny men: Otis Barton and William Beebe. They had to be thin because the entrance to the bathysphere was less than two feet wide. Barton, who designed the ball and supervised its production, oversaw the 400-pound door’s water seal, the oxygen tanks to provide eight hours of breathable air, and the soda lime boxes to absorb exhaled carbon dioxide. occupiers. He checked the telephone battery and the fan that circulated the air.

As they sank, the temperature inside dropped and water condensed on the balloon’s ceiling, dripping down to form puddles at the bottom.

The ball was fitted with two three-inch quartz windows. There were supposed to be three of them, but one of the quartz glasses turned out to be defective, so its hole had to be plugged with steel.

Bibi, an ornithologist and protoecologist, curled up as close to the glass as possible. Fascinated by the underwater world, he was well aware of his status as a witness to something that no man had ever seen. An energetic man with an infectious enthusiasm, he was already famous for his popular books describing travels around the world in search of pheasants, an expedition to the Himalayas, and for risking his life to watch an erupting volcano in the Galapagos Islands. He was 52 years old, bald and bony, almost bow-legged, and spoke his observations in a thin but stately voice as he descended. He traveled all over the world, but he never got rid of his New Jersey accent, so worlds another birds came out voids another Boyds.

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The winches unwound the cable, and as the bathysphere descended further, the light began to shift. The warm tones of the earth’s surface were absorbed by the water. At 100 feet, Beebe lifted up the red plate to check the spectrum and found it to be completely black—that warm frequency no longer reaches its current depth. A fish swam into view in the cool bright greens and blues of the water outside. He related what he saw to Hollister, who continued to write down his statements in his expedition notebook:

100 feet Red is gone, color plates are black.

Jelly Linuche.

200 Pilotfish around a 6″ long bait,

pure white with 8 jet black stripes.

250 No red or yellow in the sun. More

jelly, the tail of the pilot fish is visible again.

300 Otis saw Pilotfish, multi-colored fish

on the surface but looks white.

400 Two strings of salpa.

The shrimp look pure white.

500 Transparent fish with only food visible.

550 temperatures 75 degrees. Large leptocephalus.

Lots of Cavolinia. Several myctophids.

650 flashes of light in the distance.

800 Pretty dim. Meter reading 237.

900 A few fogs of small shrimp.

Big servo.

switch the lights off

As they descended, this interaction continued: shifting the spectrum until the world beyond the steel ball was blue, blue and nothing else, slowly fading to black, but still bright with a strange brightness that Beebe could not express. words. Their spotlight cast a dim yellow glow through the quartz windows, but now, at a thousand feet, it was fading fast.

The beam went out, and the water outside filled with miniature explosions. tiny shrimp Beebe saw them carried in nets lifeless. Now he saw them for the first time in their native habitat, illuminating the black depths by the rapid oxidation of a chemical produced in their bodies called luciferase.

When the explosions stopped, the strange glow returned and it seemed like there had never been another color in the universe. He was sure he could read it, but when Burton lifted the page, he couldn’t make out a single word. Beebe turned to the round window, continued to watch and talk, and Hollister on deck wrote it all down on the lined pages of a journal:

1050 Blacker than the blackest midnight, but still bright.

The air is great. 20 small fish can be argyropelecs.

1100 A long, pale white fish with a thick, rat-like tail, resembling a makrurid.

with six lights bypassed the bend of the hose.

11:50 The beam of light is clearly visible – the light is on.

1200 Idiacant. Two Astrones.

1250 Stomias-shaped fish 5 inches long.

3-inch shrimp are completely white.

Argyropelecus in a beam of light.

2 glowing pale white jellies.

1300 6 or 8 shrimp. 50 or 100 lights like fireflies.

Little squid in a beam of light

it seems there is no light, went downstairs to lure.

Cyclotons. Two inch shrimp.

1350 The light is very pale.

Temperature 72. Measuring wheel reading 403.

1400 Looking straight down very black.

Black as hell.

Then a huge flash of light. Like a strobe lighting something outside the window. What caused it? Now he could see nothing but shrimp and jellyfish, but the image was imprinted in his mind.

It was a fat, eel-like creature with fangs. He saw a wide open mouth, small jagged teeth like nails in a board, but the mouth was gaping. What horror and hunger had he just seen? A cog slipped in the ruins of reality, and he was briefly immersed in a nightmare of fluorescent cracks and screeching. And then he was gone, and he was back in the ball.

Outside were the familiar waves of jellyfish.

He felt like he had seen enough. He told Hollister to tell the crew that it was time to bring them to the surface. When they reached 150 feet, the crew saw the ship underwater.

The winches dropped the bathysphere back on board and unscrewed the bolts to release the skinny people into the midday sun. Bibi walked out into the now unfamiliar daylight. He bent his knotted knees and stamped his feet on the deck of the boat. He looked at the low hills of Bermuda in the distance and realized that something in him had changed forever. He would later try to determine what it was. Something to do with the light he saw.

He wrote that the yellow of the sun “can never be as beautiful as blue”.

That summer, the bathysphere made 15 dives, and by the time the expedition ended in 1934, almost 40, reaching a depth of 3028 feet. At some point, an NBC crew arrived for a live deep sea broadcast.

During the expedition, the DTR team identified dozens of new species, although some were only seen once. Visibility through the quartz windows was insufficient for photography, so staff artists such as Elsa Bostelmann and George Swanson created illustrations based on Beebe’s descriptions – and Hollister’s as well, when she made her own record-breaking dives. Often, these startling images were the only visual evidence of outlandish, never-before-seen creatures, such as the comically grotesque fisherman named Beebe. Dolopyx tentacle-shaped.

Beebe recognized the scientific value of the expedition, but he also felt that its truly transformative effect depended on being physically present at depth. The difficulty, the risk involved, the discomfort of being cooped up with Barton all heightened his sense of contingency and interconnectedness. It made the world brighter. Faced with doubts that any of this could be transferred with the help of Hollister, the in-house artists, and the rest of the team, he wrote article after article, book after book. Perhaps he could convey something of what he saw and felt, causing our imagination, if not the body, to rest for a while among the wonders of the depths.

Extracts from Book of the Bathysphere: Effects of Luminous Ocean Depths, Brad Fox. Copyright © 2023 Brad Fox. Used with permission from the publisher Astra House. All rights reserved