Deepest Down (Cont'd)

Last fortnight, dangling 2,510 ft. down in the sea off Bermuda in the hollow steel ball he calls a bathysphere, William Beebe had a "hunch" that he and Otis Barton, his fellow bathyspherist, had better not go deeper (TIME, Aug. 20). Last week not a hunch but lack of cable held him back. Down went the bathysphere, down past all previous records, down to 3,028 ft. At that point only 47 ft. of cable were left on the winch above. The barge cap tain ordered that no more be paid out. The bathysphere was kept at the new record depth for five minutes. "I'll tell the world," said Dr. Beebe, after he crawled out on deck, "that this is the last time I'll attempt record-breaking dives."

During last week's dive Dr. Beebe saw a great grey shape slide past the bathysphere window. The fish -- species un known -- was 20 ft. long, he estimated, and garlanded with lights like an excursion boat. The lights, he guessed, were phosphorescent parasites. Mr. Barton tried to photograph the creature but had almost no time to focus his camera. The film when developed was dismally blank.

Dr. Beebe's verbal description of this monster sped up a half-mile of telephone wire into the ears of a pretty, yellow-haired young woman named Gloria Hollister, who recorded the Beebe babblings in her fleet shorthand. Equipped with the conventional headphones and mouthpiece of a switchboard girl but dressed like a champion tennist, Miss Hollister resembled a cinemactress playing a part more than the earnest young scientist she is.

Gloria Hollister has a year-round job in the New York Zoological Society's tropical research department but she has accompanied Dr. Beebe on his bathysphere junkets for five years. Twenty-five years before that she was born in Suffern, N. Y. Putting aside dolls at an early age, she shortly began dissecting snakes, toads and moles, producing grotesque breeds of chickens. She explored stream bottoms by going under with rocks roped to her waist, a long glass tube to breathe through. Graduated from Connecticut College for Women, she conducted a thrill-hungry matron through the wilds of British Guiana, returned to Manhattan for an M. A. in zoology at Columbia. After showing the Rockefeller Institute's famed Alexis Carrel that she was steady-fingered enough to stick pins in the edge of a piece of paper, she worked two years for the Institute as laboratory technician. When the bathysphere first went into action in 1930. she was taken along, made a dive of 410 ft. Since then she has had the women's undersea record to herself. In 1932 she went down 1,000 ft. Last week she descended in the diving ball to 1,208 ft., not with Dr. Beebe but with Otis Barton, his handsome, truculent colleague and bathysphere designer.

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