Submersible.
L/B/D:
22 × 8 × 7 (7m × 2.4m × 2.1m). Tons:
16 disp. Hull:
steel sphere; aluminum frame. Comp.:
3. Mach.:
lead-acid batteries, 3 screws; 1 kt. Des.:
Bud Froelich. Built:
General Mills, Minneapolis, Minn., and Hahn & Clay, Houston, Tex. (sphere); 1964.
Irked by the fact that oceanographers had no way to observe the workings of the ocean depths except through what they could measure or capture from the deck of a surface ship, Allyn Vine proposed the development of a submarine with windows. At a meeting of oceanographers held in Washington, D.C., in 1956, Vine, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute ocean engineer, observed that
a good instrument can measure almost anything better than a person can if you know what you want to measure.... But people are so versatile, they can sense things to be done and can investigate problems. I find it difficult to imagine what kind of instrument should have been put on the
Beagle instead of Charles Darwin.
Six years later, the Office of Naval Research and Woods Hole contracted with General Mills/Litton Industries to build the Navy's first Deep Submergence Research Vessel, which was commissioned on June 5, 1964, with the name Alvin, for ALlyn VINe.
Though designed specifically for oceanographic research to be operated by Woods Hole, Alvin had been paid for by the Navy, for which she has undertaken several search and recovery missions. The first of these was to find a hydrogen bomb lost in the sea about five miles southeast of Palomares, Spain, after a U.S. Air Force B-52 collided with a KC-135 tanker plane during refueling on January 17, 1966. Less than a month later, Alvin and the less maneuverable Aluminaut began searching for the missing bomb in an area 135 miles square and over 2,600 feet deep. On March 15, during the nineteenth dive, Marvin McCamis, Cal Wilson, and Art Bartlett located the bomb, which was finally recovered from a depth of 2,800 feet on April 7.
In 1985, Alvin veteran Bob Ballard began planning a search for RMS
Titanic. On August 31, following initial site research by a French team, cameras on the Argo, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) tethered to the research ship Knorr, located the sunken liner at a depth of 3,780 meters. The next July, Ballard, Dudley Foster, and Ralph Hollis descended in Alvin, to which was tethered the ROV Jason Junior. After a three-hour, fifty-minute search on their first dive, they became the first people to see the majestic liner since her tragic sinking on April 14, 1912.
While these two spectacular investigations are the best known of Alvin's research, the submersible has been used in more than 2,000 scientific dives since 1967. Operating first from a makeshift pontoon mother ship named Lulu (for Vine's mother), and since 1982 from a variety of other vessels, Alvin has served as a vehicle for ground-breaking research of the ocean floor and submarine canyons, examining geological features and gathering biological specimens—including a swordfish that wedged its sword between Alvin's passenger sphere and the outer frame at a depth of 2,000 feet. On October 16, 1968, Alvin slipped out of her cradle while being launched and sank in 1,535 meters; she was recovered on Labor Day, 1969, after being located by Aluminaut. In 1974 the original sphere was replaced by a titanium one, and the same year Alvin conducted joint research of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge with the French vessels Archimede and Cyana in Project Famous. Three years later Alvin undertook her first research in the Pacific, off the Galapagos Rift. Later research has taken her as far north as the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in the Pacific, and the Gulf of Maine in the Atlantic.
Kaharl, Water Baby.
