Today, we look for the safest way out of a
submarine. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Writer Ann Jensen tells
about the German engineer Wilhelm Bauer. Bauer was
an early submarine-builder -- during the 1850s.
When one of his first boats started to collapse in
sixty feet of water, Bauer was cool and
quick-thinking. He let water leak in until the
pressure had equalized and a small breathing space
remained. Then he opened the hatch, and, in his
words, he and his two crewmen simply shot to the
surface "like bubbles in a glass of champagne."
When WW-I began, 63 years later, the opposing
forces had 214 military submarines. These new
machines would clearly be primary actors in the
horrors that were to follow. Many men were destined
to die in those claustrophobic chambers.
So the best minds went to work on inventing a kind
of underwater parachute -- a breathing apparatus to
get men to the surface. Bauer's experience was
forgotten as inventors made elaborate devices and
even more elaborate strategies for using them. I
read about them in magazines when I was a boy
during WW-II. The Momsen lung was the method of
choice. It cleaned carbon dioxide out of the air
you exhaled, it enriched it with oxygen, and it
With the Momsen lung, you first adapted to high
pressure, then you slowly rose to the surface to
avoid getting the bends. No "shooting upward like
champagne bubbles" here.
WW-II magazine articles weren't meant to frighten
young men away from submarine service. But the
grizzly truth was that 94 percent of the men known
to be alive when submarines were disabled died --
either inside them or on the way to the surface.
Worse yet, only five of the men that lived were
saved by the Momsen lung.
After the war, naval people took stock of what'd
happened. Only then did they begin to teach the
method of free ascent. You fill your lungs with
air; you let yourself out of the submarine at any
depth up to 300 feet; and then you exhale on the
way up. The air in your lungs expands as the
pressure decreases. You never run out of air. You
never adjust your body to high pressure. And you're
never threatened by the bends.
In retrospect, those breathing devices killed far
more people than they saved. They made sailors
think it was impossible to get to safety on their
own. It's a hard-learned lesson that engineers have
to learn over and over again: that no technology
can sometimes be better than a highly-developed one
-- that the really inventive designer alters the
problem itself before he solves it. The real
problem here wasn't providing air on the way to the
surface. It was getting a person safely to the
surface. Wilhelm Bauer figured that one out, on the
spot, way back in 1851.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds