Archive Gallery: Classic Thrill Rides and Carnival Attractions

138 years of Popular Science at your fingertips.

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Archive Gallery: Going Deep With Vintage Submersibles

The four-wheeled diving car, the world-famous Bathysphere, the farming sub, and more underwater craft from decades past

While touting space as the next great frontier, we tend to forget that our oceans encompass domains that might as well exist on other planets. Like outer space, the deep sea isn't an easy place to access, but explorers reared on Jules Verne and tales of the giant squid couldn't resist the challenge of mapping Earth's most alien habitat. To that end, innovators like aqua-lung inventor Jacques Cousteau, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard, and aviation pioneer Edwin Link built submersibles fit for the long and treacherous task. As Piccard once said, "Exploration is the sport of the scientist."

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By definition, submersibles lack the autonomy, power, and size of submarines. Most of the vehicles covered in this gallery couldn't function unless they were tethered to a surface ship. While Edwin Link dreamed of using submersible to facilitate week-long "camp outs" under the sea, these vehicles were barely equipped for comfortable living. But for the purposes of exploration, leisure, and even undersea farming, they were perfect (well, as perfect as technology back then would allow).

Appearance-wise, early submersibles shared more in common with land vehicles than military submarines. Early diving cars were squarish, had four wheels, and lacked windows. One even came with a large crane for harvesting sea sponges. This all changed in 1928 when Otis Barton convinced naturalist William Beebe that a small spherical vessel was best suited for resisting the ocean's crushing pressure. Six years later, Beebe and Barton set a diving record when their Bathysphere descended 3,028 feet, making Beebe the first marine biologist to study deep-sea wildlife in its natural surroundings.

Naturally, the Bathysphere's renown drove Beebe's peers to emulate his success. Auguste Piccard, who had previously set an altitude record while ballooning, developed an interest in adapting balloon technology for undersea vehicles. The result? A spherical cabin suspended from an enormous buoyancy device containing 10,000 gallons of aviation gasoline. Piccard's work reaped an incredible reward just two decades later, when his son Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh became the first (and so far, only) men to reach Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the world's oceans.

Click through our gallery to read about the Bathysphere, the "U-Drive U-Boat," and other submersibles from decades past.

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Archive Gallery: Our Favorite Vintage Submersibles

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Archive Gallery: The Futuristic Glories of Old New York

Times Square, Madison Square Garden, Grand Central Terminal, and more landmarks that defined the 20th century's most prominent city

Throughout the 20th century, New York maintained a reputation for being the greatest city in the world. It housed the world's tallest building, the most extensive subway system and a group of the world's most creative minds. While the city strikes us as an aggressive, ambitious place, New York thrives on a sensr of nostalgia as much as of enterprise. What New Yorker hasn't felt incensed upon seeing a mom-and-pop deli replaced by a CVS? Who hasn't felt overcome with sentiment while beholding the Brooklyn Bridge on a summer evening? How fitting, given that we're using our archives to tour old-school NYC this weekend.

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Much of our New York coverage concerns the city's great, if not overpopulated, future. We correctly predicted that the city would eventually hold up to 20 million people on a given day, but we couldn't conceive where all of them would live (keep in mind that this was before we imagined that people would commute from New Jersey each morning). One engineer proposed filling in the East River while creating three new islands in the New York Bay. Another suggested draining the the East River to create a boulevard between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Within a decade, we began covering more realistic projects, such as the expanded subway system beneath Times Square, the Empire State Building's new automatic "robot" elevators, and the newly high-tech Madison Square Garden above Penn Station. You can see all of these things today. The rocket-shaped Columbus Circle tower and the pint-sized subway conveyor cars, not so much.

Click through our gallery for more visions of a New York that never really came to pass.

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