A luminous and original account of the Bathysphere expeditions: the first ever deep-sea voyage to the otherworldly terrain more than 3000ft below sea level 11 June, 1930. On a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, a curious steel ball is lowered 3000ft into the sea. Crumpled up inside, gazing through the three-inch thick quartz windows, sits the famed zoologist William Beebe. With uncontrollable excitement, he watches as bizarre, never-before-seen creatures drift out of the inky blackness, illuminated by explosions of bioluminescence, bathing in the strange blue light of the deep sea - the bluest blue he has ever experienced. Beebe's dives took place against the backdrop of a transforming and paradoxical America, home of ground-breaking scientists, outmoded adventurers and eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the ocean's crushing pressure, narratives of scientific discovery and exploration slowly disintegrate; the colour spectrum shatters into new dimensions; organisms thrive in defiance of conventional understanding. The Bathysphere Book blurs the line between research and poetry to travel deep into the mind of William Beebe and his colleagues - and from this, towards the very edges of scientific discovery.

A gorgeous account of William Beebe's 1934 Bathysphere expedition, the first-ever deep-sea voyage to the otherworldly environment 3,024 feet below sea level. In the summer of 1934, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line attached to a steel cable that unrolled off the side of the vessel and plunged into the sea, sinking 3000 feet. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, sat Hollister's colleague William Beebe. He called up to her excitedly, describing bizarre creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color. Hollister, listening amid rocking waves, tried to get down everything she heard. The story of The Bathysphere Book springs from the original expedition logbooks-the first eyewitness account of the deep ocean. They possess a strange poetry, scientific vocabulary shot through with the thrill of the new, and an erotic charge due to the illicit affair Hollister and Beebe were carrying on. The expedition launched from an expansive, transforming America, as streetlights came on in New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. Backers ranged from eugenicist conservatives to billionaire socialists, while the expedition staff was a ragtag team of eccentrics who socialized with iconic figures of the period, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and Gypsy Rose Lee. The bathysphere was the subject of much media attention and made the team famous. Prefiguring NASA's blue marble photograph, the first images of the deep ocean offered a new sense of the planetary. The book will include archival images as well as a few reproductions of illustrations by expedition artists. The Bathysphere Book delights in the human drama that surrounds this groundbreaking move into the deep ocean, a story of one visionary encounter with the unknown.