Our friends at McNally-Jackson are hosting former Art Science Connect Fellow, Brad Fox, to introduce The Bathysphere Book (click to RSVP): 

In the summer of 1930, 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 was attached to a steel cable that plunged 3,000 feet into the sea. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled inside, gazing through three-inch quartz windows at the undersea world, was Hollister’s colleague William Beebe. He called up to her, describing previously unseen creatures, explosions of bioluminescence, and strange effects of light and color.

From this momentous first encounter with the unknown depths, The Bathysphere Book widens its scope to explore a transforming and deeply paradoxical America, as the first great skyscrapers rose above New York City and the Great Plains baked to dust. In prose that is magical, atmospheric, and entirely engrossing, Brad Fox dramatizes new visions of our planetary home, delighting in tales of the colorful characters who surrounded, supported, and participated in the dives—from groundbreaking scientists and gallivanting adventurers to eugenicist billionaires.

As an 2020-21 Art Science Connect Fellow, Brad Fox’s research focussed on the bathysphere logbooks, the first eyewitness account of the deep ocean, dispatched from a steel ball suspended a half mile below the ocean’s surface. Based on original archival work and field research on the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, Brad established the bathysphere logbooks as objects of major historical and scientific importance, unique records of secular mysticism, and foundational materials for today’s ecological and oceanic imagination.