Working Underwater: The Story of the Commercial Diving Industry

In the spring of 1841, as Green walked
along the dock in Oswego, he saw two men
jump into the water and disappear beneath
the surface. When they came up a minute or
so later, he asked what they were doing. They
said they were trying to recover a stolen clock
and two boxes of soap that had been thrown
into the river. Green decided to join the effort
and ended up finding one of the soap boxes
and the clock.
“Elated by this success,” he later wrote, “I
at once conceived the idea of following diving
for lost property as a vocation.”
Until well into the twentieth century, that’s
what diving would be: A vocation. Not until
the idealistic days of the 1950s, when a warweary
public suddenly had time and money
on their hands did people look at diving as a
recreational sport. But for men like Green,
diving would be a hard and dangerous job,
not something undertaken for fun.
As a young man Green for a time operated
a freight scow on the Erie Canal, but he also
did free diving for salvage. Occasionally he
helped recover the bodies of drowning
victims and once rescued a young woman
who had fallen from a steamboat gangplank.
For that, the girl’s father gave him $500, a lot
of money in the mid-19th century.
The 1852 Lake Erie wreck of the City of
Oswego, on which Green and possibly his wife
and child were passengers (the record is
confusing but likely they died in the
accident), shaped the rest of his career. While
participating in the hunt for the Oswego’s lost
cargo, Green heard of a salvage operation
underway at the site of another shipwreck
about 10 miles from the scene of the Oswego’s
demise. Going there, after demonstrating his
free diving abilities he convinced the captain
of the salvage vessel to let him try out one of
the diving suits they were using. The salvors
liked his style and he joined the crew. After
that, he spent most of the rest of his life as a
commercial diver.
In an era when underwater exploration
generated the same sort of public interest that
would later accrue to space exploration,
Green got a lot of publicity. “John Green
alone, in all the world, possesses the secret
power to ‘go down to the depths of the
seas’...he is confident that he can reach the
depths of any of the Lakes at their greatest
soundings, explore vessels and attach to them
the necessary fixtures for raising,” said the
Cleveland Herald. Eventually he capitalized
on his name identification by writing (or
more likely using a ghost writer) and
publishing a book chronicling his adventures
as a commercial diver.
One of Green’s most significant contributions
to the development of commercial diving were
his observations of the unpleasant side effects of
spending time at depth. His worst experience—
nearly fatal—came following a long day of
diving on the sunken steamship Atlantic, which
had gone down in Lake Erie with a large loss of
life on August 20, 1852. He had dived on the
wreck twice before, but still sought the ship’s
safe, which contained more than $30,000.
Using a modified version of Taylor’s
“diving armor,” Green began diving on the
wreck in August 1855. The vessel lay about
150 feet down. Light did not penetrate to that
depth, so he had to grope around on the ship
in darkness. On the fifth or sixth day, he
finally found the safe, touching its cool metal
through a deckhouse window. He returned to
the surface for a buoy and line to mark the
location. Each dive that morning lasted for 20
to 30 minutes. After lunch, he went back
down again, this time with the equipment he
needed to cut into the cabin where the safe
sat. This operation took about 40 minutes.
An illustration of the collision of the
Atlantic and the Ogdensburg on Lake
Erie in 1852, from Gleason’s Pictorial. It
was on his dive of the wreckage of the
Atlantic that diver John B. Green suffered
a near-fatal case of paralysis caused by
decompression sickness.
THE HISTORY OF COMMERCIAL DIVING
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