Working Underwater: The Story of the Commercial Diving Industry

Sir Robert Boyle.
plays a tough Navy diving instructor, he
makes Boyle’s Law a bit easier to understand.
Beyond that, it puts it into perspective:
“Boyle’s Law describes the behavior of
gases under varying amounts of atmospheric
pressure. It states that if a diver holds his
breath at one hundred feet, continues holding
while rising to ten feet, then the gases in his
lungs increase four times. Now why is this
important to a diver? Forget to exhale on the
way up, and your lungs explode.”
The expansion of gases in a diver’s lungs
under the conditions set forth in De Niro’s
line is actually by a factor of three, not four.
But the effect would be the same.
In the early days, no private association or
government agency existed to keep statistics
on diving deaths, but fatalities were not
uncommon. And adverse physical reaction for
divers was very common.
Worrisome symptoms connected to diving
were noted and described by physicians as
early as the 1840s. When his air pipe burst on
October 11, 1842, Royal Navy diver John
Williams had been eighty feet down. Reaching
the surface in a minute and a half, he was only
semi-conscious. “His face then was a mass of
lividity,” a doctor reported, “his neck was
exceedingly swollen, bloated and suffused
with livid coloured blood.”
To bring him back around, the doctor
administered a turpentine enema and applied
leaches to one of his arms to remove 20
ounces of blood. Despite his initial pressurerelated
injuries and the witch doctor-like
treatment, the diver apparently enjoyed a
complete recovery.
In 1854, a diver working in the U.S. was
not so lucky when his air hose burst at depth.
When the surface crew received no response
to their tug on the diver’s signal line, they
pulled him up immediately. When they
opened his helmet, “to their horror [they]
found him quite dead; although he had been
down but one minute.” What they beheld was
not a pretty sight: “Blood was oozing from the
eyes, nose and mouth...we found the head
very badly swollen, the face and neck so filled
with blood as to resemble liver, while the
remainder of the body was as white as
unclouded marble.”
As innovations in equipment enabled divers
to go deeper and stay down longer, many began
suffering with breathing difficulties, dizziness
and disorientation, pain in the joints and
paralysis. While the symptoms could be noted
and described, no one understood their cause
other than the obvious connection to diving.
The same maladies experienced by divers
also occurred on land. Tunnel builders,
miners and others who worked in an
environment under pressure experienced
difficulties. At least twelve workers died in St.
Louis during construction of the Eads Bridge
in 1871 from what is now known as
decompression sickness, or DCS. Workers
also died as the Brooklyn Bridge went up.
A year later, a researcher correctly concluded
that DCS could be prevented by slower
compression (descents) and slower
decompression (ascents). He suggested that
underwater workers be limited to four-hour
shifts and that recompression treatment could
help severe cases. In 1873, Andrew Smith
coined the term “caisson disease” in describing
the health problems associated with the
Brooklyn Bridge project, which like the Eads
Bridge had employed divers using compressed
air. About the same time, since one of the
symptoms of DCS is joint pain causing sufferers
to bend forward, the condition came to be more
commonly referred to as “the bends.”
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