Today, imagination glints from the ocean floor. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them
Did you see the 1976 movie,
The Deep? Jacqueline Bisset and Nick
Nolte starred in that story about a shipwreck. If
you saw it, you didn't forget the opening scene.
Jacqueline Bisset, in scuba gear, probed through a
crack in the hull with a stick, trying to grasp a
glittery object. Then, suddenly, an unseen moray
eel seized the stick from within and very nearly
took her arm along with it. It was a very
frightening scene. It was claustrophobic. An
unknown, unexpected assailant lashed out from the
mysterious hulk and caught us all on our blind
side.
When I saw the movie, I thought I'd seen a
well-made underwater set. But not so. That
fictional eel attacked Jacqueline Bisset from
inside the hull of a very real ship, the RMS
Rhone.
The Rhone was built in London in 1865.
It was a steam packet -- the new transatlantic
carrier. This one was 300 feet long and a little
under 3000 tons -- one of the propeller-driven
steamships that had started carrying mail,
passengers, and freight across the Atlantic. They
still carried some sail, but they were sleek, trim,
and fast. They really ranked among the many
iron-built masterpieces of the Victorian
imagination.
The Rhone anchored off the Virgin
Islands in October 1867 -- on its way to South
America. Suddenly, the very bottom seemed to fall
out of its barometer. The great Queen Mother of all
storms was closing in on it. The Rhone
fled for open waters to ride out the gale. But the
storm came on too quickly. It was the worst storm
ever recorded in that area. The Rhone
was soon steaming into a terrible wind under full
power in a desperate attempt to keep from being
blown onto Black Rock Point.
Then cold water flooded in on her overheated
boilers. One of them exploded and ripped the ship
open. Down it went. 173 people were killed by the
explosion, by drowning, and by sharks. Only
twenty-four lived to tell about it.
When the actors went down into the old hulk, the
long smooth lines still loomed up from the murky
waters. The modern screw propeller still lies
there, fractured where it struck bottom. We gaze
down and realize that we're looking at the embryo
of the modern steamship.
Huge moray eels do inhabit the hulk, but they're
disinclined to bother human beings. Yet we should
give the movie-maker's imagination some rope -- as
it reaches out to this eerie shadow of the
19th-century imagination. Although, in the end, the
movie-making imagination is hardly a match for this
remarkable old hulk.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
