The Insane Engineering of Atmospheric Diving Suits

In the 1981 James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, Roger Moore’s Bond and Bond girl Melina Havelock - played by Carole Bouquet - dive to the bottom of the Ionian Sea to recover a top-secret code machine from the wreck of a sunken British spy ship. There, they are suddenly attacked by one of the villain’s goons wearing what looks like a nightmarish combination of a medieval suit of armour and a giant insect exoskeleton, with a bulbous helmet, multiple round portholes, segmented limbs, and menacing mechanical claws. A similar suit also shows up in the 1989 underwater monster movie Deepstar Six. But while this contraption may look like it came from the fevered imagination of a Hollywood production designer, it is, in fact, a real piece of deep diving equipment known as an Atmospheric Diving Suit or ADS. Effectively wearable, articulated personal submarines, ADSs alleviate many of the limitations of traditional diving techniques, allowing humans to work at previously unheard-of depths. But achieving this capability has come at the cost of daunting engineering challenges, with the surprisingly long history of atmospheric diving suits being one of ingenuity, dogged trial-and-error, and incremental improvements in technology. This is the fascinating story of mankind’s quest to conquer the deep in a suit of armour. Author: Gilles Messier Host: Simon Whistler Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices