Life Under Ocean Waves.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 16 October 1914, Page 2

Life Under Ocean Waves.

I Mr. Ernest Williamson has conceived the idea of taking submarine moving pictures portraying the nmr- ! vellous beauty and colouring of the \ water's undergrowth. He thought |of a Way by which perhaps he [ might photograph the sunken cities ', of Yucatan. Mr. Williamson's , father is the inventor of the Wil- | liamson submarine tube, a contrivance which, it is said, enables j | men to go to a considerable depth beneath the surface of the sea with- | out suffering" any ill-effects. being j supplied with the same air that is J breathed by those above. At the ', end of the tube is a small chamber I with port holes for observation. Mr. J Williamson started his experiments j with about fifty feet of the tube in a barge, which was in tow of a j launch that had a small electric i plant aboard. A capable electrician had been let into the secret and had built a battery of tungsten lamps, yielding 1,000 candle power. These were connected with tiie launch's. dynamo, lowered to within ten feet of the bottom of the bay and suspended above one of' the port-holes in the tube's observation chamber. Mr. Williamson was in that chamber with a camera, and he snapped a dozen pictures of fish of all kinds as they swam by. He also photographed his brother, who plunged overboard to look into the port, and took pictures of newspapers and magazines which were lowered by weights to positions opposite the port. He has, he believes, discovered a method whereby the wonders and beauties of the deep may become better known .by layman and scientist. Anything that vitally a fleets _ the liquid that covers over half of the earth's surface .is fraught with possibilities of an interesting nature. SOME WONDERFUL PAINTINGS. After a time he put a camera into the chamber and began photographing the fish as they swam by the window and the waterfowl as they dived beneath the surface in search of food. Another type of investigator in this same field was Mr. Walter Howison Pritchard, an Englishman, who was i told by his physicians that he would not live six months unless he tried a more temperate climate. So he went off to the far South Sea and landed in Tahiti. There he sketched and painted, and watched the native divers and listened to (heir tales of the beatities of the ocean's bottom, with its coral mountains and waving trees of subaqueous vegetation. He became so impressed that he egan to practise diving himself, and ■fler having seen that the wonderful views beneath the waves far ex-'-•r-erled the best descriptions of the atives, he set about to sketch some of them. He. constructed a -air of water-tight goggles, obtained some waterproof paper and some .'iolid sticks of oil colours, and, •.vith a weight hitched to his belt, went down. He sketched for fortyfive seconds, came up, recovered his breath, and again descended. After a while he obtained a regular diving suit, and was able to stay down and sketch for almost an hour at a time without inconvenience—except to the fish.—" Popular Science Sittings."