Lethbridge Without an Air Pump: Diving Barrels and Unchartered Waters in Early Modern England

• In Event: Environments of Science

English Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that diving barrels, or engines, played in the practice of salvaging cargo from shipwrecks in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Primary focus will be paid to two divers, John Lethbridge and Jacob Rowe, whose eighteenth-century diving apparatuses provided a practical means for navigating otherwise dangerous underwater expeditions.
At the heart of this story lies an innovation that made the harsh environment of underwater salvage diving possible. A primarily English invention, the diving barrel, unlike that of Edmund Halley’s proposed diving bell, provided the diver’s body with a stable atmospheric pressure wherein they could successfully work at depths of nearly ten fathoms. Subsequently, both Lethbridge and Rowes’ diving engines operated “without communication of air from above”. This meant that the divers had to be repeatedly hoisted out of the water before then being “refreshed with a pair of bellows” a new surplus of oxygen.
As an innovation, the importance of these diving barrels provides historians with a new perspective on early interventions in which inhospitable environments, like the ocean, were made more tenable by humans. In treating theses diving engines as a technology of intervention, between our bodies and the underwater world, the paper asserts that Lethbridge and Rowe helped to expand our scientific understanding a new environment. Following their efforts, the ocean became a new frontier worthy of scientific and economic enquiry.

Author

• Guy Sechrist, Donnelly College