Verne was a visitor, notably, to the spectacular public aquariums featured at the Paris World’s Fair of 1867. Indeed, Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea on the steamship that had just accomplished the successful laying of this cable, “with a copy of Maury’s Physical Geography of the Sea beside him.” Undersea access was also promoted on land by the exhibition format of the modern public aquarium, an exhibition form that premiered to the public in London in 1853. The ability to plumb the depths took off in the middle decades of the nineteenth century with a host of inventions, from the closed-helmet diving suit to the ability to chart the contours of the ocean floor, given an impetus by the process of laying the first transatlantic oceanic cable in the 1850s–1860s. This novel was the first fiction to portray the undersea realm as a holistic planetary environment, and across its narrative, Verne proved a remarkably prescient inventor of modern undersea icons, inspired by the innovations of his age. Verne developed the figure of the helmeted beholder in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870). The creator of this figure is Jules Verne, the author who pioneered iconic imaginative figures of environmental frontiers. That figure is the image of what I call the helmeted beholder: able to breathe in irrespirable atmosphere thanks to a helmet that partially or completely masks his or her countenance while witnessing a cosmic spectacle at a scale beyond human agency that he or she is powerless to affect. In this essay I will describe a figure of spectatorship emerging in portrayals of undersea exploration that went on to exert a powerful hold over cinema’s science fiction portrayals of outer space. Įven as the ocean depths and space have been a challenge and opportunity for engineering, science, and empire, they have also stimulated the imagination. In the post–World War II era, such inventions were studied and modified by breathing supports essayed for test pilots in the stratosphere and then for astronauts in outer space. Across the next century and a quarter, the company designed equipment for “firemen, miners, aviators and chemical workers,” as well as British expeditions in the Himalayas. Siebe Gorman vastly improved the technology of the closed-helmet diving suit in the 1830s, responding to needs at the time for both marine salvage operations and waterside engineering important for constructions of the Industrial Revolution. I take this term from Breathing in Irrespirable Atmospheres: And, in Some Cases, Also under Water (1947), written by Sir Robert Davis, an important inventor and at one point chief executive of the Siebe Gorman Company based in Britain. The ability of humans to navigate such environments depends in both cases on technologies that overcome their irrespirable atmospheres. From the beginnings of the modern ambition to expand beyond the atmosphere of air, outer space and the ocean depths have been two great domains of investigation.
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