Free Jacques Cousteau by Brad Matsen Page A

to withstand the pressure down to 60 feet. Captain Williamson worked on what he called his “hole in the sea” for a decade, but it never really caught on.
    In 1913, two years after Cousteau was born, Williamson’s sons, George and Ernie, fell under the spell of Thomas Edison’s much more promising invention, the motion picture camera. They had also come across a magazine story about underwater artist Zahr Pritchard, who had built a bunker in the steep bank of his pond with a window through which he could observe beneath the surface. The next time the Williamson brothers were at home in Norfolk, they persuaded their father to drag out the hole in the sea, loaded it on a barge, and took it out into Hampton Roads at the mouth of the Elizabeth River. They didn’t have a movie camera—almost no one did—but they crouched in their father’s observation chamber with a still camera and took pictures of seaweed, pilings, and fish. With Ernie inside, George swam down to the window and held up a copy of
Scientific American
for a photograph. They sent the picture and their account of using the observation tube to the magazine, which published them the following month.
    The Williamsons had no idea that they weren’t the first men to take photographs underwater. In 1893, Louis Boutan, a French zoologist, had lowered a view camera sealed with wax and mounted in a 400-pound frame into the Mediterranean Sea off Banyuls-sur-Mer to take a ten-minute exposure of himself standing in a diving suit. Boutan took hundreds more photographs, experimented with magnesium powder lighting, and wrote
La photographie sous marin
to document his work. A few years later, American Simon Lake took photographs from inside his pioneer submarine,
Argonaut
.
    For the Williamson brothers, though, a few snapshots were just thefirst step in their plan to make movies underwater. In 1913, armed with the photographs taken from their father’s hole-in-the-water, they raised enough money to launch the Submarine Film Corporation to build and test a similar device for filming beneath the sea. Investors were charmed by their enthusiasm, the enormous publicity surrounding Edison’s motion picture camera, and the mystery of the ocean. In a year the Williamsons had a new observation tube and chamber they named the Photosphere. They also bought a French-made Eclair camera, a 40-pound contraption of brass, iron, and steel with precision gears, a variable shutter, and a hand crank to roll film past the lens at sixteen to twenty-four frames per second. On February 21, 1914, Ernie and George loaded their camera, film, and the Photosphere aboard a steamer bound from Norfolk to the Bahamas.
    Two months later, the Williamson brothers were on their way back to New York with 20,000 feet of exposed movie film. They had shot coral reefs, fish, staged scenes in which one of them in a diving suit walked around on the bottom discovering “treasure,” and the bubbly plunges of local boys leaping from a dock. Their tour de force was a showdown between a diver and a shark, set up by weighing down the carcass of a horse to attract the sharks. The movie they eventually released from their first expedition was
Terrors of the Deep
, which critics hailed as “something never viewed before by mankind.” The Williamson brothers were catapulted even further into moviemaking history when they joined Laemmle’s Universal Pictures to produce
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
. On October 9, 1916, the first scripted, eight-reel, underwater epic opened in Chicago to rave reviews. The Williamson brothers, Universal, and their investors made a small fortune.
    “If the rest of the picture were discarded,” wrote one critic, “the undersea scenes alone would be worth three times the price of admission.”
    Cousteau had been in awe of the Williamsons’ work since seeing their film in Paris. Learning that they had made a fortune shooting movies underwater added to his inspiration.
    In the spring of