A Man and the Sea

[music] >> In every age of man's history, the undersea world has challenged the ablest and bravest of dreamers and adventurers. Men driven by a strange compulsion to conquer [music] the frontiers of human experience. In this long history, few have captured man's imagination like the deep sea diver. Hardy explorers of an alien environment, they have led the way toward a revolution in underwater technology. Today, the average man ventures with modern scuba equipment into depths which 30 years ago were the private domain of these ironclad aquanauts. In this underwater revolution, no individual has played a more prominent part than Colonel John D. Craig, a pioneer and innovator whose colorful career has spanned close to half a century of progress toward man's conquest of the seas. No account of the history of diving can fail to mention the heroic contributions of John Craig in making the undersea world not only a safer place, but one full of wonder and fascination. A world introduced to many through his underwater films and his 1938 biography, Danger Is My Business. >> [music] >> Nowadays, John Craig is respected by two generations of divers, as well as a host of armchair adventurers. Living in California, where he spent much of his boyhood, Colonel Craig remains as active today as 40 years ago, when as a young man he set out upon a lifetime of adventure. John, you're quite a houseman. I know you're great underwater, but I didn't know you were so good at bringing boats in. You know, this Marina del Rey is fantastic. It certainly changed the California coast. Oh, it has. Bill, when I was a kid, this is all beach along here. Now everything has changed. John Craig, you've introduced thousands of people, including myself, to the underwater world and diving. Where did it all start? A long time ago, Bill. About 1926, I was in India shooting pictures of tigers, and I got a crew together, good technicians, but they're all adventures at heart. And MGM finally hired us to make a picture on Sargasso farming. It was a documentary, and the only place we could find Sargasso farms was down off of Baja California, there a little island, Cedros Island, off there in the Pacific. Japanese divers on Cedros Island actually cultivating the ocean floor [music] to harvest this purple seaweed. In Japan, they processed it to make [music] agar for medical cultures. We found out how they did it. They used this primitive hard hat gear to dive in water about 90 ft deep, with the diver connected by an airline to a compressor on the surface. >> [music] >> We were filming on the surface one day when they persuaded me to try on the gear. I was naturally curious, so I let them lower me over the side. >> [music] >> Without a doubt, what happened then changed the whole course of my life. Suddenly, I was all alone in a shimmering blue-green world beneath the sea, an experience [music] which I never will forget. >> [music] >> Bill, this is the kind of helmet we used down there at Cedros Island on that Sargasso farming picture. Uh John, it's unbelievably heavy, isn't it? Come on. Yeah, it weighs about 60, 70 lb, but that's all we had in those days, and it had these bolts on it. We put the telephone in it because we had to have communication. We put a check valve in it so we wouldn't kill ourselves in case we lost our air. We have lighter gear now, but you know, you don't really experience the challenging sea unless you go down there one of these for the first time, and it is an experience. You ought to try it. John, you're not going to get me to go down in that thing. John, I John, I said I wouldn't do it, but you sure it's safe? Yes, it's safe, Bill. This is your air. You just open it if you need a little more. This your line. Give a see jerks if you want to come up, and I'll be right down there shortly, Okay. and so we'll get you set in here. Here you are. Wait a minute, John. I bought that red bandana. I wear that to keep my bald head from getting sunburn. You don't need it. >> Okay. Get over here, I'm John Craig. On the first dive, you're likely to feel a little clumsy, encased in iron and unable to bend over or even to scratch if you need to. Under the circumstances, it's natural to be a little worried. But man fears what he does not understand. Gradually, the black wall of the unknown falls away, and you begin to discover freedom lacking on land. But for the beginner, it's best to take it in easy stages. Don't stay too long. A quick look around, then up to the surface. John, it was great, fantastic, but I want to leave the diving to you. When you try it a few times, Bill, you'll feel like I did, like being on the threshold of a new world. I felt like I wanted to bring it back and share it with others. Well, John Craig, after that first exciting dive of yours, you said you wanted to bring that same excitement back to others. Is that when you first thought about underwater photography? That's right, Bill, but I felt that we should photograph it in motion pictures because it was a moving world. It was a beautiful silvery blue world, and to do that, we had to make our own cameras because there were no underwater motion picture cameras in those days. It's a long time ago. So, I built my own, and the one we built, the first one we built was this camera. Uh it's an aluminum cast case, specially treated, a big nice face plate in it, but we had it on a tripod so that we could pan it and tilt it because it had to be heavy. We had to use a very heavy tripod to save us. Well, of course, we're working in hard hat gear all the time. We had gadgets here we could wind up with a spring. We had a electric motor as well as a spring motor. We could trip it from a distance. I could set the stops and the focus. We could do everything with this camera underwater that we could do with a standard camera in a studio, except load it. We had to bring it back to the surface to load it. And that's how I got some of my first underwater exciting films was with a camera like this. This was in the early '30s, and the big studios were hungry for real adventure films. So, we gave it to them. Lots of thrills, lots of action. Of course, it was all black and white, and the old films lacked the quality of today. But in those days, it was considered great entertainment. We've come a long way, Bill, since the days we used this old type of gear. Today, we have much lighter gear, like the gear Clint Den is working on here. Those are 16 mm cameras. They're spring wound. You can carry them in your hand and swim with them. You get a fish eye view of everything underwater, and it's that kind of gear, with the new film, the bright color film, that we make most of our pictures today. Underwater films are getting better every year, and we're still having a lot of fun making them. >> [music] >> Hey, John, would you give me a hand with this? Yeah, okay, Clint. I've got it. Thank you. You know, John, you've had a great deal to do with the development of the brand new camera equipment. You also had a lot to do with the sophisticated underwater gear, didn't you? Yes, I did, Bill. Uh we've come a long way since that old hard hat gear to the new scuba gear. But this old hard hat gear was very efficient, and uh it provided us with a lot of excitement down there. You know, it was dangerous gear, though, because it was considered one of the world's most hazardous calling, deep sea diving in a hard hat. And even though I was well trained as I became in it, I had my share of problems. Air compressors were run by hand, and though there were an awful lot of things which could go wrong, at such times I always seemed to have an angel on my shoulder. The airline is the diver's vital link to life, but there's plenty of hazards underwater, like this curious manta ray. He could easily tangle or break that line. >> [music] >> Whenever you dive, your life depends on other people. One day, I was tightening a broken rudder on a friend's boat. Unbeknownst to us, the skipper started the engine. I was lucky it wasn't running in reverse. Well, that's the human factor. >> But there are times you must depend upon machinery which can fail you, too. The tender's job is to keep the compressor running and to haul you up in an emergency. Normally, these gas-powered compressors are as reliable as your car's engine. [music] But at the most unexpected moment, one can quit on you. The air is off and in a place like this, the tender couldn't possibly pull me up. It's then you use ingenuity. I just climbed the piling. I had only 8 minutes of air left in that suit. Fortunately, enough to reach the surface in time. One of the most serious problems for a diver is a fouled-up air hose. When this happens, you try anything to free yourself. 8 minutes of air is all you have. In this case, the hose was laced with a steel cable. I couldn't cut it. I was in real trouble. The only one thing left to do was cut my way out of that suit. This isn't a recommended procedure. Only a half-dozen men have tried this and several didn't quite make it. It was experiences [music] like these, Bill, that made me feel that there must be an easier way to do it. If we were going to work underwater and shoot pictures, we had to have mobility. And even at Cedars Island, when I watched the fish down there, they had neutral buoyancy. They could move anywhere they wanted at any depth they wanted. And this is what we wanted. Well, something happened about that time. We got the contract to photograph the Lusitania. And this was a entirely new game because the Lusitania lay so deep, we had to have an artificial atmosphere. And using an artificial atmosphere, we had to carry it on our backs. So, that meant a new style diving gear completely. And this was the spark that started us on the scuba gear, the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. I had teamed up with a young engineer named Max Gene Nohl. And we discovered that after these tests at Marquette Medical Center, the mixture of helium and oxygen would give us the depth we needed, eliminating the fatal effects of nitrogen narcosis. To use it, we built a radically new diving outfit and we tested it out successfully in 1937 [music] on Gene's record dive to 420 ft in Lake Michigan. For the first time, the diver was freed of the cumbersome airline to the surface. From there, we took the small step to the first mixed gas scuba gear. This was in 1938 and we didn't have swim fins yet. Later, we had the face mask, a gimmick borrowed from Japan. Since then, there have been many refinements of the scuba idea until today we have Cousteau's Aqua-Lung, which uses compressed air and gives the diver the mobility and freedom we were after 35 years ago. John, is there a step beyond scuba diving as we know it for pleasure? Yes, the industry naturally came to use it and one of the developments is this rather sophisticated piece of gear. This is known as a Mark VI mixed gas unit. And you'll see this quite often in the Navy. The Navy boys use it. These tanks are 5,000 lb pressure helium-oxygen mixture and they have a sodalime canister here which is a purification a scrubber that takes the carbon dioxide out of the air the divers use. Now, they can go very deep with this gear and they use it for commercial diving and they also use it in the Navy. They used it on the Sealab program. John, you said deep. Roughly what what depths? >> Well, the divers have been working down to 600 ft with this type of gear. Now, we have a new one though that is sort of a he- it's the helium-oxygen rig, but it's for sport diving and you can make a bounce dive very very deep with this type of equipment. And this is a dandy little piece of gear. I love this kind of gear because it's fun to use, it's lightweight and it has an oxygen scrubber in here. It's helium-oxygen mixed in the little bottle and you open this gadget here and blow the gas in here and then you just put it in your mouth and breathe. When you breathe, you sound like Donald Duck. >> [laughter] >> Because that's the helium. >> Well, I don't know. My voice is old. That's really old. How what makes it do that, John? Well, helium causes your voice to your vocal cords to vibrate at a different rate of speed. And with helium, you can go so much deeper without the fear of nitrogen narcosis and it also has opened up a brand new world of deep diving. Danger is my business by John D. Craig. I tell you, I must have read this book at least five times. Because it introduced to me to a man whom I believe is one of the great adventurers of all time. John, in the book and in what we've just talked about, you got us up to the Lusitania. What happened after that in your life? Bill, I was very busy as usual because the war came along about that time and that kept me busy. I was supposed to be in the Navy, but somehow they fouled up the papers and I ended up in the Air Force and I had charge of the combat camera units in the Army Air Forces and flew combat missions all over the world. And the war ended and I was assigned to the Bikini atom bomb test. I flew and photographed both the Able and the Baker mission. That's the air burst and the underwater burst. [music] >> [music] >> Since that experience, of course, a little thing came along in about 1948 49 called television. And that all that kind of shook everybody up in show business. Now, you had a great part in True Life television. As a matter of fact, you started out with doing single appearances and all of a sudden you wound up with what I believe is one of the most exciting series ever presented on American television called Kingdom of the Sea. What happened since then? Bill, we've had a lot of fun with television. After Kingdom of the Sea, why we made several other series, Danger is My Business. I was host on Expedition. I just finished making about 260 1-hour color shows on Of Lands and Seas and during the course of that work, why we had lots of adventures. We explored some sunken ships. We did some shark research with man-eating sharks with the Navy. We played around a little bit with this Pegasus, this one-man torpedo that you ride with scuba gear. I had a opportunity to ride a 46-ft whale shark. Bill, I even was kissed by a mermaid and all for television. In the West Indies near Bimini, we discovered an old wrecked Liberty ship sunk in World War I. This was all jagged concrete and iron and several scuba divers had died in there. To make matters worse, it was full of painful sea urchins. So, for safety, I explored it by snorkeling. Less danger of getting hurt that way. >> [music] >> If you do a lot of diving, you're bound to encounter sharks. They come around mostly out of curiosity, usually meaning no harm. But these were tiger sharks and I was photographing them for the Navy. So, I'd get better close-ups, the boys threw baits right out in front of me. I never knew whether the sharks would take me or the bait. It was more fun riding the Pegasus, the one-man torpedo. You can really move around with these things. Certainly a far cry from the old days [music] of diving. >> [bell and music] >> But one of the greatest thrills [music] of my diving was the day we photographed a giant whale shark. He was about 46 ft long, a real monster of the deep. Clint said, "You grab his tail, John, and I'll take your picture." But when I did, [music] the creature just stopped still in the water. So, I was able to climb right onto its head. A short but memorable ride. >> [music] [music] >> Not all my work has been that dangerous, though. One day I was filming in the tank at Marineland of the Pacific and was surprised by a beautiful mermaid, my good friend Zale Parry. >> [music] [music] >> It was all a promotional idea, but typical of the kind of fun we had with television. John, you've had a varied career, but with the popularity of the Aqua-Lung and more and more people, amateurs as well as professionals getting involved under the sea, you became interested in instruction and in helping with this kind of thing, didn't you? That's right, Bill. >> [clears throat] >> I always felt that somehow I should share these experiences I had in the sea and I had that opportunity when I was invited to become a diving instructor for the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation people and I went through the diving training instruction program and now I have a lot of fun training scuba divers. >> [music] >> One of the groups I participated in training was a Los Angeles County Sheriff Search and Rescue Unit. These men have the heroic task of going into the mountains or out to sea to try to save lives. They have to be top-notch [music] scuba divers and they deserve a lot of credit for the great public service they [music] perform. Another challenge has been my work with the Los Angeles Fire Department. Fires on piers are very serious and hard to get at. So, underdock firefighters wearing scuba gear can swim beneath the burning piers and actually fight the fire from underwater. Certainly, this is one of the most exciting applications of scuba diving and I've been very proud to help in these training programs. Well, John D. Craig, you've come a long way since those early days as a young adventurer and like most successful men, I'm sure you've accumulated a lot of responsibilities. When do you find time to relax now? Well, Bill, I consider all of my work enjoyable and I must say that most of it has been full of adventure and fun and I'm delighted today to see diving growing to the point where it is a safe and enjoyable sport. You might say that I still have a romance with the sea. To me, this whole experience with John Craig has been very personal and very important. We've known each other for a long time. We've been competitors and friends. John and I have a lot in common. We love adventure, the outdoors, the challenge of the sea and movie making. So, I'm particularly proud to be friends with a man like him. He's given a lot to other people. He and his equipment are now active in things we saw like law enforcement, firefighting and certification of scuba divers. His underwater films are some of the finest ever made. He's already part of history. It's been a pleasure for me to bring you this story of a man and the sea.