Had recreational diving been an option when Charles Darwin set out aboard ‘HMS Beagle’ on his ground-breaking scientific voyage of discovery, then there’s a very real possibility that he may have scrapped the whole notion of natural selection and the… Read More ›
Counter-Strike
“Here there be Monsters.”
The makers of ancient navigational charts had it easy: whenever they ran out of information on the boundaries of the known world they just scrawled quick and convenient warnings like, “Here there be Monsters”, around the edges of their maps… Read More ›
The problem with penguins
It might be the little things in life that matter, but it’s the big things that get our attention. Take whales, for example. Weighing in at a whopping 60,000-plus kilograms, (that’s about 132,000 pounds for the metrically challenged) the mighty… Read More ›
Manual Dexterity
Hanging on my office wall is a framed copy of The Times newspaper dated Thursday, November 7th 1805, carrying the first reports of the Battle of Trafalgar fought off the Spanish coast on the 21st October of that same year;… Read More ›
What a Guy
First published in 1934 and widely regarded as the first book to popularise recreational snorkelling and scuba diving, Guy Gilpatric’s, “The Compleat Goggler”, concludes with, “Man, we reflected, has polluted the rivers, destroyed the forests, pitted the fields with high… Read More ›
“Ve haf vays of making you tock.”
In 1960 a diving watch, engineered from a single block of steel and featuring a large, hemi-spherical, crystal lens, was attached to the external hull of the bathyscaphe ‘Trieste’. Crewed by Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh, of the U.S…. Read More ›