Good evening. My talk this evening will cover three main themes. First, I’ll outline a timeline of how deep-sea exploration vessels developed. Secondly, I’ll describe the most recent of these, the Deep-Sea Challenger, and finally, I’ll look at some of the benefits of this deep-sea research.

OK. To start with, let’s look at how underwater exploration vehicles have developed over the years. The first manned deep sea exploration vessel was invented in the 1920s. It was called a bathysphere, better known as a Diving Bell. It was basically a round metal structure with windows with just enough room for two men to sit in, and it was lowered into the ocean on a cable. The first descent in the Diving Bell took place in 1930, and in 1934 it went down to a depth of nearly a thousand meters, which was impressive for the time. The problem with Diving Bell was that it had no power of its own and there wasn’t much room for the researchers to move around. So, the next development after the Diving Bell was the bathyscaphe, a small manned submarine, invented in the 1940s. The difference between the two was that the bathyscaphe had its own power source which allowed the scientists to investigate in the depths of the ocean more freely. A bathyscaphe called The Trieste reached a record depth of ten thousand meters in 1960. Since then, a new record has been set by James Cameron, who descended to a depth of eleven thousand metres for the first time in 2012.