Back-Breaking Science

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2:24This is part two of a two-part series. If you have not listened to part one, please start there.

2:31Inside the Theta submarine, Lieutenant Frederick Woods opened the door of Torpedo Tube 5 and watched in horror as seawater began gushing in at three and a half tons per second. Woods and a few other sailors scrambled to contain the flood. They hurried toward the next room over to shut the door and seal the Torpedo Room off. Unfortunately, with her nose now taking on water, the Thetis began tilting. This left the sailors running uphill to the next room. Worse, the door in between the rooms was iron.

3:01And with the ship tilting, it proved impossible to pull upward against gravity and close it. They finally abandoned the door and retreated further. The next room was full of catering equipment from the party to celebrate the Thetis' maiden voyage. Boxes and stools began sliding around, slamming into the men. It was chaos. They did manage to close the next door. But with two rooms now flooded, the Thetis started sinking. A minute later, it plowed into the seafloor 130 feet down.

3:32Over in the control room, submarine captain Guy Bolas released a buoy to mark their position for rescue ships. It was 3 p.m. None of the 103 men aboard had died yet. But that would soon change. And what those men endured would forever change our understanding of how we breathe and the surprising danger that air poses in extreme environments. This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Keen, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast

4:08where footnotes become the real story.

4:19The men trapped inside the Thetis faced some grim math. Normally, the sub would have 53 crewmen aboard and enough air for 48 hours. But with 103 passengers, that time was effectively cut in half. Plus, they had lost air from two of the sub-six rooms, cutting the supply even further. There was one potential escape route through a combination air-locked-water-locked chamber in the sub-stern. Before entering the chamber, an escapee would don a rudimentary breathing device.

4:51It consisted of a face mask connected to a rubber bag with 30 minutes' worth of oxygen. Wearing these devices, two men would step inside the escape chamber. Sailors outside would seal the door behind them and throw a switch to flood the chamber with seawater. This took 15 minutes. Once it filled, the men inside would open a hatch and escape. Afterward, that external hatch swung shut. The sailors in the sub would use compressed air to blow the water out, then open the chamber door for the next two escapees.

5:23It seemed straightforward on paper. The reality was messier. 43 people on board that day were civilians who had never used the breathing devices before. Even worse, those who escaped the sub still needed rescuing. They had dived off Liverpool in England, where the water was frigid, even in summer. No one would realize the sub was missing for hours, either. Then it would take more hours to find them. By that point, it could be dark, making it impossible to find individuals in the water.

5:53They could die of exposure overnight. So Captain Bolas decided to wait until morning to use the escape chamber, even though that meant sitting around for hours inside, wasting air. In the meantime, Bolas decided to lighten the back of the sub by using air to blow out tanks of fresh water and fuel. This would raise the stern and shorten the distance the escapees had to swim to the surface. Unfortunately, those tanks were not designed to be blown out. So engineers on board dismantled several air pipes and rerouted them.

6:26They even had to bend the pipes by hand sometimes. This work kept morale up. And the stern did rise substantially. But that rise also left the sub at a steeper angle, making it hard to move around. And even after rising, the escape hatch was still 20 feet underwater. Equally bad, rerouting and bending all those pipes had left the men huffing and puffing, sucking down more oxygen. By dawn, most people on board were panting slightly, struggling to breathe.

6:56They also had headaches, and their thinking was growing foggy. At 8 a.m., Captain Bolas ordered the first two men out of the escape hatch. One was Lieutenant Woods, who had opened the torpedo door that started the fiasco. The other was Officer Harry Orum. Given the steep angle and the dwindling air, it took Woods and Orum 45 minutes to crawl up to the escape chamber. Then they needed 15 more minutes to catch their breath, smear grease on their bodies against the cold, and don the breathing devices.

7:26In the escape chamber, Woods and Orum felt the freezing water creep up their legs, then their chests. They had no idea whether any rescue ships waited above. After 15 minutes, the chamber filled with water. Then they opened the hatch and rocketed toward the surface to find... several rescue ships. Rowboats yanked the men out of the water. And because it was 1939, they were immediately given cigarettes. Down below, the evacuation team hurried to send more men up.

7:57In fact, they took a shortcut. Even before the escape chamber was fully drained, they opened the door to speed things up. As a result, some water spilled out. Now, this would not have been a big deal. Except, given the slope inside, the water ran downhill, sloshed onto some electrical equipment, and started a fire. It got put out, but not before consuming more oxygen. And the resulting smoke made it even harder to breathe. In response, several men on board put on their breathing devices early.

8:29To save time, the captain ordered four men into the tiny escape chamber for the next round. The evacuation team sealed them in and hit the switches to fill the chamber with water. But after 20 minutes, the team realized something was wrong. The men inside still had not opened the hatch to escape. So they drained the water and opened the door. Four bodies spilled out. Three of the men were dead, one nearly so. The live one croaked out that they had had trouble opening the hatch with four men inside.

9:00But why hadn't the others survived to exit? After all, they had 30 minutes of air. Examination revealed that they had ripped their masks off underwater and drowned. No one knew why. But there wasn't time to ponder the mystery. The remaining men on board were panting by now, their heads pounding. Two more sailors were hustled into the chamber. They could not have felt confident as the icy water crept up their bodies. Would the hatch open? In their fear, they waited until the last second to don their breathing devices.

9:33Finally, with the chamber full, they tugged at the hatch, and it opened. They flew up to the surface and were smoking cigarettes in the rowboats within minutes. At this point, I wish I could relate some more happy news, some more escapes. But no. After that second pair, not a single remaining man got out. All 99 died. A few days later, divers went down to begin recovering bodies. They found a macabre scene inside. Men had torn off their clothing and nearly bitten through their tongues.

10:05Why? And why had the second group of men in the escape chamber torn their masks off underwater? The British Navy asked biologist J.B.S. Haldane to investigate. He was the natural choice. He and his father had run plenty of experiments on air and breathing in confined spaces. And just like his father taught him, Haldane knew the best way to solve these mysteries, however dangerous, would be to run experiments on himself. This is the new Weight Watchers.

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Carbon Dioxide Poisoning

12:36The natural assumption was that the men aboard the Thetis died from a lack of oxygen. And that deficits certainly played a role. But J.B.S. Haldane felt that there was more to the story. He remembered his father's work on mining deaths. There, the real culprit was carbon monoxide. Here, Haldane suspected that the key gas was carbon dioxide. Every time you exhale, you release carbon dioxide because it's toxic. Breathing it back in poisons the body. But in 1939, no one had systematically studied the effects of breathing CO2.

13:09So, Haldane volunteered to. One night in July 1939, at 10 p.m., Haldane sealed himself inside a spherical chamber six and a half feet in diameter. He planned to sleep overnight inside. He'd be breathing more and more exhaled carbon dioxide each hour. By morning, he was panting with a pounding headache and severe agitation. This mirrored the symptoms of the Thetis crew. Haldane finally staggered out at 12.15 p.m. A survivor from the Thetis was there. He commented that Haldane looked worse than his crewmates had when he'd left them behind.

13:43At this point, Haldane donned a navy breathing device to pump pure oxygen into his body. For a few minutes, he felt blissful. Then things went sideways. He suddenly felt overly warm, then hot. His agitation ramped up like a panic attack. And despite not having eaten for 16 hours, he felt an uncontrollable urge to vomit. He finally tore the mask off in heat. Haldane and his assistant subjected themselves to more such experiments over the next few days.

14:13The results were clear. Whenever CO2 levels crept above about 6%, huffing pure oxygen left them horribly agitated. Then they puked. Haldane concluded that, under certain circumstances, oxygen can be poisonous. In particular, during a bout of CO2 poisoning, switching to pure oxygen can induce a sort of shock. This explained a lot about the Thetis disaster. Based on the amount of air and the number of men, the carbon dioxide levels inside would have been around 6% when the first escapes began.

14:47In the second attempted escape, recall how three men spilled out of the flooded chamber, having torn their masks off. They almost certainly puked from oxygen shock with the masks on underwater, then ripped them off in desperation to clear them. Now, two people did escape after this. But remember, through dumb luck, they had not put on their masks in the escape chamber until the last second. Then they got the hatch open before they felt nauseous. A follow-up experiment by Haldane explained another mystery.

15:18He began dunking himself in tubs full of ice and breathing CO2-rich air. He found that cold made carbon dioxide poisoning worse. Consequently, the oxygen shock and extreme agitation were worse, too. Recall that Liverpool Bay was freezing, which also left the men inside the Thetis freezing. Recall, too, that after the smoky fire, some men donned their breathing devices early. Others donned them in desperation after the last escape, as the carbon dioxide levels approached 7% or higher.

15:48They didn't expect the precious oxygen to shock their systems. And apparently, they grew so violently agitated that they began tearing their clothing off and biting their tongues. It was a sad way to go out. Even after pinpointing the role of oxygen in the disaster, Haldane kept going and tested a potential rescue option for future missions. At one point, the Navy rescue ships outside the Thetis had considered snaking a hose down into the sub and blowing compressed air in. So Haldane put himself in a chamber full of CO2-rich air and tried something similar.

16:22It was a disaster. When a compressed gas expands into a bigger space, its temperature drops. And cold gases sink. So the cold, incoming air flooded the bottom of Haldane's chamber. This, in turn, forced the CO2-rich air already inside the chamber to flood upward, into Haldane's lungs. He started choking. He realized that subs needed fans to mix the incoming air. Otherwise, pumping it in through hoses was risky. Ultimately, though, Haldane proposed a simpler solution for subs.

16:55Just sprinkle soda lime around. This chemical absorbs CO2 from the air. That will not solve every problem on a stranded sub. The crew still needs oxygen. But it prevents the agitation and mental fog of carbon dioxide poisoning. It also sidesteps oxygen shock if they don breathing devices.

Haldane's Research

17:13At the Navy's request, Haldane continued his research on gases when World War II started. For both submarines and deep-sea divers. Some of this work had its comic side. Before this, anecdotal reports among divers indicated that breathing in compressed air at great depths would leave them feeling drunk. They called it nitrogen narcosis. According to the facetiously named Martini's Law, after about 60 feet down, every 10 yards you drop underwater is equal to gulping one martini.

17:44Haldane and his team decided to see if nitrogen drunkenness was real. He and another man entered an air chamber and opened the valve's full bore. In four minutes, they were at a pressure equal to being 300 feet underwater. At this point, they planned to run some tests, like timing with the stopwatch how long it took to multiply four-digit numbers, or whether they could transfer ball bearings from one spot to another with spoons. Now, according to Martini's Law, 300 feet of underwater pressure is equivalent to drinking

18:14seven to eight martinis in four minutes. Haldane and his assistant were absolutely blotto. Haldane even began hallucinating noises and tasting phantom ginger beer in his mouth. As for the tests, they did not go well. They fumbled the ball bearings and utterly bombed the math exam. Haldane started summing numbers in different columns, hopelessly muddled. In the end, though, that turned out to be moot, because his assistant kept forgetting to start the stopwatch. As they later concluded, with typical British understatement, no great trust should be placed

18:48in human intelligence under these circumstances. Still, this experiment was not all fun and games. As the chamber's pressure returned to normal, Haldane felt a searing pain in one tooth. It was an air pocket in a poorly filled cavity. Before long, it started whistling like a tea kettle and caused debilitating pain. But rather than quit experimenting, Haldane had it pulled from his jaw to avoid discomfort in future work. Ultimately, though, that future work proved even more dangerous.

19:19Haldane and his team tried breathing all manner of guesses in all sorts of conditions. And under this onslaught, Haldane's body began breaking down. He eventually blew out an eardrum. He laughed afterward that he could now blow tobacco smoke out of his ear as a party trick. But bluff humor could not erase all of the pain. Over the next year, he and his assistant suffered collapsed lungs, dislocated jaws, and even seizures. During one seizure, Haldane broke his spine, and the bones grew necrotic and started dying.

19:51Afterward, he could never again sit on a hard chair without his back aching. As the injuries piled up, Haldane's team started calling the pressure vessel the Chamber of Horror. Haldane even drew up a will. But neither he nor his assistant stopped experimenting. This war work was too important. They eventually ran 600 experiments on themselves, and the British Navy used this data to improve submarines and make underwater diving much safer. This in turn allowed them to dominate the seas around Europe.

20:22It also helped them make clandestine reconnaissance trips to France to scout landing sites. Without Haldane's team, D-Day could have been a disaster. But Haldane never got the credit he deserved. His work remained top secret during the war. And afterward, when the Cold War started, his communist politics got him blacklisted and booted off government committees. Haldane was outraged. He had sacrificed his body for the war no less than any soldier, yet he'd been discarded in disgrace.

20:53Meanwhile, the Thetis submarine endured its own unhappy ending. After recovering the bodies, the Navy towed it to shore, scrubbed it out, and slapped a new name on it. They called it the Thunderbolt. Then the Admiral sent her right back out to fight at sea. On its combat missions, the Thunderbolt sank at least one enemy sub. But while fighting near France in 1943, it was struck with depth charges. The entire crew drowned. It thereby became a rare ship in history to go down with all hands and kill nearly everyone

21:24on board on two separate occasions. Not even a genius like JBS Haldane could have found a workaround to luck as wretched as that. This is the Disappearing Spoon podcast. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon.

21:57It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com. You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening. If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort.

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22:58If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now it's the final days of our Everything's on Sale event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses. Our Memorial Day event ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep.