Charles William Beebe

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Charles William Beebe ['bi: bi] (born July 29, 1877 in New York City , † June 4, 1962 in Arima , Trinidad ) was an American ornithologist , ichthyologist , deep-sea researcher and ecologist . For his work he was awarded the John Burroughs Medal and the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal , among others .

For years he worked for the New York Zoological Park , now known as the Bronx Zoo ; most recently as curator of the bird department.

Life

Beebe was born in 1877 as the son of a paper merchant. Through his interest in biology and numerous visits to the Natural History Museum of New York, he won the friendship of the director there, Henry Fairfield Osborn . After a scientific education at Columbia University (without an academic degree) he worked from 1899 on the ornithological department of the New York Zoological Park . There he soon made a name for himself as a talented bird keeper. In 1902 he married the Virginia farmer's daughter Mary Blair Rice . This accompanied him on his ornithological research trips. In 1913 she divorced Beebe again, only to marry the architect Robert L. Niles a day later . In public, however, William was branded as the cause of the marital crisis.

In the same year Beebe took over the management of the newly founded department for tropical research. For this he founded the first tropical research station in British Guiana in 1916 . Another followed later in Bermuda . During his first expedition to the Galápagos Islands in 1923, he climbed an active volcano and suffered poisoning from the escaping gases. Around this time he also started helmet diving in order to be able to explore the animal world of the oceans in their natural habitat.

In 1927 he married the younger to 25 yo writer Elswyth Thane Ricker from Vermont . Then he and Otis Barton developed the bathysphere , a diving sphere with which they reached the record depth of 923 m on August 15, 1934. The collaboration between Beebe and Barton did not last; the two soon went their own way again. The depth record was beaten in 1948 (without Beebe's participation) by Barton in his newly constructed diving sphere Benthoscope with 1,370 m. (In 1960 Jacques Piccard reached the greatest possible sea depth, almost 11,000 m, also in a steel ball, but with its own buoyancy body, the submersible " Trieste ".)

In 1944 Beebe first met Rachel Carson , who wrote the afterword for one of his books. He encouraged them to do their own research and diving trips and to publish their results. Since the research station in Bermuda had been converted into an air force base during World War II , Beebe set up a new base in Trinidad using his book fees . This station, called Simla , was affiliated with the Asa Wright Nature Center in 1974 and is still a popular meeting place for ornithologists and bird lovers.

In 1952, Beebe retired at the age of 75. Of course he continued to work on “his” research station Simla, supported by his longtime zoological assistant Jocelyn Crane (1909–1998), died here on June 4, 1962 and is also buried in Trinidad.

Act

Beebe went on numerous expeditions to observe the wildlife. Among other things, he has made the following trips:

For his diving trips, he first had an old gasoline can with a glass window. The air supply to this diving helmet was via a hose connection with a hand pump that was on land (or in the boat). With this construction he reached 15 m water depth, where he observed and documented numerous animals.

Soon the desire grew in him to go deeper. He did not want to force himself into diving tanks, which were already known at the time , with which depths of 100 m and more could be easily reached, but in which the diver was quite immobile. So he started looking for a new diving apparatus. Together with his partner, the technician Otis Barton , he began the construction of the first bathysphere in 1929 , as he named his diving sphere similar to a deep-sea fish. In June 1930, Beebe and Barton made the first diving attempts off the coast of Bermuda; initially up to 76 m and then deeper and deeper until they reached 435 m. The diving ball was attached to the cable winch on the carrier ship Ready with a steel cable ; In addition, a power cable (for lighting) and a telephone line (for communication) were added. The oxygen supply took place with bottles directly in the diving ball, the carbonic acid was absorbed by means of caustic potash .

After this first successful attempt, further improvements were made to the diving ball. In a further attempt (the 32nd dive) on August 15, 1934 , the record of 923 m was reached. During these dives, numerous sketches and photos were created of previously unobserved deep-sea animals. Quite a few of them, e.g. B. Bathysphaera intacta , have never been seen or even caught since then and are therefore considered to be the product of Beebescher's imagination. He also examined the propagation of light at different depths of the sea.

Beebe published numerous books about all of his expeditions and ventures. Among other things, he used the fees he received to finance the tropical research stations.

Some contemporaries accused Beebe of excessive populism, with which the results of his research could not keep up. In particular, the scientific value of his diving trips to great depths were often questioned (by desk researchers and envious people). Others rightly called him “one of the first ecologists in North America”.

After a dive, William Beebe said: “ These fish not only have half a dozen scales, but they shimmered like in shimmering armor, shrimps and jellyfish drifted past us like flakes of unimagined blizzards. "

Bibliography (excerpt)

  • William Beebe and Mary Blair Rice: Two Bird Lovers in Mexico , 1905
  • William Beebe and Mary Blair Rice: Our Search For a Wilderness , 1908 (Venezuela and Trinidad)
  • William Beebe and Mary Blair Rice: A Monograph of the Pheasants , created as a four-volume work 1912–1913, but only the first volume was published in 1918.
  • William Beebe: Jungle Days , New York: Putnam 1925
  • William Beebe: The Arcturus adventure: an account of the New York Zoological Society's first oceanographic expedition . Putnam, New York 1926. German edition: The Arcturus adventure. The first deep-sea expedition of the New York Zoological Society , FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1928
  • William Beebe: Galapagos: World's End , 1926. German edition: Galapagos the end of the world , FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1928
  • William Bebe: Exploring with Beebe , 1932. German edition: On a journey of discovery with Beebe, FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1936
  • William Beebe: Half Mile down , 1934. German edition: 923 meters below sea level , FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1936
  • William Beebe: Zaca Venture, 1938, German edition: The Zaca adventure - explorers' trip into the fishing grounds of the Pacific , FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1939
  • William Beebe: High Jungle , 1949. German edition: Rancho Grande - Two years in the cloud forest of the Andes , Ullstein & Co., Vienna 1951
  • William Beebe: Adventuring with Beebe 1955 (the most interesting stories from his complete works).

literature

  • Robert Henry Welker: Natural Man: the Life of William Beebe . Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1975, ISBN 0-253-33975-8 .

Web links

Commons : Charles William Beebe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IN MEMORIAM: LEE SAUNDERS CRANDALL , accessed on May 30, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Beebe, Charles William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American deep sea explorer
DATE OF BIRTH July 29, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH 4th June 1962
Place of death Arima , Trinidad