Are Tablets the Way Out of Child Illiteracy?
SMITHSONIAN | Give them technology that they may have never seen before, and students' brains will work wonders.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN SMITHSONIAN.COM, SEPTEMBER 24, 2014
MOST OF THE BUSINESSES on Main Street in Roanoke, Alabama, are shuttered. Through the windows of Phillips Brothers Hardware and Steve’s Downtown Barber Shop you can see upturned chairs and faded Crimson Tide posters. The Martin Theatre remains a brick shell from the fire that gutted it in 1980, before a run of Friday the 13th. There’s a newer commercial strip on the highway that bypasses this town of 6,000, but also a sense that Roanoke has never fully revived since the Handley textile mill closed four decades ago.
Of the 1,500 students enrolled in Roanoke’s public schools, nearly 70 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Many of their parents did not progress beyond high school. David Crouse, the technology director of Roanoke City Schools, says some of his students enter kindergarten understanding about 5,000 fewer words than typical Americans their age. “It’s staggering,” he told me not long ago. “Father, mother—we have children that have no concept of that kind of vocabulary.”
One morning, Crouse took me to a kindergarten class at Knight Enloe, Roanoke’s elementary school, where students were receiving tablet computers for the first time. Their teacher, Melissa Hill, did not explain how the devices worked. She simply placed them on miniature wooden tables in front of groups ranging from two to four.
Immediately, the children began inspecting the tablets from all sides, as if they were gift-wrapped. They poked and swiped at the darkened screens. Before long, some found the power button and voiced delight as the machines sprang to life.
“How do you turn it on?” a four-year-old asked. A classmate leaned across the table to show her.
At one table, four children seemed to be hardly getting anywhere. Eight hands played tug-of-war with their shared tablet until one girl laid down the law: “All right, everybody takes a turn. Let’s take turns.”
Ms. Hill sat quietly at her desk. When students asked questions, she deflected them, saying, “You guys figure it out.”
Even as Roanoke struggles to leave the 20th century behind, the tablet project has brought the town to the leading edge of education. It’s an experiment, conceived by researchers at MIT and Tufts and Georgia State Universities, to determine the extent to which technology, left in the hands of children, can support reading development and literacy instruction in students with limited resources.
The Roanoke project was born out of a project launched in Africa two years ago by Tufts and Georgia State in conjunction with the One Laptop per Child organization, founded in 2007 by Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. One Laptop per Child, or OLPC, sought to empower students in resource-poor environments by distributing 2.4 million Internet-connected laptops in 42 developing countries. The results of the project, which ceased operations last year, are still being assessed and debated—for example, a study by the Inter-American Development Bank found no effect on test scores but some increase in cognitive skills. But in some places, it became clear that children couldn’t use some of the software because they couldn’t read, and they had no access to schools or teachers.
The research team wanted to investigate whether such children could learn to read on their own, aided only by digital devices. They delivered 40 tablets to children in two villages in Ethiopia, without instructions—a scene that must have conjured the 1980 South African comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which a Kalahari bushman has his first encounter with technology, in the form of a Coke bottle fallen from the sky.
It took four minutes for the first child to power on an Android tablet. "I got mine on! I'm the lion!" he declared. After about a month, most children had learned to recite the alphabet song in English and teach themselves to write letters. This got Robin Morris, a neuropsychology researcher at Georgia State, thinking about his own backyard. “I was saying, I know whole rural environments where 30 percent of the parents don’t have any kid books at home,” Morris recalled recently. “They want their kids to learn, but they don’t have the resources to help them. Ethiopia opened our eyes to the idea that this kind of technology, if it’s done smartly, can actually, maybe have a chance of helping some of these kids who otherwise don’t have opportunities.”
In Roanoke, meanwhile, David Crouse was seeking ways to bring technology into his school district, and his inquiries led him to Morris. In contrast to Ethiopia, Roanoke had schools, and its students were familiar with technology: What would their learning curve be with the tablets? “We want self-directed learners,” Crouse says—students who can work things out alone and together.
Last September, each of Knight Enloe’s seven kindergarten classrooms received five tablets. The students would use the devices in class for around 40 minutes each day, and every child would take a tablet home one weekday afternoon.Researchers at MIT, Tufts and Georgia State are trying to determine the extent to which technology, left in the hands of children, can support reading development and literacy instruction in students with limited resources. (Andy Isaacson)
In Ms. Hill’s class, I watched as the students, by trial and error, quickly found their way around the screen. Each tablet contained about 160 specially designed educational apps. On the home screen, they appeared simply as untitled colored squares. The students jabbed them at random, which led them down a warren of more menus of colored squares and eventually to various games, cartoons and videos. Two blond-haired boys giggled along to a piano song, snapping their fingers and swaying. A couple of students settled for a little while on an animated driving game; as they navigated a car down a road, they collected letters. The letters formed words, the words formed sentences and the sentences formed stories.
The room became a din of pings, dings and chimes as the students matched shapes, painted train cars and listened to ducks talk back to them. Perhaps more important, they did all of this socially, exploring the tablets in groups and sharing what they’d learned about the devices with others. Ms. Hill sat at her desk, organizing papers.
Credit: Andy Isaacson
Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, has become an evangelist for the concept of “minimally invasive education,” based on a series of experiments he made beginning in the late 1990s. In the first trial, he carved a hole into a wall dividing his research center in Delhi from an adjacent slum and put a computer in it for children to use; the children soon taught themselves basic computer skills and a smattering of English. The “hole in the wall” experiment, as it became known, and succeeding efforts convinced Mitra that children learn best with computers, broadband and a teacher who stands out of the way. “I found that if you left them alone, working in groups, they could learn almost anything once they’ve gotten used to the fact that you can research on the Internet,” he has said. “You ask the right kind of question, then you stand back and let the learning happen.”
This regimen is intended to help the students avoid what Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts, calls the “black hole of American education”—the fourth grade.
American students are taught how to read in kindergarten and first grade—they learn that letters refer to sounds, sounds compose words and words express concepts. From there, students decipher the nuanced laws of the English language: They discover, for instance, that ea can be pronounced as in bread or in hearth or in at least ten other ways. They learn that muscle contains a c, even though it looks weird, and that the words muscle and muscular and musculature are related. “By the end of third grade, the working assumption of every teacher until recently was that the kids are ready to move on,” Wolf told me. “But if the kids are not fluent—if they don’t have that repertoire of what the English language demands, or the vocabulary to correspond to what they read—they are going to miss the whole boat of the educational system.”
In Roanoke, the researchers see the tablet more as an educational aid. Wolf, one of the project’s designers, claims it marks the first time anyone has tried to deploy apps curated or created expressly to stimulate the young reading brain. If this approach works, thousands of disadvantaged children in the United States—and perhaps millions more around the globe—could escape illiteracy. “That would be revolutionary,” says Wolf, whose publications include the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “It’s not just about autonomous use of a tablet, but where we can, we want to emphasize how important it is to have children working on this together, playing with this together, discovering.”
Human beings are not wired to read, says Wolf. The young brain must forge a whole new circuit for the task, drawing on the neuronal networks it inherits genetically for language, hearing, cognition and vision. The apps in the tablets distributed to Roanoke’s kindergarteners were loosely designed with that process in mind: There are apps for recognizing letters and learning the sounds associated with letters, as well as apps that address many aspects of vocabulary and language development.
One of the most engaging apps is called TinkRbook. It opens with the image of an egg. The child, intuitively, taps the egg, hatching a baby duck. A playful story of the duckling’s first day unfolds—it swims in a lake, it eats bugs—as the child acts as its caregiver. Each scene engages different literacy concepts while allowing the child to tinker with the story. He or she can combine blue and red shampoo to bathe the duck and turn the duck purple, for instance; meanwhile, the child sees the colors, sees and hears the names of the colors, and then learns how to mix colors to create new ones.
“The whole premise of the TinkRbook was, in some sense, could you make learning to read more like the way children learn about physics by playing with blocks and sand?” says Cynthia Breazeal, who directs MIT’s personal robots group, which built the app. (Wolf chose the words and sentence structure for early readers and supplied the voice.) The tablet’s interactivity allows for the learning that occurs when children play socially—the “What if you tried that?” sort of dialogue. “Try something out and see what happens,” Breazeal says, “and through the contrast of trying different things and seeing different outcomes, you start to understand the key principle or key concept underneath it. That’s directly mapped to how children learn.”
One other purpose of the TinkRbook project was to create an app that would engage parents who aren’t highly literate. “It was really about, how do you foster richer parent-child dialogues?” Breazeal says. “We know that’s absolutely critical to develop early literacy: When a mother reads her child a static book, it’s not about reading the literal words on the page. It’s all in the conversation that’s prompted by that story.”
During my morning with Roanoke’s kindergarteners, I noticed that one of them, Gregory Blackman, appeared to tune out while the two boys he sat with delighted in catchy songs and dancing animals. But when I visited his family’s one-story rental house a few miles outside downtown Roanoke, Gregory was sitting on the family’s brown living-room carpet, eyes glued to the tablet. And for the next hour, he matched shapes, recited the alphabet and giggled at cartoons. His mother, Shelley, and his two older sisters hovered nearby, offering help. A darkened TV sat in the corner.
What students do when they’re left on their own with a tablet is a bit of a mystery—for now. MIT’s software records how the children in Roanoke use their tablets: which apps they open, for how long, and in what order. (Or at least it did until some students learned how to bypass the start screen midway through the year.) So far, the data show that the students use them for an average of two hours a night. Initially, they blaze through the whole tablet, exploring dozens of apps. Eventually, they settle on a handful of favorites. The Roanoke students seem to gravitate toward academic content—sounds, letters, puzzles—especially when it is framed as a game. (The piano and coloring apps are also popular.)
Of course, the increasing role of technology in children’s lives—especially young children’s lives—has triggered a series of anxieties over their physical, intellectual, emotional and social well-being, and you don’t have to be a Luddite to be unnerved by the specter of kindergarteners left, somewhat literally, to their own devices. But current research on screen-based technologies suggests that their influence on children depends on how old the children are, what they’re doing onscreen, for how long and in what context. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends limiting screen time for children over 2 to less than two hours a day. The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning recognize the need for limits, but also say that if technology is properly deployed in early-childhood programs, “educators are positioned to improve program quality by intentionally leveraging the potential of technology and media for the benefit of every child.”
“[Students] want to be competent, and they want to learn new things—old stuff doesn’t excite them very much. And they like a challenge,” Morris says. “The good thing about the digital technology is that, based on their performance, you can increase the difficulty level and complexity of it. But it’s that child-directed learning that we’re really interested in tapping into. We want to know what attributes on which apps are going to make that happen.”
On the TinkRbook’s back end, for example, the team can track how often a student or group has “tinkered” with certain words and concepts. “A lot of the commercial [educational] apps are not at the level where we can capture that kind of data,” Morris told me. David Nunez, a MIT graduate student, has developed a “mentoring system” that keeps tabs on what a child is using across the tablet, in order to nudge him or her toward apps that address concepts that child needs exposure to—just as Amazon.com might suggest products to you based on your prior purchases. The teacher, Morris said, “will able to say, ‘Okay, Johnny’s really got his capital letters down. We need to move him into small letters, lowercase letters, and the sounds related to those letters.’ ”
Roanoke also tested the mentoring system with preschool children, having secured state money for a full-day pre-kindergarten class consisting of 18 students, a teacher and an aide. Those 18 students were a control group; they all received tablets, which they used for 20 minutes a day in class and once a week at home. Meanwhile, 16 students in a half-day class used the tablets several times a day and took them home every night. And 22 children in a third group used the tablets entirely at home.
So what did the students learn? The researchers are still analyzing the data, but preliminary results showed that among the kindergarteners, for whom data was compiled on a class-by-class basis, there was a high correlation between the time the students spent with a tablet and their speed in learning to name letters, an indicator of early-childhood literacy. What’s more, the correlation was even higher in classes whose students used the tablets more at home. Among the preschoolers, there was improvement among all three groups, but it is still unclear how much of it can be attributed to the tablet. Children who used the tablets entirely at home had fewer gains, but they didn’t spend as much time on the devices as the students in classes, and they didn’t have a teacher—or fellow students—to learn from.
“Clearly, we’d think that more engagement with a technology-supportive teacher would produce better outcomes, but how the teacher uses the tablet, and how it helps the teacher, are important questions we need to understand,” Morris said. “But how do we maximize tablet use, and how much learning can the students get who are not even coming to a traditional class? That’s the more important challenge for us, because those are frequently the more at-risk children we need to reach more effectively.”
Last year, Sugata Mitra won a $1 million grant from TED, the global ideas conference, for a three-year project to explore the concept of “schools in the cloud.” In these “self-organized learning environments”—five in India and two in the United Kingdom—students of various ages will be left in a room with computers and no teachers, with volunteer tutors providing help only when asked. “It is not about making learning happen, it is about letting learning happen,” Mitra says.
Maryanne Wolf is more cautious. “By no means do we know fully whether or not [tablets] are the best medium for children’s learning at all,” she says. “But we’re in a digital age, and what is imperative is that we learn what works best for different children, in what amounts, at what ages.” Students need to develop what are called “deep reading” skills—inference, analogical and deductive thinking—and that requires time and focus. She worries that a medium that insists on rapid-fire processing and partial attention may not be ideal. At the same time, she believes that well-designed learning apps can bridge that gap. “I think our 21st-century brain is going to need both kinds of cognitive processes: a biliterate brain with faster processing, but that knows when to think and read and focus deeply,” she says.
“We are not in any way, shape or form opposed to teaching,” Wolf insists. “In fact, for children who have any kind of struggle with reading, the teacher is essential to helping ‘scaffold’ them”—to piggyback off what the technology teaches them.” Computers, she says, may be heavily involved, lightly involved or not involved: “I will be the first to say we don’t know all of that yet.”
The 36,201 FT (Deep) Man
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE | It was one of the last great feats of exploration: Diving alone, in a sub, to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. For three years the quest consumed an idealistic engineer and a single-minded record-setter. This is their untold story.
THE MAVERICK: Engineer Graham Hawkes and his team show off their latest invention: Super Falcon. Credit: Douglas Adesko
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ADVENTURE, OCTOBER 2009
WHEN STEVE FOSSETT strapped himself inside a two-seat stunt plane and took off into a bluebird Nevada morning on September 3, 2007, he was on the verge of his most remarkable achievement. The famed aviator, the only person ever to travel around the world nonstop and alone by both plane and balloon, was in the final stages of planning a journey to the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean. If successful, he would be the first to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench—36,201 feet down, 190 miles southwest of Guam—since U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard in 1960. The consummate record-setter, Fossett wanted to gain the spot, called Challenger Deep, alone.
At the start of the project, there wasn’t a submersible in the world that could dive much below 21,000 feet. The water pressure at the bottom of the ocean is a crushing 16,000 pounds per square inch, nearly the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus. Fossett’s search for a sub capable of withstanding those conditions led him to an engineer named Graham Hawkes. After a career at the forefront of deep-sea exploration, the British-born Hawkes had begun work on a new type of submersible, one that cruised through the ocean more like anairplane than a hot-air balloon, astraditional subs do. He had success-fully tested three prototypes onshallow missions, setting a solo diverecord of a thousand feet in theprocess. But in an age of roboticexploration, he had struggled tofinance his manned projects.
Fossett first called Hawkes in early 2000. It was apparent from the start, however, that the two had conflicting agendas. Most notably: Hawkes wanted to be in the driver’s seat. “Look back to the early days of aviation,” he says. “The guys designing the aircraft were the same guys building it and the same guys flying it. The whole challenge was one ball of wax.” Hawkes offered to build two subs—one for himself and one for his client—but Fossett declined. He wasn’t interested in a Walsh-Piccard reprise. (“I’m not a passenger type of person,” he once said.) Hawkes then offered to test the sub fully before handing it over to Fossett. “That probably ended any chance of our becoming buddies,” Hawkes recalls. Fossett responded with a wry smirk and insisted on retiring the machine to the Smithsonian after a single deep dive. A deal could not be reached.
It took more than four years for Hawkes to reconsider his position. “Ultimately, Steve was right,” he says. “His argument was, ‘I’ll get the record, you’ll get the technology.’ I came to realize that that was fair.” Hawkes reached out to Fossett in November 2004, and the two met at Fossett’s palatial vacation home in Carmel, California. “We presented Steve with various records that I felt we could help him break in addition to Challenger Deep, but he was only interested in the big one,” Hawkes says. “He liked that this would be a record no one could ever beat.” They agreed that Fossett would finance research and development of the sub, called Deep Flight Challenger, after the Royal Navy vessel that surveyed the trench in 1951. Hawkes would own the intellectual property. Fossett would get the record. The project would be kept secret until the very last minute.
HAWKES OCEAN TECHNOLOGIES occupies a modest, low-lying office complex in a marina on the San Francisco Bay. The work- shop, a cluttered 2,000-square-foot space, resembles the stock- room of an air and space museum, with cold cement floors, shelves stocked with parts, and a few computers rendering CAD drawings. Hawkes’s first breakthrough, Deep Flight 1, rests by the door. Sleek and lightweight, with a pair of stubby inverted wings, the microsubmersible dove to 3,000 feet in 1996, laying the groundwork for Challenger a decade later.
On the day I visit, Hawkes is dressed casually in a sweater and jeans, with disheveled hair and a couple days’ worth of stubble. The 61-year-old engineer doesn’t care much for chitchat, preferring instead to occupy his mind with the task of solving problems. “We can be at a dinner party,” says his wife, Karen, “and I’ll look over at Graham, staring off into the distance, using his hands to shape something in the air. When I ask him where he is, he’ll say he just designed a critical part of a submersible.” On his first ski trip Hawkes was so unhappy with his boots that he devised a new pair. He is chronically searching for his car keys, wallet, and glasses, Karen says, devoting little mental space to “the mundane details of life.”
A born engineer, Hawkes wasn’t always interested in the sea. But after graduating from England’s Borough Polytechnic Institute in 1969, he saw opportunity in the deep and took a job designing underwater swimmer delivery vehicles for the British Special Forces. “Ocean engineering was so back- wards that I knew I could just make leaps and bounds,” he says. In 1979 Hawkes invented the Wasp, an atmospheric diving suit for offshore oil workers, and in 1981, the Mantis, a microsubmersible with mechanical arms. Throughout the 1980s he designed multiple versions of Deep Rover— one of which was used by owner James Cameron to film Aliens. But after creating more than 60 robotic microsubs for the offshore oil and gas industries, Hawkes shifted his focus to manned submersibles. He wanted to go underwater himself.
The world of manned ocean exploration has long been dominated by a handful of government-backed oceanographic institutions operating five subs. The Russians own Mir 1 and 2; France, Nautile; the Japanese, Shinkai 6500. (China has also reportedly neared completion of a submersible that could reach 23,000 feet.) The U.S. Navy maintains the oldest and most productive vessel, Alvin, a three-person sub built in 1964 and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. All of these vessels work in much the same way: A devoted support ship drops the heavy sub overboard. Loaded with steel weights, the craft sinks. After the scientists inside do some close-range exploring—Alvin’s current floor time is around four hours—the pilot jettisons the weights, and the sub surfaces.
In Hawkes’s view, these submersibles are like mainframe computers, too heavy and expensive to be practical. (Alvin, which Woods Hole is spending $21 million to update, weighs 35,200 pounds and requires a crew of 30.) Hawkes blames the subs’ design (or lack thereof) for the sorry state of ocean exploration. “We’ve explored 5 percent of the seas—at best,” he says. “I love Alvin, but who dreams of diving in an underwater elevator?” Hawkes’s deep-flight concept is his answer to the status quo. With inverted wings and five-prop thrusters, the subs weigh one-seventh as much as traditional manned submersibles, travel seven times as far, and cost much less to own and operate. According to Hawkes, they also “bridge the imagination gap” for a new generation of private underwater explorers. “There is something about the freedom to fly that strikes a chord with the human spirit,” he says. “People intuitively understand it. It sets them daydreaming.”
In Fossett, Hawkes found a kindred spirit, someone who immediately understood the value of his flying submersibles. He also found a piggy bank for what he now calls his “era of experimentation.” “I always thought that building a sub to go to full ocean depth would be what I’d do when I was 90,” he says. “For a submersible engineer, reaching 37,000 feet is the holy grail.”
DURING THE FIRST MISSION to Challenger Deep, Piccard and Walsh dove in Trieste, a then revolutionary bathyscaphe designed by Piccard’s father, Auguste. But after a four-day journey to the dive site through rough Pacific seas, the vessel wasn’t in top form. “[It] looked like a victim of battle rather than an undersea laboratory,” Piccard wrote in the August 1960 edition of National Geo- graphic. Confined to a 50-foot-diameter spherical hull, Piccard and Walsh descended “at the speed of an elderly elevator,” sitting on stools and eating Hershey’s chocolate bars. Suddenly, at 32,500 feet, they heard a sharp cracking sound; the cabin trem- bled. “Could we have encountered an undersea monster?” Pic- card asked. “Could it be shrimps?” (It was a damaged Plexiglas viewing port—not life threatening.) After nine hours, Trieste landed with a thud on a layer of diatomaceous ooze. It was, as Piccard wrote, “a region of eternal calm, an immense mysterious domain where the fish of the deeps open their avid eyes in the darkness.” After spotting a foot-long fish with round eyes on the top of its head, and red shrimp, they dropped lead pellets and returned to the surface.
Fifty years later, Challenger had a farmore graceful flight plan. Cheyenne, thecatamaran that Fossett sailed to anaround-the-world record in 2004, was retrofitted to ferry the ultra- light sub from San Francisco across the Pacific to the Mariana Trench. Strapped stomach-down, Fossett would fall aggressively at seven miles an hour in a thousand-foot-wide spiral. After one hour and 46 minutes, an acoustic beam would detect the seafloor nearly seven miles down. A hundred and fifty feet before touching bot-tom, Fossett would flip a switch, the lead weights would drop off, and the craft would become slightly positively buoyant—lighter than the water it travels through. By activating the sub’s thrusters, Fossett could explore up to 12 miles of the seafloor and locate the absolute deepest spot on the planet.
If Challenger’s descent was straightforward, its construction was anything but. To limit costs, Hawkes scavenged for parts. He bought lithium-ion batteries in China similar to the one used in the Tesla electric car. He covered the wing lights in repurposed sapphire crystal. For buoyancy, he custom-ordered blocks of syntactic foam, an epoxy embedded with billions of microscopic glass spheres. “Cost a fortune,” Hawkes says. “Only half a dozen companies in the world build deepwater flotation, but they had never been this deep. We said, ‘We’ll give you the contract if you’ll give us some samples.’ Three of them couldn’t resist the challenge.”
Designing the hull presented the greatest hurdle. At 36,201 feet deep, the sub would have to withstand 16,000 pounds of pres- sure per square inch. The Trieste survived the crushing force by brute strength: Its spherical hull was reinforced with thick steel walls. Most conventional submersibles today, including Alvin and Shinkai 6500, use lighter titanium, but the material can’t handle pressures much below 20,000 feet. Hawkeswould need to design a new composite material four times stronger than titanium.
Fortunately, Hawkes knew that a U.S. Navy scientist named Jerry Stachiw had been secretly working on the same problem at the National Deep Submergence Facility, in San Diego, two decades earlier. At the time the Navy was interested in developing light- weight, cylindrical hulls for unmanned vessels that could dive below 20,000 feet, and Stachiw had researched different composites, including ceramics, glass, and carbon. Hawkes called up Stachiw, since retired, and asked him to be a consultant on the project. “It just happened that the diameter of the cylindrical hull we were looking for was very close to the one Jerry had been developing,” says Hawkes. “So we picked up where he left off. We’d just need to push the strength of materials another 10 to 20 percent and we were home free.”
Hawkes subcontracted the hull to a company in California that builds composite mate- rials for industrial applications. “They were very, very confident,” Hawkes recalls. “I gave then a set of numbers. They gave me a margin that they expected to hit. But they didn’t get there. It was just failure after failure.”
ONCE A MONTH Fossett drove up from Carmel to check on Challenger’s progress, usually arriving in some exotic car—an Aston Martin, or a Mercedes McLaren—that Hawkes’s engineers took great interest in. Fossett was accustomed to delays in his projects, and his feelings about the sub’s setbacks were inscrutable. “There was no small talk,” Hawkes recalls. “I’d say, ‘We had a failure here, and this is what we need to do to fix it.’ He’d just sit there and”—Hawkes nods his head up and down—“seem to agree, but you had no idea.”
By age 63, Fossett, who built his fortune as an aggressive commodities trader, had set 115 new world records. His public image was that of a balding, paunchy man standing alongside expensive machines in jumpsuits. (Richard Branson once described him as “a sort of half android, half Forrest Gump.”) There was Fossett in a gray outfit after completing his solo, round-the-world hot-air balloon journey; in a yellow suit, next to the glider he flew into the stratosphere; in a white Virgin Atlantic onesie, waving beside the single-engine jet aircraft in which he circumnavigated the globe, nonstop, on one tank of gas.
But whatever drove Fossett to devote himself so completely to record setting remains a mystery. Publicly, he was demure. “I have a very low boredom threshold,” he once said. “It’s internal. It doesn’t lend itself to explanation.” Will Hasley, co-author of Fossett’s autobiography, suspects that an explanation lies in Fossett’s roots as a Boy Scout (an organization he supported throughout his life, serving on the national board). “I think part of his drive as an adult was still as a Boy Scout getting merit badges,” Hasley says. “Only the merit badges were world records.”
Hawkes recalls Fossett’s single-mindedness vividly. “I remember thinking, It’s such a shame that the guy writing the checks doesn’t get satisfaction out of the process,” he says. “We’re engineers, so there is pleasure in the process. The guy’s so focused, all he wants to hear is, ‘We’re done, we’re moving on.’”
Engineer and financier danced around differences in style—Hawkes pushing for more flair, Fossett reining him in. “I’d say, ‘Well, if you’re going down there, let’s not put on blaring lights and destroy the eyeballs of all the creatures. Let’s try something more subtle.’ And he would ask, ‘How much would that cost?’ Steve was adamant that he did not want to pay for unnecessary R&D. He was singularly focused on his record. Which meant get- ting down and back safely”—Hawkes corrects himself—“no, getting down alive. I would now, knowing him, drop the word ‘safely.’”
As the project progressed, Hawkes tried to convince Fossett that Challenger meant more than a record. “We’d sit at lunch and I’d say, ‘Steve, if you look at the path of human development: We had to explore the continents. We had to sail across the seas. We had to go into space. And we have to go down there. Circling the globe on one tank of gas is optional. Circling the globe in a balloon is a brilliant, beautiful piece of science art, but it’s optional. Getting human access to full ocean depth is not optional.’
“He began to agree with me, but per- haps he was already heading there. To take credit for influencing Steve Fossett,” Hawkes chuckles, “is a little optimistic.”
A YEAR INTO the project, Jerry Stachiw, the hull consultant, died. A year later, with millions invested, Fossett was growing impatient. He wanted to press for- ward by eliminating safety precautions required for commercial subs. “An escape for the pilot is mandatory for anything you sell,” Hawkes says. “We didn’t build one. Steve didn’t want any costs associated with a likely unnecessary.”
Hawkes wanted to continue testing the materials’ strength. The carbon composite hull had successfully reached a safety factor of 1.5 (the American Bureau of Shipping strength and performance standard for commercial vessels), but Hawkes hoped to reach 2. “I wanted this thing to be bulletproof. But Steve said, ‘No, we’ve spent enough money, go with what you’ve got.’”
To those who knew him, Fossett was not a daredevil. He was meticulous and methodical, and he carefully planned his endeavors to minimize risk. “Everything he’s done, he’s taken a calculated risk with,” Richard Branson has said. But this was not the first time Fossett disagreed with his engineer about safety. According to Hasley, the record-setter and Burt Rutan debated the readiness of Virgin Atlantic, the single-engine aircraft Fossett piloted around the world in 2005. Rutan, the engineer, wanted another six months of testing. “Steve said, ‘I know that the plane is safe enough. You’ve minimized the risk enough for me to take possession of it.’ Steve would do his own rating of the risk level he was willing to take. He would sometimes believe, OK, this is the safety I need to feel comfortable.”
In May 2007 Challenger was ready for its first full-scale trial. Hawkes secured a test facility at the Applied Research Laboratory Building at Penn State, where the Navy tests torpedoes. Hawkes and his team of six were there, as was Fos- sett. In previous tests the engineers had built scale models to evaluate material strength. Implosions would occur without warning, jolting the ground and rattling their nerves. This test would simulate a depth of 37,000 feet with 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. It was late in the day when Challenger was lowered into a tank, its systems running, lights flashing, and life support systems in full operation.
Everything appeared to go smoothly. The hull survived, intact. But as the sub was lifted out of the tank someone noticed a small crack in the glass observation dome. It was, Hawkes reflected, “a spectacular failure.” Fossett was stoic. Hawkes was perplexed. “The data from the test was difficult to understand,” he says. “Some of it was so anomalous that I dismissed it. Steve wanted answers right then, and I didn’t have them. It was intense. We were all shell-shocked.”
Hawkes was desperate to figure out why the glass had failed, but it wasn’t until the next morning, once Fossett had left and his team had gone to the facility to dismantle the sub, that he had a moment alone to review the data. “OK, Graham, I said, sup- posing this anomalous stress pattern data wasn’t anomalous but was real. What could that mean? Suddenly this lightbulb went off in my head: Oh my God.”
It occurred to Hawkes that if the glass dome sealing the hull was beveled and did not sit flush on its titanium base, the pres- sure would have been distributed unevenly, causing the dome to crack. “They’re about to dismantle the sub and we’ll never know, so I ran a quarter mile to the facility and beat the hell out of the door. I couldn’t speak I was so out of breath. I said, ‘Don’t dismantle this thing, I’ve got to get inside!’”
Challenger was still dripping wet. Hawkes needed to climb into the cockpit to check if there was space between the dome and the titanium rings. “I figured if the gap was four-thousandths of an inch or more, that would account for it. The guy that runs the place was dubious. He lifted the glass and I climbed inside and said, ‘OK, put the glass back on.’ They’re like, ‘You don’t have life support, are you gonna be all right?’ I said, ‘Put the freaking glass on. I’ll give you hand signals!’”
Hawkes, now reclining inside the hull, fished for a dollar bill in his pocket. “I couldn’t see the gap, so I wanted to see if I could poke a bill in between the rings. And damned, it went in. So I got another one. If two got in, that was a big problem. Two went in. I didn’t have any more dollars. I got them to open the glass. ‘Anyone have a dollar?’ I asked. They’re all fussing for bills. Well, I got seven of these things in.”
The error was an embarrassment for Hawkes—a manufacturing issue, not a design failure—but it would set the project back several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. “Steve was really disappointed,” Hawkes says. “I thought it was over. But at that point he was more interested in time than money.”Fossett, having now spent $3 million, was eager to manage the project more closely. “He saw his risk areas as the design and testing,” Hawkes recalls. “He would consistently ask, ‘Is the design done?’ When I said yeah, he said, ‘Well, the job of your team is kind of done.’ ‘Like hell it is,’ I said. ‘The devil’s in the details.’” Fossett eventually fired the project manager. “That kind of made matters worse,” Hawkes says. “Still, I was surprised about how it went forward with him micromanaging. We just wanted to get this thing done.”
Then, a little over two years ago and a few weeks before the initial open-water test for Challenger, Fossett took off in a two-seat Super Decathlon from the Flying M Ranch in Nevada, heading south along U.S. Route 395. He never returned. The next day Hawkes received word of his disappearance and rallied the team to western Nevada for a ground search. Back in the Bay Area, Karen Hawkes scrambled to enlist helicopters and volunteers for the effort. After six futile days scouring the rugged terrain by truck and on foot, they returned home. In November 2007 an Illinois court declared Steve Fossett dead. His plane was found a year later by a hiker out on a morning walk.
THIS SPRING AN unmanned submersible operated by Woods Hole became one of the first vessels to reach Challenger Deep since Piccard and Walsh in 1960. The hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV), named Nereus, was tethered to a surface ship via a hair-thin cable that provided electrical power and transmitted high- speed broadband video and data. “We’re on the verge of being able to do an awful lot of this exploration the way we’ve been exploring Mars—with fairly smart robotic vehicles that can go around and investigate and report back,” says Laurence Madin, director of research at Woods Hole. National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Robert Ballard, who discovered the Titanic in 1985, is just as bullish on the future of unmanned exploration. “I’m not looking for a spiritual experience while diving,” Ballard says. “I’m looking for discoveries. I’m looking for results.”
Dan Howard, superintendent of the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanc- tuary, recently spoke with Hawkes about using his flying machines for deep-ocean research. Howard sees certain advantages to manned exploration—including depth perception, peripheral vision, and on- the-spot evaluation—but he questions Hawkes’s approach. “Graham’s selling point was how deep and how fast his submersibles travel,” Howard says. “Our question to him was, How slow can it go? How maneuverable is it at very low speeds?”
Ultimately, perhaps Hawkes’s best defense for his deep-flight technology may be sentimental, rather than scientific. “You send a robot to explore Mars,” he says, “but would you build a robot to climb Everest?” The exploration of our planet, Hawkes believes—the quest to reach and discover new frontiers on Earth—is a fundamentally human endeavor. And as Challenger neared completion, Fossett had come to agree. “Initially the idea was a one-shot dive and then it goes in the Smithsonian,” Hawkes says. “Then the program sort of changed. Steve would talk about forming a foundation for underwater exploration.”
Challenger is still housed in Hawkes’s San Francisco workshop, but the unfinished vessel now belongs to Fossett’s estate. If Hawkes wanted to continue the project, he’d have to come up with a substantial amount of cash he doesn’t have. “Maybe it’s a self-protection mechanism, but I’m not devastated,” he says. “The numbers work. I understand the process now. For an engineer, that’s 99 percent of it.” Hawkes has started designing “work” versions of the sub that can accommodate two passengers and include functions useful to researchers, such as robotic arms. And two years ago, Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley venture capital titan, paid Hawkes $1.5 million to develop Super Falcon, a two-person submersible that Perkins could launch from his megayacht, The Maltese Falcon. Hawkes built two, one for Perkins and another for himself, using much of the same technology, hardware, and systems he’d devised for Challenger. “Steve brought this technology up to speed,” Hawkes says. “He has paved the way for others to explore.”
Hawkes sees Super Falcon as his greatest achievement. He calls it “a sculpted piece of beauty” and a manned sub for the digital age. Perkins, whose fortune was built with a keen eye for technology (like Google), agrees, calling it a masterpiece. John Scully, the former CEO of Apple Computer, said of the sub after a test ride: “If Apple wanted to build an underwater spaceship, this is the one it would build.”
Early one morning this past summer, I visited Hawkes in Monterey, California, to dive in Super Falcon. Hawkes had spent a month operating the sub from a dock in Monterey Bay, training would-be recreational pilots and pitching influential people—ocean researchers, politicians, capitalists. The day I was there, he was coaching Greg Bemis, an entrepreneur who owns salvage rights to the notorious R.M.S. Lusitania.
Super Falcon looks like something between a hammerhead shark and George Jetson’s hatchback. “This is not your father’s submersible,” Hawkes announced. His team of three engineers and interns slid the 4,000-pound sub down a boat ramp from the back of an SUV. After a Zodiac towed it out of the marina, Hawkes took over using a single joystick.
Graham Hawkes in the Super Falcon. Credit: Andy Isaacson
The visibility was terrible that day—a thick green plankton bloom clouded our view of Monterey’s kelp forest—but we were flying nonetheless, traveling through the currents the way most subsea creatures do, with the exception, perhaps, of the chambered nautilus and humans in conventional subs. After dipping down 70 feet, Hawkes pointed the vessel up, pressing me into my seat as the water gradually lightened above my head. We breached the surface like a whale and floated lazily in the harbor. Sea lions eyed us warily.
As Super Falcon reached the boat ramp, with water dripping off its wingtips, I thought about a moment in Hawkes’s workshop a few months before. We were standing in front of what’s left of Challenger. Propped up by metal beams, the hull was surprisingly small, hardly bigger than the five-foot-eleven Fossett. It looked like a cast-aside piece of scrap metal, not a one-of-a-kind carbon composite. Hawkes looked down at the sub, taking the mea- sure of a three-year labor of love that he cannot afford to buy back and fly himself. “What you’re looking at,” he said, “is a moon launch, and the rest of the world is just trying to reach orbit.”
The Robotic Search For Lost World War II Airmen
POPULAR SCIENCE | World War II combat pilots have been lost at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for nearly 70 years. Now autonomous robots have been deployed to find them.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN POPULAR SCIENCE, SEPTEMBER 2013
ON A BRIGHT MORNING in mid-March, Pat Scannon stands on the deck of a 40-foot catamaran looking for an airplane hidden in the waters of Palau's western lagoon. A limestone ridge thick with vegetation juts into the cloudless blue sky behind him. His quick-dry clothing, coupled with a red bandanna knotted around his neck, befits Scannon's role as an amateur archaeologist. He has spent the past 20 years making annual wreck-hunting trips to Palau, about 500 miles from the Philippines, to find aircraft that had been shot down during one of World War II's fiercest battles—planes that may still be holding their pilots. His organization, BentProp Project, works to repatriate their remains to the U.S. To guide the search, Scannon ordinarily relies on interviews with Palauan elders, military records, and maps hand-drawn after the war. But on this trip, he has a new tool at his disposal.
Two technicians in a nearby Boston Whaler cradle a small, torpedo-shaped craft, then lower it into the water. Scannon watches as its nose tilts down and its rear propeller pushes it beneath the surface. Out of sight, the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), an oceanographic workhorse called a Remus, begins gliding through the lagoon in a pattern that resembles the long, linear passes of a mowed lawn. From roughly 10 feet above the seafloor, its side-scan sonar sends out acoustic waves that build a two-dimensional map. The strength of the reflected waves also helps distinguish metal from mud or coral.
For a group like BentProp, the use of advanced oceanographic instruments is a huge technological leap forward and one it couldn't afford on its own. The vehicles come from the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware, which received a grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The funding enables oceanographers to test new technologies while helping BentProp locate World War II airmen—an effort they named Project Recover.
The lead scientist is Eric Terrill, director of the Scripps Coastal Observing Research and Development Center. Board shorts and sandals make the athletic oceanographer look more surfer than scientist—he even brought a board on the research vessel for what he calls "wave sampling." For the past few years, Terrill's team has used a Remus to study the ocean circulation around Palau.
"Historically, on unmanned underwater platforms, you might spend the better part of your experimental time just ensuring the sensors were functioning, tracking the vehicle navigation, and charging batteries," he says. "The systems now have matured to where we can run them hard, like outboard motors. The oceanographic community is engineering new sensors for them and having them do smarter things during their searches."
When Terrill and Scannon met through a mutual friend on the island, a collaboration seemed natural. BentProp could find planes in a tricky marine environment—with steep terrain, fast currents, and coral heads—while Scripps tested circulation models and advanced imaging systems. "If we're able to use those techniques on natural environments, there's nothing to say we can't apply it to the man-made objects on the seafloor," Terrill says.
Scripps and the University of Delaware shipped 60 packages of equipment to Palau, including underwater vehicles, cameras, various types of sonar, and, for aerial surveys, an autonomous hexacopter drone that had been rebuilt to survive sea spray and aquatic landings. The mangroves growing along the shore around Palau are so dense that aluminum wreckage from aircraft has been found sitting on top of the tree canopy about 30 feet up.
This year, Scannon has his eye on a major prize: a B-24 that he believes had been shot down in Palau's western reef. With the oceanographers' help, he hopes, BentProp could find it. "On land our major technology was a machete, and underwater it was scuba tanks," he says. "The ability to extend our mission is, like, I don't know how to describe it. It's like starting out walking, and suddenly you're in a supersonic jet."
By the 1920s, Palau had grown into a thriving Japanese port for goods and services en route across the Pacific. Recognizing the strategic location, Japan established an airfield there, and after World War II broke out, it began to shore up its defenses—building hundreds of bunkers and caves to defend the islands from an American attack. General MacArthur, who wanted to secure islands to the east as he prepared to invade the Philippines, ordered that attack in 1944. The U.S. began with a furious air campaign that was designed to knock out Japanese vessels clustered in Palau's western lagoon and adjacent harbors, and clear the way for an amphibious assault.
These people died defending usThat September, the U.S. Marines landed on the island of Peleliu. Although they ultimately won that battle, it came at a terrible cost: 10,000 Japanese and 1,700 Americans were killed in action—the highest casualty rate of World War II's Pacific Theater. And between the beginning of the air campaign and the end of the war, BentProp estimates, 200 U.S. aircraft were shot down inside Palau's barrier reef. Some 40 to 50 planes and 70 to 80 airmen have never been recovered. Scannon, a medical doctor and founder of a biotechnology company, first visited Palau in 1993 as a recreational scuba diver. He came with a group looking for a Japanese naval vessel that had been sunk by George H.W. Bush, who flew torpedo bombers during the war. After the group found it, Scannon hired a local guide to take him to other wreck sites, where he eventually discovered the wing of a B-24. When he researched Palau's history at home, he realized there must be many more planes in ruins around the islands. "Palauans knew of them but didn't know anything about them," he says. He was particularly gripped by the thought that many airmen couldn't have survived the impact. "These people died defending us," he says. "And they deserve to be honored and, if possible, brought home."
So began Scannon's quest. He returned to Palau for the next few years by himself, chasing leads. Then in 1996, he formed BentProp and recruited volunteers, roughly half of whom are retired and active-duty military members, to help him search. Combing the jungle and surrounding waters, they located debris from more than five dozen aircraft.
Last year, local spear fishermen diving on Palau's western barrier reef stumbled across one of the most impressive finds: an intact plane. They alerted the owner of a dive shop, who passed photos of the wreck along to BentProp. Scannon's team eventually identified the plane as an American Corsair. It had sustained some damage to its left forward wing root, but the wing flaps were down, and the canopy had been locked open, suggesting that the pilot had ditched. "It had been sitting there unknown for 65 years," Scannon says. "It gave us great hope that there were other intact airplanes out here that no one has seen."
BentProp calculates that eight American planes, including a B-24 bomber, remain hidden in Palau's western lagoon. The B-24, in particular, would be a tremendous discovery. It carried 10 to 11 men, including a pilot and co-pilot, gunners, bombers, a radioman, and a navigator. Of the four B-24s BentProp suspects were shot down near Palau, two were found after the war. BentProp located a third in 2004; the organization notified the Department of Defense's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, and the remains of the eight men onboard (three had parachuted out, only to be apprehended and executed) were repatriated to Arlington National Cemetery.
Mission photographs from World War II show the fourth, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator, on a path toward the western lagoon. Two of its crew had bailed out midair, landing in Malakal Harbor to the east, where the Japanese took them into custody; the rest presumably went down with the plane. "We have very, very good information about what heading they were on during the bombing mission, and we have very good information about what heading they took leaving," Scannon says, on the deck of the research vessel during this year's expedition. "So bringing the two of those together essentially brings you right here."
The oceanographic team's official command center in Palau is on the second floor of the Coral Reef Research Foundation, but their unofficial headquarters is an open-air bar called the Drop Off, originally built for the production crew of CBS's_ Survivor: Palau_. Several days into the expedition, they head there for dinner and order a round of local Red Rooster beers. As they wait for their food, Mark Moline, an oceanographer from the University of Delaware, opens a Toughbook laptop and scrolls through sonar images produced by the Remus.
Grainy and reddish, the sonar images look like transmissions from Mars. Some show deep scours; others, shadowy trenches. The team have given the features names like Homer Simpson, Crying Baby, and SpongeBob's Grave. After identifying promising targets in scans, they will have to investigate in person, diving to the various sites to determine if the features are purely biological, like coral heads, or actual wrecks.
Moline pauses on an image with an oblong shape. On closer inspection, it seems to have intact wings and a tail. "We got a plane!" Moline announces. Everyone springs up and huddles around the screen, snapping photos with their phones. Their excitement attracts the attention of a Japanese man dining at the other end of the long communal table, who cranes his neck for a peek at the computer. Moline abruptly shuts the laptop; World War II wrecks attract dive tourists and salvagers.
The next morning, at the coral-reef lab, Terrill debriefs Scannon and the BentProp group. Paul Reuter, a Scripps programmer, projects Google Earth onto a wall. Reuter had used an archival map of observed plane crashes to mark Google Earth layers with known wreck sites; he then added a layer with intriguing objects that had turned up in the sonar images.
Terrill uses a laser pointer to indicate the newest find. "The hard edges provide bright scatter," he says. "There's a long shadow here and here." He then shifts his pointer to a spherical object about 45 meters away and wonders if it could be the pontoon of a floatplane.
"If that's intact, it tells me it was a low-speed impact, perhaps ditching," says Daniel O'Brien, a former skydiver and Hollywood stuntman who now volunteers for BentProp. "My first impression is that's a Zero"—a long-range fighter aircraft. "There are rounded edges at the tail. But if it is a floatplane, the only U.S. airplane it could be would be amphibious. The shape looks like a Kingfisher." Flip Colmer, a former Navy pilot who now flies for Delta, also with BentProp, reaches for the book Floatplanes in Action and begins flipping through color pictures.
The Kingfisher, O'Brien explains, was typically flown for observation and to rescue downed pilots. "If they were in this deep, it would have been on a risky endeavor. There weren't anti-aircraft along the ridge. But existing ships that were still moored had anti-aircraft. So for him to come in and land here, it would have been to pick somebody up."
During World War II, floatplanes in Palau often flew rescue operations. As they scooped airmen from the water, another plane provided cover overhead. BentProp knew that two Kingfishers on reconnaissance missions had disappeared during the war, and the western lagoon seemed the most likely location for them to have ended up. The identification number painted on the plane's exterior would have degraded by now; to confirm the exact craft, divers would try to recover a stamped metal plate riveted to the inside of the cockpit. "It's our holy grail," O'Brien tells me.
Colmer cautions the group about jumping to conclusions. The Japanese also flew seaplanes. "If there's any primer left on the interior of the cockpit—which will last longer than straight paint—that's one way to take a peek at it," he says. U.S. airplanes used lime-green zinc chromate; the Japanese had a red primer. The team will have to get a close look.
Guided by GPS coordinates from the AUV, Pat Colin, director of the Coral Reef Research Foundation, pilots the vessel across the lagoon to the approximate location of the mystery plane. Then Terrill lowers a device called an Echoscope over the side. As we creep along the surface, an onboard computer displays 3-D images of the seafloor in real time.
While side-scan sonar provides a general impression of contours along the bottom, it doesn't directly measure the elevations of features. The Echoscope, or multibeam volume imaging sonar, does, enabling oceanographers to map topography accurately and in high enough resolution to distinguish man-made objects. Terrill describes it as "the oceanographic seafloor-mapping equivalent of ultrasound sonar used to look inside the human body." Using the two technologies in tandem helps to narrow wide-area searches and then pick out targets from clutter on the seafloor, so that human divers maximize their time at the correct site.
With the boat now directly over the plane, the dive teams begin to suit up. Terrill fills his scuba tank with nitrox to allow himself more time to explore the aircraft 100 feet below. Shannon Scott, an engineer from Scripps, descends with Terrill, Colmer, and O'Brien. He carries a handheld sonar that displays acoustic images on an LCD screen, allowing the divers to zero in on the floatplane even in five-foot visibility. About 20 minutes later, O'Brien surfaces. "Well, it's not a Kingfisher," he says.
After descending to the plane, O'Brien noticed that the windscreen on the cockpit was located behind the wing. In Kingfishers, it was situated in front. He'd also detected a subtle distinction in the shape of the fuselage near the tail.
I strap on a scuba tank and jump into the water with Scannon, who wants to see for himself. We follow a rope line, pinching our noses on the way down to equalize pressure, until we arrive at the fuselage. It lays on a bed of thick sediment that our fins kick up into dusty clouds. Long, gangly strands of black coral grow up and through the corroded metal. The front motor and propellers have broken away from the body of the plane, so that it now resembles a chewed-off cigar or the burnt end of a firecracker. Scannon waves me over to the cockpit and places my hand on the gun mount. It held a 7.7mm machine gun, Scannon later explains to me, developed by the Japanese navy.
The next day, BentProp compares the aircraft in the western lagoon with a hundred different vintage planes. Eventually, the team determines that the wreck has all the characteristics of a Kawanishi E15K1 Shiun, code-named Norm by the Allies. The high-speed reconnaissance floatplane had a single engine, contra-rotating propellers, and a center pontoon that could be jettisoned during an attack. It also had a flattened beaver tail around the vertical stabilizer, an aft cockpit machine gun, and no wing armaments. According to BentProp, the Japanese manufactured nine prototypes; six were brought to Palau for combat testing, and all were shot down by U.S. forces.
Though it isn't an American plane, Scannon is pleased with the discovery. "It's a very unusual aircraft, one of the rarest archaeological planes you will find," he says. "And there's a very high likelihood that the remains are still on it." BentProp alerts the Palauan government, which will notify the Japanese embassy.
Of more than 60 aircraft BentProp has identified in Palau—half of which are Japanese—the team has recovered just one metal plate stamped with a serial number: that of the American Corsair discovered by the spear fishermen. That plate revealed the Corsair's story.
On November 21, 1944, a young Marine captain named Carroll McCullah set off from the American airfield to finish off a Japanese vessel that had been bombed earlier. On the way back, he and his wingman strafed four Japanese ammunition dumps; an explosion at the last one sent shrapnel into the oil cooler of his plane. McCullah placed a distress call and made for the island's western reef. Then he tightened his seat belt, locked the canopy back, and turned off the plane's engine switch. Placing his left hand on the cockpit coaming, he braced for impact.
"There was no shock," McCullah later wrote in a mission report. He launched his life raft and swam across the reef, where a rescue aircraft swept down to pick him up. For the rest of his life, McCullah—who, after his rescue, went back to the base, had a brandy, and then flew another mission the next day—retold the story of that landing. "And many other ones," his son, Patrick, told me by phone from Florida, where McCullah lives (with dementia) at age 92. "His tales were tall, but they were true."
Today, McCullah's plane rests intact on the seabed, with its nose up against the edge of the reef, like a car driven up onto a curb and abandoned. But time has turned the craft into a relic: corrosion has gnawed at the metal, and the reef has crept into the propellers and the engine; a large, bulbous coral head has taken up occupancy in the cockpit. Originally painted blue, with a white star-and-bar symbol, the aircraft has been scoured to bare aluminum.
Scripps wants to use its technology to document this chapter of the Corsair's story too, before it ends altogether. "We're not only here to find and detect underwater objects, but to get a snapshot of the state of those objects that may be corroding or eroding away in time," Terrill says. "There's a whole new field in trying to baseline-capture all the detail we can about these historic artifacts. I'm calling it digital preservation."
Suzanne Finney, an American archaeologist working with Palau's Bureau of Arts and Culture, joins us for the 45-minute boat ride to the site of the Corsair. Marine archeology rarely gets to benefit from such advances, she says. "Most of the work I've done, you've got a tape measure and some string and a dive slate and a pencil, and you're taking photographs and measurements by hand. And that's what you do." With data from the robotic vehicles, Palau can add downed aircraft to an inventory of the country's rich underwater sites, something previously unattainable for an office that can barely afford to buy gas for a boat. "There are a lot of wrecks in water that's inaccessible to diving," she says, "so you need remote-sensing equipment." By the time the expedition ends, the AUV has scanned 18.9 square kilometers of the seafloor at slightly better than 10cm resolution, an area that would have taken scuba divers a decade to explore. The sonar also revealed what Terrill says could be a new species of coral.
When we reach the Corsair, engineers lower the Remus, now equipped with GoPro HERO3 HD cameras, into the water, and it once again begins a methodical sweep. Back in California, Terrill and his team will use the thousands of captured images, plus hundreds of photos taken by human divers, to build a 3-D reconstruction of the plane. Terrill is beta-testing algorithms developed by Autodesk for the company's new cloud-based, reality-capture software, called ReCap; the software has been designed to model aboveground areas like historic sites and factory floors, and Terrill is evaluating how well it works in an aquatic environment, where light is distorted. "Man-made structures underwater are an ideal testbed for that," he says. "If it pans out, it'll be a great archaeological tool to baseline a lot of these wrecks."
Scientists and naval historians could use such technology to document how wreck sites decay. Oceanographers and biologists studying living structures such as coral reefs could also benefit from it; 3-D models would enable them to detect how ocean acidification and events like typhoons alter reefs over time. And, of course, Scannon hopes that one day AUVs will lead him to his biggest find, the final B-24, so that a perfect replica of it, too, can be recorded for posterity. For now, it still lies somewhere in the lagoons surrounding Palau, concealed by water and time.
Engineer Mate Rimac Revolutionizes Electric Cars
WSJ. | The young Croatian built the fastest electric car in the world. Now his innovative designs are being licensed by manufacturers building the next generation of supercars.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN WSJ. MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 2013
MATE RIMAC guides the Concept One—a prototype electric sports car he first designed when he was 21 years old—onto a stretch of road in Sveta Nedelja, a suburb west of Zagreb. The cherry-red vehicle is low, sleek and hardly subtle. Stepping gently on the accelerator, Rimac propels the car to 60 mph in less than three seconds. Jerking the steering wheel, he screeches through a roundabout before returning us to the parking lot outside Rimac Automobili—the Croatian engineer's automotive start-up—where he flings the car into a tight circle, pinning me hard against my seat.
"I'm not showing off," says Rimac through a haze of tire smoke. "I want to show you that the technology is reliable enough to do crazy stuff with an electric car. It's not just something that looks pretty at an auto show. We can build it today. We just need scale."
Unofficially, the Concept One is the world's fastest accelerating electric automobile. The car spreads 1,000 hp across four motors—one for each wheel. As the car turns a right corner, the front right wheel can break for a fraction of a second while the rear wheel generates power. It's an innovation that Rimac, now 25, points to as the "kind of stuff you can't do with an engine," and which defines the Concept One, in his self-confident estimation, as "the sports car of the 21st century."
The official Guinness records for the world's fastest accelerating electric automobile, which hang on the wall of the company's airy white-tiled showroom, belong to a converted 1984 E30 BMW parked in the adjacent shop. Rimac uses the boxy green vehicle as a "test mule" for technologies his company develops. He built that car when he was 19. At the time, Rimac had been winning international competitions for an electronic glove he devised in high school that functions as a keyboard and mouse, and came up with an idea for a car mirror system that eliminated blind spots.
After licensing his mirror invention to a European automotive supplier (Rimac is bound by an agreement not to disclose its name), by 2008 he'd earned enough money to buy the used BMW, which he then began entering into "drifting" competitions (a motor sport in which the car goes into a controlled skid). When the engine blew up after a few races, Rimac decided to marry his passion for cars and electronics. He'd always reveredNikola Tesla, the Croatian-born inventor and electrical engineer, and it occurred to Rimac that an electric motor—a source of instant power, free of cumbersome spark plugs and oil filters—would yield a superior sports car. "It wasn't about making the car environmentally friendly," he says. "The performance is just much better."
It took Rimac six months to convert the BMW into an electric car, using off-the-shelf components. Back at the Croatian racetrack, he was mocked. "What are you doing with this washing machine? Can I charge my phone with it?" competitors joked. Something always broke after each race, but Rimac kept tinkering, designing all the parts himself. The car eventually became "quick enough to whoop a Tesla in a street race," as one auto blog reported. By 2010, Rimac's DIY vehicle was trouncing even gasoline-powered cars.
"At that point, it started to get serious," Rimac tells me. A Croatian businessman approached him on behalf of Abu Dhabi's royal family. They wanted to see a prospectus. "They said, 'We want two cars,' " he recalls. "I was like, 'We're just a couple guys in a garage.' " He set to work on the Concept One.
What began as a hobby then turned, almost by accident, into a business. Today, Rimac Automobili employs 22 people, mostly Croatian engineers (the one non-Croatian employee, the company's head of sales, came from Tesla Motors). Thinking it would be wise to hire someone with actual car-making experience, Rimac Automobili initially brought in an engineer from BMW. But his high salary, and the specialization he'd grown accustomed to from working in the car industry, were not a great fit for the company's start-up culture, where the guy who makes the brakes also orders the parts for it.
"It was a learning curve—we made mistakes," Rimac admits. "But eventually I realized we were doing something right: developing cars for a lot less money than big car manufacturers and managing to beat them in many fields. We have an advantage starting with a blank sheet of paper. There's no heritage that we have to incorporate into the design."
For the first year, Rimac, then 22, hobbled along on a shoestring, helped by some seed money from his father—a shopping-center developer—and the promise of investment from Abu Dhabi. "I sold everything I had just to pay the rent," he recalls. In a superstitious mood, Rimac and his girlfriend, Monika Mikac, the company's head of public relations, concocted a reverse incentive: They vowed to swear off two of their biggest vices—chocolate and potato chips—for an entire year if the company finished a prototype for the Concept One by the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show.
When the Concept One debuted in Germany, the industry took notice: The all-wheel-drive vehicle reaches a maximum speed of 190 mph and boasts an average range of 150 miles on a single charge. The power-to-weight ratio is on par with a Formula One engine. Rimac replaced conventional mirrors with cameras, linked by fiber-optic cables, and added a few other luxury flourishes, like self-closing doors.
Most of the components—almost everything but the battery cells and air bags—are developed in-house. Rather than use molds to make the wheels or pedals, as is typical in mass production, two large milling machines cut parts out of solid aluminum blocks, a costly process that enables the company to adapt quickly to design changes. "Only Formula One cars or spaceships are made this way," Rimac explains. "Nikola Tesla had to go to America to be successful. I wanted to stay here to give young Croatians a chance to work on something interesting."
With only one complete commercial vehicle sold to a European car manufacturer, the company was desperate for revenue. What sustains Rimac Automobili is designing and producing various components—electric power trains or battery management systems—for other automotive companies. Recently, Applus Idiada, an automotive engineering company in Spain, commissioned an electric supercar made with the windows and roof of the Concept One but built to different specifications. Rimac has sold batteries to a company that's building levitating trains, and he hints at a breakthrough in the works for "the next generation of braking systems.
"We can design and build prototypes fast and inexpensively, and not just for electric cars. We make chassis, electric parts, molds—all under one roof. But if BMW wants to develop a supercar with an electric power train, the best one on the market is from us," Rimac says. "Our technology could end up in a high-volume product under a different brand. If we had sufficient funding, we probably wouldn't do this kind of stuff. It's a simple matter of survival. Enzo Ferrari started to make road cars just to finance his race cars—he did it to pay the bills."
Building a show car to drive business to its engineering services is a strategy that many auto companies adopt, explains Christoph Stuermer, an industry analyst with IHS Automotive in Frankfurt. "Part of Tesla's business plan is to license out other technologies. There are similarities there," says Stuermer.
Looking ahead, Rimac intends to ramp up production of the Concept One, release a new model every two to three years and keep slashing the sticker price. (The car currently lists for $1 million.) He views his target customer as more of a Bugatti or Ferrari enthusiast, rather than a Tesla driver. Indeed, Rimac brushes off comparisons with Tesla, not just because he believes his company occupies a different market, but because Tesla's $465 million in federal loans places the company on an unequal playing field.
Although Rimac Automobili has carved out novel revenue streams, questions over its financing still dog the company. "The government won't help us, banks won't give us loans and there aren't foreign investors in this region," Rimac says. This hurdle is one shared by scores of other electric automobile upstarts operating out of garages and universities: Capital is scarce. Still, Rimac may be able to get by producing a handful of Concept Ones a year, appealing to that niche of customer that manages to keep high-performance automakers like the Italian supercar manufacturer Pagani afloat. For now, he can keep eating chocolate.