Cameron's souvenir styrofoam cups show the crushing force brought to bear on objects (such as cameras and humans) plunged almost two and a half miles beneath the icy-cold North Atlantic, where the external pressure is nearly 6,000 pounds per square inch, or 400 atmospheres greater than on the surface.
Filming at such depths was doubly daunting for Mike Cameron, the man responsible both for equipment, as head of his brother's Lightstorm Technologies, and for keeping his sibling alive. The design challenge: an externally mounted 35-mm motion-picture camera system that could be remotely operated from within the submersible, articulating through 325 degrees of pan and 175 degrees of tilt at depths as great as 13,000 feet.
First he had to reengineer a camera down to the smallest profile possible in order to reduce implodable volume. "The implosion of even a fist-sized volume of air at Titanic depth would be the equivalent of five sticks of dynamite going off," he explains.
Mike chose an Arriflex camera, already adapted to accept Panavision lenses, and further customized it to run film at two perforations instead of the standard four and calibrated it at half speed, or 12 frames per second. "This effectively doubled the capacity of the small amount of film we were able to squeeze into the magazine - to a grand total of 15 minutes!"
To protect the fragile camera system from atmospheric pressure, Mike commissioned underwater-systems manufacturer Benthos to construct a cylinder of titanium with walls two-thirds of an inch thick. The final design problem: the glass dome that fronted the housing, in addition to being optically correct, had to be strong enough to withstand the crushing pressure as well.
Certain parallels, Mike observes, exist between deep-ocean and space exploration. "In both cases the isolation is one of the biggest dangers," he says. "But the deep ocean's extremes of pressure and temperature are very harsh compared with the vacuum of space. It would have been a lot easier for us to go to Mars."
