Mid Lancs Sub Aqua

The younger Haldane found the first world ‘a very enjoyable experience’ and freely admitted that he ‘enjoyed the opportunity of killing people’. He was himself wounded twice. After the war he became a successful popularizer of science and wrote 23 books (as well as over four hundred scientific papers). His books are still thoroughly readable and instructive, though not easy to find.

His father’s principle interests concerned miners and poisoning, the younger Haldane became obsessed with saving sub mariners and divers from the unpleasant consequences of their work. With Admiralty funding, he acquired a decompression chamber that he called a ‘Pressure Pot’. This was a metal cylinder into which three people could be sealed and subjected to tests of various types, all painful and nearly all dangerous. Volunteers might be required to sit in ice water while breathing ‘aberrant atmosphere’, or subject to rapid changes of pressurisation. In one experiment, Haldane himself simulated a dangerously hasty ascent to see what would happen. What happened was that the dental fillings in his teeth exploded. ‘Almost every experiment’, Norton writes, ‘ended with someone having a seizure, bleeding or vomiting.’ The chamber was virtually sound proof, so the only way for the occupants to signal unhappiness or distress was to tap insistently on the chamber wall or to hold up notes to a small window.

On another occasion, while poisoning himself with elevated levels of oxygen, Haldane had a fit so severe that he crushed several vertebrae. Collapsed lungs were a routine hazard. Perforated eardrums were quite common, too; but Haldane reassuringly noted in one of his essays, ‘the drum generally heals up; and if the hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is quite a social accomplishment.’

What was extraordinary about this was not that Haldane was willing to subject himself to such risk and discomfort in the pursuit of science, but that he had no trouble talking colleges and loved ones into climbing into the chamber too. Sent on a simulated descent, his wife had a fit that lasted thirteen minutes. When at last she had stopped bouncing across the floor, she was helped to her feet and sent home to cook the tea. Haldane happily employed whoever happened to be around, including on one memorable occasion a former Prime Minister of Spain, Juan Negrin. Dr Negrin complained afterwards on a minor tingling and ‘a curious velvety sensation on his lips’ but otherwise seems to have escaped unharmed. A similar experiment with oxygen depravation left Haldane without feeling in his buttocks and lower spine for six years.

Among Haldane’s many specific preoccupations was nitrogen intoxication. For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers have been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or to decide to have a smoke break. If also produced wild mood swings. In one test Haldane noted, the subject ‘alternated between depression and elation, at one moment begging to be decompressed because the felt "bloody awful" and the next laughing and attempting to interfere with his colleague’s dexterity test’. In order to measure the rate of deterioration in the subject, a scientist had to go into the chamber with the volunteer to conduct simple mathematical tests. But after a few minutes, Haldane later recalled, ‘the tester was usually as intoxicated as the testee, and often forgot to press the spindle on his stop watch, ot to take proper notes’. The cause of the inebriation is even now a mystery. It may be the same thing that causes alcohol intoxication, but as no-one knows for certain what causes that, we are none the wiser. At all events, without the greatest care, it is easy to get in trouble once you leave the surface world.