Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Bathysphere
/ˈbæθɪsfɪər/noun
A steel sphere lowered on a cable to carry observers into deep water.
The Greek roots
βαθύς
bathýs
deep
σφαῖρα
sphaîra
ball, sphere
Literally: “deep ball”
The story of the word
William Beebe named it in 1930 for what it was: a deep ball. He and Otis Barton had a steel shell cast with walls an inch and a half thick and three fused quartz windows, and in 1934 they were winched 923 metres down off Bermuda inside it. The thing had no propulsion whatever. It was a sphere on a string, and the string was the entire safety plan.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1930
Same family
bathyscaphebathymetrysphereatmospherehemisphere
In a sentence
Beebe described fish nobody had seen before, shouting the details up a telephone line from inside the bathysphere.