This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Dej, jag skulle ju köpa några nya palstält. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, man hade en skribord, jag köpte en sån här, och kontorstolar, och sen hade de en skit snygg tippkont. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till AI-produkten! Ving firar 70 år av resor, och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Hitta våra bästa jubileumserbjudanden på ving.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först.
BBC Sounds. Music radio podcast. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBCIN Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in eighteen seventy two HMS Challenger set out from Portsmouth on a four-year mission around the world to explore the ocean depths and search for new life.
Mae'n wedi'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i' Its discoveries were so vast that they're still being studied today, offering insights into the ever changing oceans that cover so much of our planet and into the health of our planet.
Rydw i mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud. Giles Miller, principal curator of micro paleontology at the Natural History Museum London, and Erica Jones, curator of navigation and oceanography, Royal Museums, Greenwich. Erica Jones. It's sometimes called a voyage into the unknown. What was it in particular that those on the Challenger wanted to know?
Well, the eighteen sixties was a really exciting time for oceanographic research. think that in 1866, that's when the first working transatlantic telegraph cable stretched between Europe and the United States. But even then they really had a lot of questions about what was at the bottom of the sea. They needed more information about the ocean floor. And so there were these practical questions. needed to lay future telegraph cables.
But on the scientific aim, they had so many questions about the deep sea, and a lot of them related to evolution. They had this big question about what could live in the deep ocean. It was this idea that it could possibly be this link. between modern and ancient forms of life. They thought possibly a creature called Bathabus hecli could be on the ocean floor and the origin of all life on the planet. So they really were looking for these
big questions about evolution in the ocean. That was one of the big questions Challenger was looking for. So what was the kickoff? We've talked about the telegraph and we've talked about seeing if there's the origins of life down there. What kicked the thing into action?'Cause it was a massive exp expedition. It was, and I need to go back just a few years to talk about the lead up.
And you think at this time, again, this question of evolution, you had William Carpenter. He was the vice president of the Royal Society and he was looking for these ancient forms of life and their relationship to organisms today, and he worked with Charles Wyvill Thompson. He was also very interested in zoology and evolution. And they were able to work with the Royal Navy on a few shorter voyages. Now this is in the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic.
On two little ships called the Lightning and the Porcupine, and they were able to find life at three and a half thousand meters. And that really sent shock waves through the international community and that really galvanized excitement. uh to put what they called a great circumnavigation expedition to take those techniques of deep sea dredging around the world. Who put it together? Well William Carpenter. He had a lot of political influence.
being the vice president of the Royal Society and Friends in Government. And he worked with the hydrographer of the Navy at the time, and that was George Richards. Richards was interested in those practical questions of telegraph cable lane. but together they really were able to convince the Admiralty that circumnavigation voyage would be a good idea. Again, working with the Royal Society, they took their idea to Parliament.
The funds were approved by the British government and then they allocate a shipment. HMS challenger for the voyage. You've just said a phrase that'll be sweet music to the ears of most people applying to parliament for funds. I took it to Parliament and funds were agreed for a four year voyage around the world, just like that.
They knew the right people to ask. That's for sure. That's right. It was the right place and the right time. Yeah. Would it buy those standards an enormous amount of money? It was. It was no small thing, the things they asked for. I mean, the application to Parliament was fantastic. They only asked for three things.
They asked for a crew, they asked for scientists to go on the voyage, they asked for everything that was needed to carry out all their experiments, and a Royal Navy ship. And that was it. So they were really drawing on the existing resources of the Empire. But that Royal Navy ship and the crew was really essential.
Talking about the ship Sam, Sam Robinson, what did it look like before it became the Challenger, the ship that they took? The ship that they used. So HMS Challenger was built in eighteen fifty eight as a pearl class wooden holder. Corvette. It's got a steam engine, but it's got a vast amount of sails, about sixteen thousand square feet, and it's armed before they take it with twenty-two guns, of which they take all but two off.
and then they replace on the main deck a series of cabins that will become laboratories and this is the nicest part of the ship. This is in the middle and this is towards the aft of this ship, which is about two hundred feet long, it's about forty feet wide. And it's got a crew of about 197, uh about twenty officers. And they build all of these accommodations to take a very small scientific staff of about six.
And all of this work is completed very quickly. But the interesting thing is the challenge has already been around the world. This is not a new vessel. It was bit when it was built it was sent to Mexico. It's been involved in action. It's served on the Australia station. So it's already travelled quite a long way by the time it's c decided that this will be the vessel that's be chosen for the voyage.
And it's a combination of steam and sail that is crucial, is it? If so, why? So i it is it is a ship s equipped with a steam engine. It's about four hundred horsepower steam engine, which is quite standard for the time. But it is primarily a sailing vessel, and to travel long distances uh you would use the sail, and then to hold station to take these uh measurements that the ship was going to take as its scientific survey
You would use the steam engine to hold your stationery in the sea. And you'd also use the engine to get in and out of port and you would use it in an emergency. And that's o that's common at the time for what steam power is capable of. If you're going beyond uh what would be deemed a a a a voyage which could be completely steam powered like crossing the Atlantic. Going further relies on using sail.
Which is also cheap. It it's cheaper to use sail than coal, especially if you need to go somewhere far but you don't need to get there very quickly, which is what the Challenger was going to do. But using coal entailed entailed going to places where there was coal along the way so that they could stock up. Absolutely. There's not a vast amount of space for coal on the ship, so they plot a voyage that we'll use.
what is the great advantage of the British and the Royal Navy in the mid to late nineteenth century, which is its location of coaling stations and naval ports all around the world and they visit quite a lot of these. Such as Such as well they the first one is Lisbon in Portugal, then Gibraltar, uh Halifax, Nova Scotia, uh Melbourne in Australia, Hong Kong, um the Fiji Islands. The British Navy or the Royal Navy has been very good in locating coaling stations.
in all of the places uh that it wants to exert influence. And Challenger as a Royal Navy vessel can make full use of those. There were six scientists on board. Can you tell us something about them? The director and leader of the expedition is Charles Wyvill Thompson, he's the Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh. Uh you have John Murray, who's a naturalist, who's a Canadian born scientist who'd had experience in the Arctic with whalers.
Uh you've got Henry Mossley, who's a a naturalist as well, who's later involved in the Pitt Rivers donation to the University of Oxford. Uh you've also got some non British scientists. You've got Rudolf von Wilmos Schum, who is the is a chemist, he's German. He mit meets Thompson when the North Sea expedition
pops into Edinburgh and he he meets Thompson and he's a very late edition. And then Thompson takes a secretary who is also the official artist, which is a Swiss academic called John James Wilde. You mentioned I think it was a hundred and sixty seven crew. What were they doing? What what j different jobs did they have? You have a usual complement of officers. You obviously can get reduced the crew, the the crew had been bigger when they needed to man guns. You don't need those crew.
So the crew is slightly reduced from what it had been when it had been a fighting ship. But the crew do a whole range of jobs from stoking to to sailing, the sailing crew and stoking crew. You have what were called idlers, which would be your cooks, your chefs, your carpenters, the crew who don't necessarily serve watches but do other jobs. They become really important. in fixing and maintaining scientific instruments on the voyage.
and part of the crew and then you have uh the officers who Provided tasks you would expect like navigation, but they're also the surgeons and you've obviously you've got a captain. So you've got a standard Royal Navy crew minus those who would be fighting men and so you you need a big complement of crew. But you kept two guns. Yeah, there's various reports as to why they kept two guns. I've I've got a suspicion that it was because it was gonna be too difficult to remove them. Also, Challenger
regardless of where it was going, was expected to take out duties that a Royal Navy vessel would do going to these places of hosting dignitaries, firing gun salutes. So you need to have at least some kind of gun, not really for fighting anyone off, that wasn't anticipated. But more for ceremonial reasons. Thank you. Giles Giles Miller, much of what was discovered is in front of you on your desk where you work. Can you tell us what there was and what there is?
That's right. Well I'm extremely privileged to have uh such an amazing collection at the Natural History Museum. How big is it? That's a very difficult question'cause the collections are they're they're distributed amongst
many of my colleagues at the Natural History Museum. I'm I'm in charge of the ocean sediments deposits and that includes you mentioned me having something on my desk. That's a piece of rope which was one of the original pieces of rope used to haul up the deposits from the base of the ocean.
But these collections are spread uh throughout the world. And we did make an attempt, um, through a project run by the Royal Albert Museum in Memorial Museum in in Exeter, um to try and piece them back together virtually so that Somebody can look them up online and see how many they had.
So if you go online you can actually look at HMS Challenger dot net and you can look at some of the items that we found as we were trying to piece those together. But really we were only really scratching the surface and there even now. Yeah, even now, yes. There are I mean, my colleagues are still discovering items even at the Natural History Museum in in far fetched drawers that have Challenger labels on them.
I've got also a temperature, uh a thermometer. Um we've got several of those in in the museum in in a drawer. We we sent one of them round the world, in fact, in our treasures exhibition. We've also got many, many jars of these sediments. We've also got rocks that have been dredged from the bottom, particularly manganese nodules. We've got many m many types of invertebrates which were all t also caught in the dredging nets as they dredged them from the door.
And dr just dredging along the bottom and pulling them up and then poking around'til you find something that can land on your desk. Well I was just listening to Sam mentioning that the about the coal. Actually I I don't think there would be room for any coal because that it was probably full of ropes.
'Cause apparently they took almost a hundred miles of rope with them because they kept losing rope and sometimes instruments because the the ropes would break or get worn and so they were constantly having to replace the rope and it sounds like most of the available spaces in the ship were sort of crammed with extra bits of rope to help them
in their dredging. But they did dredge, they did bring an enormous amount to the surface, out of which we're told to have more than a hundred thousand objects remaining now and still available for enticing new study. When they sent down the it was like they sent down these enormous bags and
While they were doing first of all they would send down a sounding mechanism which would basically be a lump of lead which would sink quickly to the bottom of the ocean. And at that time they would need the engines of the boat to hold in place at exact spots so that they could take a good reading of the depth of the ocean. And they would simply measure how much rope had gone down. The knots. And um at the bottom there would be a small tube which would sample a very small part of sediment.
And after they'd done that they would then send down a dredge and what this is was basically a massive bag with some weight. And then they would drift gradually in in the wind and that would, as the boat moved, trawl some of the ocean ocean sediment. And when they brought that to the surface they found that that was absolutely crammed full of mud. And early in the in the expedition they found that it was this amazing white It was the consistency of of concrete. The one ooze you're talking about.
exclusively this of this creature. These are tiny microscopic things, usually less than a minimum in size. So what was valuable about that? They had found them in other cruiser. Erica was mentioning some earlier cruises just earlier, and they had found these oozes in those cruises. So they were expecting to find that.
But they didn't know whether they would find it across the whole of the ocean. And in fact when they began to dredge they were finding there were variations. Sometimes they had these white oozes. And sometimes it was just mud. So what's the value of them though? Well they contain these microscopic organisms called foraminifera uh which are very sensitive to the climate. So these are floating around in the ocean and they also took
plankton samples from the surface of the ocean at the same time and they were comparing them on ship. And one of the things they discovered that was that th they were finding the same organisms floating in the ocean as they were finding in these oozes. So clearly the bottom sediments w were composed of these sort of planktonic calcifying organisms that were floating around in the ocean at the time. Thank you. Erica Jones again. The world was becoming much more interc interconnected at that time.
How did that relate to the challenge of voyage? Well one thing that was going on at this time was the speed of travel. I mean it was a r a time when global capitalism was expanding and you had steamships trains and the royal mail actually is a big part of the Challenger story. One of the things that Challenger did, talking about related to what Chiles Giles' work is that it was able to collect the largest n amount of data and specimens that ever been collected from the deep ocean at that time.
And how they did it after they collected it from the drudger trawl, they put it on board and preserved it. But then the next trick they had to do was preserved it how in alcohol. Yes, lots of alcohol. They use thousands of gallons of alcohol. Thick jaws? Actually the jars were the ones that were sold to sell sweetmeats. So sort of Victorian
treats and so Charles Wyvill Thompson had acquired these before the voyage, hundreds of jars and boxes ready to be filled with the animals that they discovered. So they they filled up these jars on ship. but there wasn't enough room to store them and the hold. So what they did was they at certain ports of call they would ship these back to Edinburgh for study later on. But the other thing that was really important is that alcohol evaporates.
And these specimens need to get back as quickly as possible before the alcohol evaporated and then they would begin to rot. So they were sent in what was really the FedEx system of the day and take for instance I've studied the story of one mollusk named Carditas asteroides, and you can track its voyage from the Challenger. It leaves at Sydney Sydney, Australia. And it's put in a a case and it it's great, it's fantastic. They had some really good records on Challenger and they they tried to
write down these long lists of everything that they were not putting a thing on uh uh Sydney, then what? Then it went from a steamship to San Francisco. And this was a steamship line that had just been put into operation that year. So I can trace it on that ship. to San Francisco and then from there it was taken on to the American Transcontinental Railroad. Which it only opened in eighteen sixty nine. So these are like really new fast ways of transportation that made it
much faster to send specimens from remote parts of the world. So we're on the east coast with this specimen. Then what? Well, it's taken off the train at New York City and then put on a postal steamer to London and then from there, after it's checked by the Admiralty, it goes to Edinburgh University, where William Turner puts it in the storage room, and that's where he tops up the alcohol, checks that everything's okay,
and amasses the Challenger collection waiting for them to study these animals when they return. It's an extraordinary journey, isn't it? I mean just as a very, very lay person you think why didn't they spill it? Why didn't it break? Wasn't there a crash? Didn't all this Obvious things happened. None of them did. They got the stuff back to Edinburgh. Well, see that's one of the great things about Challengers that other voyages
They had tried to make these collections before. United States Exploring Expedition, they collected a lot of materials, but some of them rotted and giving you an example of the things that can go wrong, they sent their collection back to Washington, D C. and unfortunately that's where a curious administrator opened up the boxes, took them all out,
misplace the labels and there you don't know where they came from. So a lot of things had to happen right for Challenger to get its information in order. Sam Sam Robinson, so we be we've mentioned that the British uh colonies all over the world. that time. Who joined in. Can you give us some examples? Where the colonies get really involved is in welcoming the challenger when it comes into port.
So the very first sense of how important Challenger will be is when it arrives at its first port in Lisbon, which is obviously not a British colony, but it's our closest ally and longest term. And the Portuguese king is invited onto the vessel and and tours it for an hour an entire hour. They're not two months in in Japan, in the port of Yokohama. They are honored with an audience with the Emperor. These are things that are quite unusual and not really been
things that scientists in particular have have been able to have recognition before. They are welcomed by big parties in places like Cape Town. And so they're a big event when they arrive. What bearing did this have on the success of the expedition? They're obviously giving a lot of s a lot of help. I I want to always put it into the opinion of the ordinary sailor. The most exciting thing about coming into port is fresh meat.
So they uh they one of the things that they do is they are re s restocked with with fresh food and they're they fix and do any running repairs. The idea is that the ship will keep moving. I think the biggest thing that is the help is the ability to communicate, to pick up on what Erica's just been saying about specimens.
One of the things that they're also able to take advantage of with the imperial communication network is to send early reports of scientific findings to London which are then published with illustrations.
in scientific journals like Nature, which is not something that's ever been done before. It's not like this expedition sets off, nobody's talking about it. It's not been Rydyn ni'n ei wneud yn ei wneud yn ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud ei wneud Giles, Giles Miller, another discovery was a cosmic dust.
uh micrometeorites under the ocean. What did that reveal? This was one of the surprise discoveries of the expedition. They spent a lot of time when the ship was calm enough looking down microscopes. There's some rather beautiful illustrations of those um scenes. Micrometeorites are falling all the time, so if if you were to go up onto your roof perhaps I I don't recommend you doing that now, but uh to take some sediment or some some dust from a drain pipe you might find a few of them.
And they were falling in the ocean, um or they are falling in the ocean at the moment. What these can tell us is as they fall through the atmosphere, they react with the carbon dioxide and the oxygen in the atmosphere. So by studying them we can tell what the ancient atmospheres were like.
The particular ones for the Challenger are really useful to us at the moment because um we can go back through millions of years of time and take ancient rocks and do the same thing. We can dissolve them up and find these these microscopic cosmic particles. They give us some idea of the age of the universe. Um not necessarily the age, but the the composition of the atmosphere in in earlier times of the universe.
The issue i with those is that of course they've been sit sat at the bottom of the ocean millions of years ago. So what the Challenger shows us is it gives us a window on what might be happening to those while they're sat at the bottom of the ocean. I think one of the things that the Challenger scientists thought was amazing about these feroles is that they contained iron. And'cause there was this question of how in the middle of the Pacific
Do you get iron? Because iron is an element that is absolutely essential. to all life, you know, animals and plants. And so that was one of their questions. How did iron get into the middle of the ocean? And one of the answers was debris falling from space. That was not a an answer that anyone expected. You're you're at sea and and it sometimes it's rough weather and so on. It's a very limited space, however well your planet out. Uh what did they have working methods to work with it?
I think that's a really good question because it reminds us that a voyage at sea, they had to deal with changing weather conditions, environment. Different types of of ocean weather and conditions. And I think one of the things that's also really important to remember is that they learned from people they met along the way. One thing I found in my research is when they went to the Philippines. the challenger scientists were really interested and they wanted to acquire this specific
type of animal. It's a a glass sponge and it's called the Venus flower basket, Upotella. And it only was found at that time in one place in the whole world, and that was off the island of Cebu. So they got to Cebu and they asked the local fisherman where can can we find this glass sponge? So the fishermen showed the challenger scientists where they should dredge and they did so. But as we've talked about, then they had this very heavy iron dredge.
And it crushed and mangled these delicate creatures. And then what the answer was the local fishermen, they had a very special type of dredge that they had developed It was made out of bamboo, it was very lightweight, it had about fifty sort of fish hooks on it, and when the challenger scientists used the fisherman's dredge, it gently pulled these glass sponges from the mud.
Sam, presumably people in uh a long way away we'd say, What's this? Well they knew it was a ship, but what are these people doing? What are they doing here? Was it reciprocal? Did the people on the ship find themselves amazed by what was happening on these remote islands?
Amazed is an interesting concept. I think what they did do, what we can say they did, is when you're at sea for a long time and the vessel's going very slowly and you're taking a station or so you're taking some samples every three or four days, it's quite monotonous. So getting to l any kind of land was quite exciting. And also gathering specimens or doing geographical work such as just walking the land and taking recollections of of what you were seeing.
was quite easy compared to doing any anything at sea. And so every opportunity was taken when they went on land to stretch their legs. And some of the things they did was to take photographs of local people, local scenes, local animals. They also it was said that Royal Navy officers were very keen to shoot.
as much as they could shoot, so they would happily f um take their guns and and and collect as many samples as possible. Samples are one. Uh the best superstitious one was the the sailors didn't like anyone to kill an albatross.
So they would but but if an albatross would come near, it was very difficult for for gentlemen who have a sporting persuasion to not want to shoot albatross. But they'd take any animal that basically they they could they could hunt and they could take a specimen sample of and it and it wasn't just necessarily the scientists
There were scientists on this voyage, but the Royal Navy had spent over many years encouraged its officers, especially its surgeons, to take up scientific pursuits and scientific interests. and so many of the officers themselves had an interest in collecting animals or seeing or viewing or castling new animals. And it was it was the sport almost of the Victorian age to
collect all sorts of natural history. So it it was quite common in the Victorian era to do this and officers in particular took every opportunity to when they could. Giles, why did they want to measure the temperature? The first reason was that it was an unknown quantity. But um the main reason I would be that um if you're laying cables at the bottom of the ocean you'd like to know what the conditions are down at those those depths.
'Cause a little bit of expansion and your cable could break or or contraction or however. So that was one of the main reasons for sampling and working out the temperature. But also the things that they were dredging up from the deep, they were very interested to know how they lived. How were they able to live down in those in those conditions? What was the temperature like in those conditions? And also all the way through the water column.
And they were also studying currents um through the ocean, so it was interesting to study some of the temperature variations in some of those areas where the currents were well formed. The main str surprising conclusions would be that at the bottom There was an environment that was okay for things to live. Many of the conclusions before they left were that that they wouldn't find anything. There'd be nothing there and it would be too cold and too dark. to be able to find anything at all.
Yeah, uh this is the Azoic theory which had been put uh around by a a naturalist called Edward Forbes who'd said that there couldn't possibly be life below three hundred meters. and so they w or three hundred fathoms. They weren't expecting to find uh much down there and then recent scientific voyages just before the Challenger had started to disprove this theory. So you wanted to at this time and one of the things that Thompson particularly wanted to do was not just collect specimens of of life
but also measure the physical properties of the ocean to understand how life might live in these quite extreme environments. And one of the things that they did was to send down a live rabbit to five hundred Tavams to see what would happen to the body.
So they they were very interested in what kind of life could live down there and what c the conditions were like and temperature was one way of understanding how the conditions were were different to what they were. They were very aware that there was a lot of pressure down there from sending bottles down that came back crushed. But they didn't necessarily have any r reliable way of measuring exactly what that pressure was.
Along the way we told that people jumped ship and new people came on. How did that how did that operate? And why? Why did they want to jump ship? I think we've alluded to that one of the important things about HMS Challenger is that it had steam power.
So every time that they were using the sounder or the dredge, they were operating under steam power. And the way this worked was they had six furnaces in the hold and those had to be filled with coal by hand continuously while they were sounding or dredging. Take for instance when they were dredging, that was something that could take all day. They would raise steam around six AM. They'd finally bring up this dredge of all the things from the bottom of the ocean and the mo the mud about
five PM in the evening. So during that whole time there were men in the hold shoveling coal. And we know from contemporary accounts the temperatures could reach between forty and some say seventy degrees. So it was extremely hot, noisy, it was a dangerous place to work. And so throughout the voyage we know that about sixty men did desert
And recent documents have shown me that it was mostly stokers that were deserting along the way. But on the other hand, they were also picking people up as people left. And I think it's interesting to note that not only did they have the six scientists on board who are rightfully famous, they also had assistants who were helping them. And one of these assistants, his name is William Penabar, and we know about him'cause we actually have two photographs of him, one on deck.
And one in the Bermuda's And he was a black man for Bermuda that joined the voyage there and he was working in the analysing room all the way until Hong Kong. where he died. So we don't know much more about him, but so people were leaving but also joining Challenger throughout the voyage. The voyage took four years, which I think is worth reminding our listeners of in case I thought you had a long time to be
stuck on a ship going round the world, whatever condition. Anyway, that's rather diminishing it. It was a heroic event. Were they still in touch with the world?
What they were doing was very much connected to the expansion of what would become the red line, which was the British telegraph cables going around the world. And this was a really important thing. So I think there was that aspect to it, but again through as a scientific voyage, exploring the deep ocean, not only was it exciting, but it was breaking new ground.
And as Sam mentioned, they were sending reports back to the Royal Society during the voyage and that information was being communicated to people that way. Also in newspapers, I think everyday people were interested in what Challenger was doing. And Charles Wyvill Thompson, he was also a great advocate of
giving the science to the people, this popularization of science. And so they were speaking on two different levels. One to the scientists, but also trying to tell people about what they were doing to educate the British public. And also tried to justify all the money that they were spending on this voyage. Was there any rumblings back in London or Edinburgh that all this money was uh
Going down the dry as it were. Uh not rumblings that I know of. There was certainly concern with how much this was going to this was costing. Um I the the r the justification for the supporting the telegraph surveying is it's something the Royal Navy had had taken on through the eighteen sixties as the US Civil War had taken the US out of that. And the Royal Navy had done a lot of surveying work.
for telegraph companies. Where there is the most concern is probably after the expedition with publishing the reports. The reports are published by Her Majesty's stationary office and they cost an absolute fortune. And late much later John Murray claims that the amount of science produced by The Voyager's more than paid for itself. But still as late as the early twentieth century people are complaining about how much money
this voyage has cost and continues to cost. It takes until the eighteen nineties for the final volumes of the report, which amount in the end to fifty volumes to be published. Char Charles, can we talk about these strange nodules that they found round around uh Objects like shark's teeth or plankton shells? Yeah, so they found them uh pretty much everywhere that they went. I mean they got a bit bored with them after a while because they found so many.
So we do have them in our collections. They're about the size of a fi a potato sort of size. I mean they could be larger than sometimes smaller. When you cut them open with a rock saw you find these concentric rings inside. And they're composed of um a series of manganese and iron hydroxides with some other minor elements such as cobalt and nickel and copper. So does that make them very valuable? They are, yes, very much so. If you imagine how much that might be worth if you mined the entire
nodules from the entire ocean, that would be quite a considerable amount of of resource. With such a huge gathering of information, Erica, um how was this preserved back in Edinburgh? How do they find the space and the people to look after it. They had a lot of energy in the beginning and Charles Wyvell Thompson, he had a plan. So in May 1876, he set up what was called the Challenger Office.
And that was a place where they would distribute the specimens for study to experts, and as Sam mentioned, as a place to organize the publication of the Challenger Scientific Reports. And one thing they did as part of this distribution of specimens was to involve experts not only in Britain, but also the United States and throughout Europe. And that was something that was actually very controversial at the time, again going back to this idea of this very expensive British voyage.
And so there was some debate in the press, but then the scientif heavy scientific heavyweights such as Darwin came to support the uh Charles Weivell Thompson's view that it should be an international study. These should be the group of experts who know these specimens the best. And so that took a lot of organization sending these out to the right people. And that took just the first year.
Sam, can Sam Robinson, can you tell us what changed because of the four years voyage of the Challenger? So it's often said that the Challenger is the foundation of of modern oceanography, and that's a complicated kind of statement to make. One of the things that the challenger was doing was actually answering a lot of questions that have been posed since the eight eighteen fifties. One of the things that it changed was these publications.
So this fifty volumes of reports which are incredibly vast. detailed, become the foundation of many scientific institutions dedicated to oceanography that are founded after the eighteen seventies. Edinburgh itself becomes a major site for ocean sciences and international collaboration into the early twentieth century. that it definitely Dead was
Although this comes to an end. One of the things he did was put the Royal Navy onto a continuous uh mission to continue to uh chart and sound the deep sea. You've got to understand one of the thing two things that I think Ch uh Challenger did that have seemed really mundane but really important.
Is mariners before the Challenger don't really need to do depth sounding beyond a hundred fathoms because they're not they dep they originally are depth sounding in case the ship runs into rocks or runs into shores. So the it becomes a continuous thing after challenges to start to take deep sea soundings, which had been done before, but it becomes more common and people start to develop techniques that improve dropping a lead on the line.
The other thing that Giles was saying is they find a lot of these specimens everywhere. that's an important finding. To discover that the the natural biosphere of the ocean is the same all over the ocean, one ocean, that starts to become an idea that's seeded in ocean sciences and the For the next fifty years oceanographers work very hard to understand whether we have one ocean or we have separate oceans and that's
a debate that's not n not really closed until after the Second World War when oceanographers really decide that they're dealing with one ocean and you can find things in all of the oceans and it's it's very similar sort of environment. We rather neglected one of their purposes which was to speed the development of the international telegraph. Well what we can see is that the expansion of the telegraph network between
eighteen seventies and eighteen ninety was phenomenal. And Challenger was one part of this. But we have charts in our collection at the National Maritime Museum where you can see that Challenger's information has been added to charts that would later be used for ships for cable laying. So Challenger's information is definitely part of this project of such an expansion of the telegraph cable network. by the end of eighteen nineties. And that's particularly beyond the Atlantic.
So a lot of this work has been laying cables in the Atlantic. One of the things that the Challenger does in a very deliberate way is zigzag its way across the Pacific. to think about how we might lay telegraph cables in those areas. So it's about expanding that telegraph uh ocean telegraphs to more than just the Atlantic and challenges the beginning of that sort of work and that sort of hydrography work.
Charles, what would you say from uh about the legacies of the Challenger and the pr and with the work you do? Well, as a curator, the collections I th I think are still remain to be fascinating. Um an example I would give is that um at the Natural History Museum when you're when you're walking in the galleries you wouldn't know that underneath there are laboratories where we have C T scanners, for example, and there are scientists scanning natural history objects all the time.
So one of the things that we've been doing is to scan some of these tiny foraminiferal shells. and we've been able to scan some of the Challenger shells and compare them with a similar voyage over a hundred and forty years later, the Tara expedition. And they were able to we were able to look at the thickness of the shells and and compare the the oceans from that time and from the Challenger time. And one of the um conclusions that we've come to is that it's been quite difficult
for the foraminifera to to secrete their shells. The thel shells are much significantly thinner in the present ocean than they were in the Challenger time. That's likely to be I mean our conclusion was that that was to do with ocean acidification and that because of the acidification of the oceans it's harder for those to um to calcify. Obviously we needed a lot more data and the Challenger collections are perfectly placed for providing that information
Not just from the one example that we've done so far, but from the whole of the ocean um that was surveyed by the Challenger. So it's still this this time on it's th this length of time on it's still a valuable resource? Absolutely, said I mean some some of the methods that were used were rather crude when we've mentioned the dredging and the trawling. Um and sometimes those um other than historical value those collections can be not quite so useful.
But on the other hand, um you would never be allowed to dredge or trawl some of those areas of the world now. It it simply wouldn't be allowed. So the collections that we have Well, by dredging you are destroying the ocean bottom b basically. they're unlikely to get to give you that permission to dredge. Any final thoughts, you Sam and you, Erica?
Thinking about one of the amazing things they did was this collection of data and materials from around the world. And one of their early questions was the distribution of life.
And I think one of the most interesting reports was actually published after the Challenger Report in eighteen ninety six by John Murray. And what he did was he looked at all of the specimens that've been collected by Challenger where they were placed in the world and especially comparing those found at northern and southern latitudes. and what he came up with, which I think is one of his most abs astounding discoveries.
was through the movement of these animals, where they were found, tracing lines of evolution. He came up one of the I think he was one of the very first people to Postulate the idea that the oceans in the past were shallower and warmer than they are today, which of course we know is true. And so there you have it. his work really showed that the ocean was not this ancient, unchanging environment, was but it was dynamic like the land and was a place of evolution and change.
I think ocean historians are gonna debate for forever how important the challenger was. uh for the history of ocean science and the foundation of oceanography. I think what's really interesting and fascinating is that a hundred and fifty years later these specimens are still providing new scientific insights. Well, that's a shaking your spear in the air ending. Th thank you all very much. Thanks to Erica Jones, Giles Miller and Sam Robinson, and our studio engineer Steve Greenwood. Next week
It's Dragons, Siegfried, Rheingold, and Attila the Hun in the medieval German epic The Niebel Lungenlied. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not say that you'd like to have said? There's a subject that's often left out of histories of maritime voyages and that's women.
Women were definitely part of the Challenger expedition. And if we think of the Challenger report as being its legacy that passed down its research. to scientists over hundreds hundred and fifty years, women were a big part of making that production of those volumes happen. For one example, Elizabeth Gouland, she was a celebrated artist at the time, also a feminist. Her work can be found in the National Portrait Gallery. She created some really fantastic illustrations.
that you may have seen associated with challengers, such as the sailors on deck wrestling with a shark or demonstrating how to use the deep sea lead and line. And so those images which we see on the internet today, those were made by Elizabeth Gouland. And just another point about women who literally made the Challenger report, looking at where the reports were published. thirty thousand pages of text.
Those were printed at Neal and Company in Edinburgh. I was able to look at their company records and photographs. And a lot of their staff were women and some children. So women were the typesetters of the Challenger Report and literally running the steam presses which made the reports that we're reading today.
uh specimens and collections was really controversial in the eighteen seventies. A lot of scientists who'd not necessarily been directly involved in the challenger but were British scientists felt that they should get their hands on them first and they shouldn't be sent off to all the experts around the world.
But Thompson was adamant and I think Eric can correct me in this if I get any of this wrong, but Thompson was adamant that the very best scientists in the world needed to uh be the be looking at these specimens because they need we needed the very best science. And we couldn't just just make this British. So at the end the specimens are sent far and wide with the intention of them coming back into the British Museum at the end, not all of them make it back. There are lots of duplicates.
But there was a bit of a controversy, particularly with British scientists, that that these specimens were being sent abroad before they were able to look at them. Yeah, it's very interesting you mentioned that and being spread wide. Um and the sediment and we have that problem with the sediment collections because it's very easy to subsample them.
So you'll find that there are lots of people who say they've got some sediment from the Challenger because you could just put a spoon into the bottle and put it into another bottle and then distribute it around.
Some of the collections we have you open a cupboard and there are literally tens of these massive great jars full of sediment in in them, so It it has been very easy to distribute and so there are lots of people who who can quite rightly say they have challenger materials in their collections, in their museums. or in their private collections all all over the world.
Definitely that's a big part of the Challenger legacy. Not only the Challenger report, but the materials that went around the world. And not only did the scientists perhaps keep back some of the specimens which Thompson gave to them, But it was also this it was a program in the eighteen nineties where the Natural History Museum sent out what they call the duplicates. To universities and other museums around the world. And they did this into uh to further the science.
of ocean science in the end of the nineteenth century. And so some of these specimens ended up at small universities and not just Oxford or Cambridge. And it allowed students to read the challenger reports, look at the illustrations, and then see specimens that they could then compare for further analysis. And this was a way of sharing information and furthering research, which is one of the real goals of John Murray. That's why he gave detailed instructions on
the techniques they used and also wanted to have such great illustrations. So it all went together the sort of instructions, the materials, it was really set out for students and future researchers to take this information further. This the birth of modern oceanography. It's that. It's it's it's teaching materials and learning materials and research collections. mae'n cael eu bod yn ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl.
And was it the first on that scale of ocean ocean uh adventures as it were? Absolutely. That's the that is the amazing thing about Challenger. They had the largest collection of deep sea materials. acquired at that time and it wouldn't be replicated until much later and it was because of the cost. And voyages that happen after a challenge or thinking about
the USS Blake, they were concentrated on smaller areas such as the Atlantic. And so there were voyages that happened after Challenger that were very important, but those tended to concentrate in specific smaller areas. Do you think it's anything like it is likely to happen again, Giles? I mentioned the Tara earlier. I mean that's a they're they're continuing to collect materials from the from plankton from from the oceans, but not necessarily dredging the the bottoms as the Challenger did.
So there are sort of lower levels expeditions, but I I think it's very unlikely that the scale and the breadth of the collections that they made and the breadth of the scientific expertise on board Mae'r ffordd yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r
Um, I don't think so,'cause um the modern day um method of of studying the ocean bottoms would be to send down a submersible, for example, where you could go and you could potentially collect small amounts or you could collect individual
ymwneud â llawer o oceaniaeth yn ymwneud â'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un o'r un
And also video cameras they're using today. And that's another link with Challenger, that they had an official photographer on board. And of course back then nineteenth century photography wasn't a great fit for oceanography, but Video cameras are such an important part of modern day oceanography. You can send a video camera down and be looking around and not have to dredge. I think ocean science has become more mission oriented. It's a lot more focused on particular questions.
There are a whole variety of reasons, particularly you mentioned funding earlier on. I think funding is one reason why we've had to you have to be more results driven. You can't be just as curiosity driven perhaps now. Um but I mean there's a lot more ocean science happening now around the world than Challenger did.
And I I think one example is is we also don't use ships so much anymore. We can use satellites to some extent, but we can also use remote sensing. So um I'll mention the Argo project, which is a use of floating buoys that sink take temperature measurements, depth measurements, pressure measurements, come back up after a number of days and then uplink their data to a satellite, then sync again and repeat the process.
that project in its first phase uh generated as much data as all of ocean science had created beforehand and that was just in a few years at the turn of the twenty first century. So the way that we do ocean science is now very different. It's not that we couldn't do another challenger, it's that we wouldn't necessarily do it in the in that exact same way. We'd use different set of tools.
Just one thing springs to mind actually mentioning all those different methods of um looking at the ocean bottoms. Um the integrated ocean drilling project. has been drilling the ocean since about the nineteen fifties and they've got a very good coverage of the entire ocean bottoms. So instead of trawling trawling and dredging, they've been drilling and and able to collect the very top surface of the ocean. at at that time and also the sediments going down into the the depths of the oceans.
And those are really useful. For example, looking at the foruminifera can tell us about changes in the climate a across all those different areas of the oceans, across millions of years. So for example, the last glacial periods, they can be really instrumental in showing us climate variations towards those and how the planets and the oceans have recovered from those periods. So the challenge goes on. Well thank you all very much indeed. Now we might get a cup of tea if we're lucky.
In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. About why your mortgage rate is going up, unsure of what causes inflation, or befuddled. Dans I'm Tim Harford, and in my new Radio 4 podcast, Understand the Economy, I'm taking you back to basics. I'm going to explain all the complex financial terms you're hearing in the news as clearly as I can. Inflation, interest rates, growth, bonds, banks, I'll explain it all. Understand the economy. Available now on BBC Snap.
Parodontax Active Gum Repair är en daglig tankkräm som börjar reparera blöd. Och inflammerat tandköt inom en.