Hannes Keller's 1,000' Dive

[Sam Miller III]

Per Sam Miller, 111:
I recall Leo stating the shooter is still on death row, is now in his 70s As I also recall the wife received life and the step daughters rather lengthy prison terms.

Per
@tomfcrist

His wife got out in 15 years (had cancer...humanitarian release 1998). At least one of the stepdaughters served less than 3 years.

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\Tom

Interesting !
You information/post completes the saga …
From what source did you obtain the information ?


Sam Miller, III

 

[Oceanaut]

Excerpt from Dr Val Hempleman’s letter to the author of October 29, 1993 on Hannes Keller’s decompression procedures:

A few years after the Keller episode had faded away, I met him socially and we discussed his past diving successes and failures. He said to me that when he came to fulfil the terms of his contract with the USN Experimental Diving Unit (Washington) he was so confident of the correctness of his ideas following the trials at Toulon, with Cousteau as a distinguished observer, that he offered to complete 20 minutes at 700'/213M instead of the originally agreed 10 minutes. However, the USN turned down this alteration to the contract and Keller said that refusal was one of the luckiest pronouncements for him, because he never succeeded with 20 minutes at 700'/213M!

After testing Keller-like decompressions, it became clear that most normal men seemed able to complete them without trouble, but if the procedures failed they generally gave rise to serious forms of decompression sickness; so this approach had to be abandoned as unacceptable.

I offered an explanation of these facts which has met with general acceptance. The basic idea is that when a decompression occurs a bubble is formed, which takes time to grow to a possibly trouble-provoking size by acquiring gas from the tissues in its immediate surroundings. If the rate of removal of dissolved gas from the tissues surrounding the bubble can be made sufficiently rapid, then the entry of gas molecules into the bubble during its growth is reduced; and in the optimal case can prevent it reaching a critical size.

One way to ensure rapid removal of dissolved tissue gas is to establish a large pressure gradient from tissue to blood by instituting a big drop in the pressure of gas being breathed. There is thus competition between gas being rapidly eliminated via the blood (and lungs) and gas rapidly diffusing into, and enlarging, the bubble. This is a highly unstable form of ‘beat the bubble’ decompression, which either succeeds dramatically or fails catastrophically.

The reason 10 minutes on the bottom succeeded but 20 minutes failed is that too much gas had been acquired after 20 minutes to be eliminated rapidly before bubble growth supervened.

 

[JohnN]

I didn't think of that. Just makes it even more amazing!

(I kinda knew what a slide rule was, but had never seen one. But d*mn, how old are you? According to what I just Googled, slide rules stopped being used when Hewlett-Packard came out with the first handheld electronic calculator in 1972.)

Hey I resemble that remark!! When the HP35 was introduced, IIRC it was $350 about $2150 in today's dollars according to the interweb. Quite a fortune and out of reach for most mere mortals.

A bit of trivia about HP and Reverse-Polish notation. . . as I understand it, the engineers didn't have sufficient memory available to parse equations, so some smart marketing dude/dudette made it a feature that you pre-parsed the equation for the calculator