the.com/diving helmet
A copper bubble that lets you walk on the seafloor like an astronaut who took a wrong turn.
means A rigid metal headpiece, classically of copper or brass, sealed to a diving suit and fed surface air through a hose, letting a diver breathe and work underwater for extended periods.
from A plain compound of "diving" and "helmet." "Dive" comes from Old English "dūfan/dyfan," to plunge or sink, and "helmet" is a diminutive of "helm," the old word for a protective head-covering, traceable through Germanic roots tied to the idea of covering or concealing (a cousin of words meaning "to hide"). The object itself grew out of early-19th-century efforts to seal a diver's head in breathable air; the famous closed-suit version is usually credited to Augustus Siebe, whose design fixed the helmet to a watertight suit and made true seafloor walking practical.
- Brass weight
- Often over 50 pounds, useless above water
- Air supply
- Hand-pumped from the surface via hose
- Deadly silence
- Cut the hose, and you suffocate slowly
- Twelve bolts
- Standard model bolted to the dress suit
- Squeeze danger
- Pressure loss could crush a diver inward
kirby morgan 17b — commercial diving helmet used by north sea oil rig workers since the 1970s
hard hat diving helmet — standard copper and brass helmet used in bridge construction and salvage diving, particularly in the delaware river and hudson river projects