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Chuông lặn >

Thiết kế chuông

Cách hoạt động của Chuông lặn ngực

bởi Manuel B. Carvalho

1.0 Bối cảnh lịch sử

Chuông lặn sông Chestatee là một hiện vật hàng hải độc đáo được sử dụng để khai thác vàng dưới nước. Tuy nhiên,
công nghệ của nó bắt nguồn từ quá khứ xa xưa vì mong muốn được đi dưới nước có lẽ đã luôn tồn tại: săn tìm
thức ăn, khám phá hiện vật, kho báu bị chìm, sửa chữa tàu (hoặc đánh chìm chúng!), Và có lẽ chỉ để quan sát sinh vật
biển . Tuy nhiên, cho đến khi con người tìm ra cách thở dưới nước, mỗi lần lặn nhất thiết phải ngắn và rầm rộ.

Một chuông lặn là một buồng kín được lơ lửng dưới nước như một máy trạm cho một hoặc nhiều thợ lặn; nó sẽ
làm mới các thợ lặn bằng không khí mà không cần phải lên mặt nước, cho phép thợ lặn ở dưới nước trong thời gian
dài. Một thợ lặn có thể để chuông trong một hoặc hai phút để thu thập bọt biển, ngọc trai hoặc khám phá đáy, sau đó
quay trở lại trong một thời gian ngắn cho đến khi không khí trong chuông không còn thở được nữa. Người thợ lặn
sử dụng nguồn không khí này để ở dưới nước lâu hơn mức có thể.

Ở dạng đơn giản nhất, bộ máy này được đặt tên vì giống với một chiếc chuông, ở chỗ nó hẹp ở phía trên và mở ở phía dưới. Khái
niệm về một chiếc chuông lặn đã có từ xa xưa với người Hy Lạp cổ đại. Aristotle (384-322 trước Công nguyên) đã viết về một
thiết bị như vậy trong cuốn sách XXXII Những vấn đề của ông nói rằng “chúng cho phép các thợ lặn hô hấp tốt như nhau
bằng cách thả một cái vạc xuống; vì điều này không làm đầy nước, nhưng giữ lại không khí, vì nó bị ép thẳng xuống nước. "

Theo truyền thuyết , Vua Macedonian, Alexander Đại đế , đã sử dụng thợ lặn phá dỡ để loại bỏ các
chướng ngại vật dưới nước khỏi bến cảng trong cuộc vây hãm Tyre (Liban) nổi tiếng năm 1332
trước Công nguyên của ông. Nó đã báo cáo rằng Alexander mình thực hiện một số lặn trong một
ngày
cái chuông kính lặn để quan sát các công việc cơ bản dở dang như mô tả trong 16 kỷ vẽ ở bên trái.

Trong thời kỳ Phục hưng, Leonardo Da Vinci đã mô tả trong cuốn sách “Codex Atlanticus” của
mình, một thiết bị thở cho phép thợ lặn ở dưới nước trong thời gian dài. Vào năm 1535, nhà vật lý
người Ý, Guglielmo de Lorena, đã sử dụng một chiếc chuông lặn từ một thiết kế của Leonardo da
Vinci để thu hồi các đồ vật bị chìm từ hai trong số các phòng trưng bày bị chìm ở Caligula từ đáy Hồ Nemi . Thiết bị này về cơ
bản là một chiếc "chuông" lớn đặt trên vai người dùng và có một ống chạy từ bề mặt vào chuông để dẫn không khí trong lành vào
để người dân có thể hít thở.

Thiết kế chuông lặn sẽ không đạt đến điểm khí hậu của nó cho đến thế kỷ 17 khi Tiến sĩ Edmond
Halley , người nổi tiếng về sao chổi, đã cải tiến thiết kế d esign bằng cách sử dụng một hệ thống bổ
sung không khí để khắc phục ảnh hưởng của áp suất khí quyển. Bản khắc ở bên trái từ Bảo tàng Hàng
hải Quốc gia, London mô tả việc sử dụng.

Không khí được thêm vào chuông từ các thùng chứa chì riêng biệt được hạ xuống từ con tàu phía trên.
Một vòi từ thùng dẫn đến chuông, nơi một thợ lặn bên trong chuông có thể chỉ cần vặn van để cho
không khí trong lành từ thùng khi nước đầy qua một lỗ ở đáy buộc không khí lên và ra vào chuông. Các
thùng được kéo lên mặt nước để đổ đầy và thả trở lại. Bằng cách này, hầu như tất cả nước có thể được
đẩy ra khỏi chuông, cho phép các thợ lặn hoạt động trong điều kiện gần như khô ráo. Không khí hôi
thối ấm áp được thoát ra khỏi lỗ thoát khí ở đỉnh chuông. Chuông của Halley hoạt động ở độ sâu điển
hình từ 20 đến 60 feet.

Nhà khoa học người Anh John Smeaton đã phát minh ra một máy bơm khí lặn hoạt động được vào năm
1788 để thay thế các thùng.
Throughout the nineteenth century various designers built bells of ever-increasing size and complexity. These later bells were made
of cast iron and very large and heavy compared to the traditional wooden diving bells. Although the diving bell allowed for the
exploration of underwater depths longer than any other apparatus its main disadvantage is that it needed be pulled up to the surface
for the workers to be replaced which is a time and energy consuming process.

Later designs connected the diving bell with the surface by means of a turret that served as an air-lock. Personnel and equipment
could then pass through the airlock, equalizing pressure, on their way to and from the diving-bell. These bells are also known as
Caisson bells but the terms are often used interchangeably. The earliest air-lock design [ref 1] apparently is due to John Williams of
Exeter, England who in 1691 petitioned a patent for a "submerged chamber. communicating with the surface by a rigid tube, up and
down by which persons might pass." Further improvements continued such as those by Col. Pasley [ref 2] who, in the early 1850's,

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proposed to attach boat shaped ends to a diving bell in order to prevent the considerable vibrations when diving bells where used in
rapid moving streams.

In 1862, Bindon Blood Stoney, Chief Engineer of Dublin's Port and Docks, proposed using a 90 ton bell as
part of a process for deepening and laying huge cement blocks for the foundation of the North Wall Harbor
in Dublin, Ireland making it a deep water port. The bell chamber was rectangular box twenty by twenty
feet, with six and a half feet of headroom inside. The overall height of the bell including the three foot
diameter shaft and airlock chamber was forty-four feet. Working in compressed air may not have been
fully understood by the crews working in the bell as there are several accounts of men suffering with ear
trauma and bleeding from the nose and ears. The project was completed in the mid-1880s but the bell was
used several other times until the 1950s. Today, the restored bell, seen at right, stands in Dublin's Sir
John Rogerson’s Quay.

New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Industrial
World, used a caisson diving bell, basically large open bottomed wooden boxes, shown at
left, for the construction of its pier foundation. The work of
preparing the site of the foundation of the Brooklyn tower was
commenced January 3, 1870 using an oblong form caisson
measuring 102 feet by 172. Its top was 22 feet thick made of dense
Southern pitch-pine in timbers twelve inches square. The bolts
and angle- irons of the massive 3,000 ton device alone weighed
250 tons.

Workers, 30-50 per each eight hour shift, entered the caisson through an air lock tube to reach the
pressurized work chamber, shown right, where they dug away at the sand and rock on the river bottom until
reaching bedrock 78 feet below the surface. Stone was added to the top of the caisson as it went down and it eventually was filled
with hydraulic concrete becoming a permanent part of the tower foundation when the project was completed in 1883.

2.0 The Diving Bell

It is in this technological milieu, where diving bells have been used to lay harbor
and lighthouse foundations, building docks, deepening harbors and the salvage
of wrecks, that Philologous H. Loud in 1875 acquires his Diving Bell for mining
gold from the Chestatee River bottom gravels. Where and when this idea
exactly came to him we can find no documentation. It is known that in 1852 the
San Joaquin Diving Bell Company attempts to use this method during the
California gold rush. Loud being an educated man plus the history of gold
mining in the family [A Loud Gold Mining Company still exists today in White
Co., GA] it’s easy to imagine that the thought could have easily come to him.
This would be particularly so after the Civil War and the difficult economic
conditions generally throughout the South. The mix was right for trying to
enhance the family’s net worth in a unique way.

What is known is that in Aug. 27th, 1872 the Georgia Legislature incorporated
the Georgia Gold Mining Company with $10,000 in capital stock and gave the
exclusive right to Loud and four other people to work for precious metals on any
state property for a period of thirty years. In 1875 the machinery for the Diving
Bell arrived in Dahlonega and a boat to carry it was built of Southern Yellow
Pine. The diving bell is constructed of ¼ inch boilerplate iron panels forged at
the Pottstown Iron Works in Pottstown, PA according to forge marks on the
panels. The panels are shaped and riveted together to form air tight joints. The front of the bell is wedge shaped in order to break
river currents and reduce turbulence inside the bell. A pressure equalizing entry tube with two inner doors allows workers to enter
the bell. Inside the bell's working chamber is an inner chamber used for ballast needed to weigh down the bell in order to sink it
below the river surface. Five fixed portholes mounted on the top of the bell and one on the entry tube allow for light to enter inside
the equipment. There is no bottom on the bell.

The bell, less the entry tube, measures 6 feet wide by 14 feet long and 8 feet high. The whole craft weighs a bit over 5,000 pounds.
Who designed the bell and where it was fabricated is not known.

3.0 The Diving Bell Boat

The diving bell boat remains a wreck in the Chestatee river and has not been fully seen since October 1876. It has yielded only some
of its secrets to direct observation by the authors. The boat is a barge type design that measures 17 by about 50 feet. A well, slightly
larger than the bell, located towards the center of the boat deck allowed the bell to be raised and lowered.

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A wench drove the bell up and down. Using four hooks on the side of the bell a rope or wire rope connected to the wench via two sets
of block and tackle within the timber support structure above the bell. The rope was routed from the block and tackle through
pulleys, two on each side of the bell well, to another double set of pulleys at the front by the wench. The rope was then wound on the
spindles of the wench. When the wench rotated the rope wound around its side spindles and, depending on the direction of rotation,
the bell was either lowered into the river or brought up into the bell well.

The wench was powered by a steam engine that has not been located and its exact specifications are unknown. Full exact
measurements are not know because the boat is partially buried under the river bank and covered by a large quantity of sand and
silt. The rear section of the boat has not yet been seen and remains covered with about four feet of sand. About 15% or so of the left
front side remains buried under the bank. However, the top view of the boat, including underwater photos of still attached
machinery, is something like this:

Additional equipment for working the gravel – a sluice box, for example – in order to extract the gold and possibly a roof would also
likely be present but not shown in the simplified diagram. None of the engine machinery has been discovered. It's likely that it was
all removed along with the tools in order to satisfy liens placed on the equipment. The pulleys and parts of the wench have been
found still mounted on the boat as shown in the images in the boat diagram. The wench itself was yanked off the boat in 1983 when
the bell was forcibly removed from the boat.

4.0 Operating the Diving Bell

There are no known diagrams, schematics or photographs from

this era related to the diving bell and its boat. However Loud
never stopped thinking of his idea because in 1883, seven years
after his failed attempt, he patented [no. 272, 722] an improved
diving bell design. The major improvements are the addition
of a stamp mill, marked with a red X in Figure 1 to the left, and
better support which may be ignored for the moment but the
overall design provides a prospective look at what the actual
diving bell looked like. It would likely have a similar support
structure and set of block and tackle pulleys to move the bell up
and down through the well. Eyewitness accounts of the bell
being pulled out describe seeing block and tackle.

In order to push the water out of the open bottomed bell,

compressed air was pumped into the working chamber as it was
submerged into the river. Once at the bottom the pressurized
air would not only keep the water level at the miner's feet, it
would also maintain a fresh air environment for them to work.

When the men wished to enter the bell they passed through the
top hatch and descended using a ladder secured to the side of
the entry tube. Once the hatch was closed they equalized the
pressure of the entry tube to be the same as in the bell's
working chamber. They could then open the lower hatch and
pass safely into the bell, closing the door after them. When
returning to the surface, they reversed the operation, opening
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the lower hatch, entering the entry tube compartment and closing the hatch. They would then open a valve to release the air
pressure and exit to ambient atmosphere through the top hatch.

Once at the bottom the miners would spade up the gravel into a suction tube, labeled R, in order to bring the gravel up from the river
bottom into the boat to be worked in the sluice box and extract the gold. Although no actual physical evidence of the suction tube
has yet been found there is a newspaper account that describes it. Mr. J. A. Burns discusses the diving bell operation in a letter
extoling the virtues of Georgia to the Calaveras Citizen newspaper in California and reprinted in page 1 of the June 16, 1876 edition
of the Dahlonega Mountain Signal. In his letter, Mr. Burns describes the diving bell operation consisting of “a monster boat, on the
Chestatee river. It works by steam, and has a large iron caisson, which is lowered into the water. The air soon forces the water all
out, and then the men go to work in the river-bed and shovel the gravel to large pumps, which take it up to sluice boxes, water for
which is raised at the same time.”

The addition of the stamp mill to the diving bell in Loud's 1883 patent design is likely indicative of operational difficulties with the
suction tube. It's likely that the tube was smaller and probably became easily clogged. The addition of the stamp mill to break up
larger rocks into smaller particles is likely an improvement by Loud to get around this operational problem. The suction tube is also
an integral part of the craft unlike the Diving Bell which has no ports for such a device. It's likely a flexible hose under the Diving
Bell was used to take the gravel up to the boat. A recently discovered article by the famous Matthew Stephenson in
Savannah's "Southern Cross" newspaper stated that "suction by vaccums (sic.), drawing up the gravel and gold from any depth to
the deck, where it is washed, and the gold obtained" provides more proof that a suction tube was used to bring up the auriferous
gravel from the river bottom up to the boat.

To lower the diving bell to the river bottom and stay there, the buoyancy of the air trapped within it would have to be overcome.
This was accomplished by placing material within the ballast inner chamber to weigh down the diving bell. Newspaper articles of
the time indicate that it took 22 tons of sand ballast to sink the bell. This is in agreement with current calculations that indicate that
it would take at least 15 tons of weight for an object with the surface area comparable to the diving bell to just break the surface of
the water. It's likely that this was a major technological flaw in the bell operation since it would require either removal of the ballast
or tremendous force from the wench to raise the bell from the bottom of the river. Diving bells of that era typically used water in a
sealed chamber to serve as ballast. Such a tank is easily filled and emptied by using compressed air unlike the Diving Bell's ballast
chamber which used a solid material as ballast. While there are sliding panels at the bottom of the ballast chamber which could be
used to empty it as the bell raises, filling the chamber for another descent must have been a tedious and cumbersome affair.
However, Loud makes no improvement in this perceived problem in his patent. It's possible that using sand as a ballast was not
much of an operational problem with his large and likely powerful wench. On the other hand, perhaps he didn't have sufficient
operational time for this to become a problem. The boat and the diving bell appear to have been operational for only a few months.

5.0 Conclusion

As previously stated there are no known diagrams of the Diving Bell and its boat.
However, it can be imagined by what has been discovered thus far that it must
have looked very similar to the diagram on the left. At the rear of the boat the
diagram shows a submerged diving bell below its support structure. In the
middle is a steam engine, a boiler and an air compressor. On the sides, labeled
R, is a sluice box for separating the gold from the gravel. In the front is a wench,
which in this case, also is used to settle the bell and move it slightly when
necessary. This image, which when clicked will show a larger view, is from an
1898 patent whose major aim is to provide a better seal between the bell with the
river bottom. From the known information available it is very likely the P. H.
Loud's diving bell and boat were very similar to this design.

P. H. Loud took the first dive into the murky waters of the Chestatee River in November of 1875. He emerged thinking that a fortune
was within easy grasp and that he would build more boats to collect it. Unfortunately, bad weather, poor finances coupled with likely
difficulties in Diving Bell operations resulted in legal problems that caused all operations to cease. These unfortunate circumstances
culminated when the boat sankvào tháng 10 năm 1876. Những giấc mơ của Công ty Khai thác Lớn đã đi cùng con thuyền. Ngày nay
Chuông Lặn vẫn là một tượng đài cho những ước mơ này và có lẽ để truyền cảm hứng cho những người dám làm điều gì đó mới và
khác biệt. Không phải lúc nào người ta cũng thành công, nhưng giống như Philologous H. Loud, đừng bao giờ bỏ cuộc.

Trở về trang chủ

Đăng ngày 3 tháng 4 năm 2012

ngày 16 tháng 4 năm 2012: Sơ đồ thuyền đã được sửa đổi do thông tin mới từ chuyến lặn của Bill Waldrop trên thuyền vào cuối tuần ngày 13
tháng 4 năm 2012.
Ngày 4 tháng 3 năm 2020: Đã thêm tài liệu tham khảo trong phần 4 vào bài báo mới được phát hiện từ Southern Cross, Savannah, Ga. Ngày 23
tháng 10 năm 1875.

vui lòng đăng nhập để bình luận

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