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Plan New Ship Salving Mac ines Art of Making Recoveries Under Sea Greatly Advanced During ' Past Four Years ---iAll Allied) Counc ce Involved in Task NGLAND, France and. Italy have shown an active interest in the work of salving the vast amount of tonnage sunk during the war. Germans. are also reputed to have ambitions in this direction. Dur- ing the war our own government un- dertook some developments along this line but since the cessation of hos- tilities our salving has been handed back to private interests. Something between a five hundred thousand and a billion dollars worth of .ships have been sunk off our coasts. Fur- thermore a number of American ves- sels have been sunk in European waters. Although some of our vessels were sunk in foreign waters, the United States has refused to relin- quish claim to their ownership and the salvage work attempted on them will undoubtedly be in the interest of American owners. National claim to vessels sunk dur- ing the war, no matter what their locality, is being advanced by all the maritime nations. The old con- tention that a nation could claim own- BY V:..G; IDEN ership of nothing sunk outside the 3-mile limit, is being exploded. If the new basis of ownership is adhered to, it is doubtful whether the Germans will ever be permitted to carry out their reputed intention of reclaiming much of the.merchant tonnage which their own submarines and mines sunk during the war. Must Work at Great Depth At the same time the salving of vessels today presents more than the ordinary problems of recovery with which we have had to contend here- tofore. Vessels representing great wealth have been sunk in the ocean at depths much beyond anything divers have worked before. It is claimed that divers cannot work suc- cessfully at a depth greater than' 80 feet because the water pressure is too great. Working at depths within this range presents considerable hardship, - since it is necessary for the diver to breathe compressed air. But while breathing the oxygen in the com- pressed air, nitrogen is taken into FRONT AND REAR VIEWS OF SISSON DEEP SEA DIVING 455 the blood in the form of gas. Should a diver come suddenly into a normal atmosphere with all this nitrogen gas in his blood, it will effervesce, breaking the capillaries, causing pain and often death. - Inventors have therefore turned their attention to the problem of protecting the diver from the water pressure, thereby mak- ing his work easier and permitting him to go down to depths greater than 80 feet. Deep sea armor is one of the schemes which has been advanced. a The Atlanta Engineering Corp., of New York, proposes. to build one style of deep-sea armor. A suit wa constructed and tested but. some al- terations are to be made. The first suit was of cast steel from 'the waist » to, the feet with a large' cylinder "*tank encompassing the hips in which it was proposed to carry air. bottles. The suit from the waist up was con; structed of an aluminum come tion. It has been decided that the large cylinder around the' waist made the armor cumbersome and in the MACHINE SHOWING MAGNETS, PROPELLERS, DRILL, ETC.