Let me tell you about the world’s first underwater motion picture.
That’s a dead horse.
That’s the inventor of the filming technique.
That’s a knife in his hand.
And that’s a shark.
But, that’s later.
The story begins, as it must, with Jules Verne.
(All good stories below the ocean’s surface do…)
The year is 1916.
The silent film of his 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is “the only production of its kind in the world...
[with] sights that for thousands of centuries have been denied to mankind.”
In the picture, the first time you see out Captain Nemo’s “magic window,” the fiction
of Verne’s adventure stops…
For almost nine minutes, a documentary of sorts plays (like this).
The magic window is, in reality, the porthole of the photosphere…
Verne’s Nautilus ship come to life.
This is the photosphere.
This is its inventor, J.E. Williamson.
J.E.’s father, a sea captain and shipwreck scavenger, had previously designed a deep-sea
salvaging device: a tube affixed to a windowed chamber capable of reaching great depths...
Lightning, of course, struck.
J.E. would add a lamp to illuminate the water and design a viewing chamber with larger windows…
(Also, he dropped a camera down the hatch.)
In 1914, J.E. got backing for his first filming experiment, christened a barge the Jules Verne,
and set a course for the Bahamas...
What you’re seeing right now is the first motion picture recorded below the ocean’s surface—
the result of J.E.’s experiment.
How strange that the first moving images recorded of this little-seen world were of a dead horse
lowered upside down as bait for a shark.
Not only to lure the animal to the camera, but to lure it to its death...
That violence was prefered over beauty...
J.E. promised his financiers a fight between man and shark.
The first take was of a hired Bahamian diver, but he killed a shark just out of the camera’s frame
The second take was of J.E himself...
He remembered it like this: “I grasped the monster's fin, felt my hand close upon it.
With a twist, I was under the livid white belly at the spot I was trying to reach.
With all my remaining strength I struck.
A quivering thrill raced up my arm as I felt the blade bury itself to the hilt in the flesh…
Then a blur, confusion—chaos.
J.E. Williamson (again): Somehow I had managed to reach the deck...
Still panting from exertion, my head in a whirl, I slid down the tube in time to witness
the end of the shark.
With upturned belly gleaming in the wavering sunlight filtering through the waters,
the dead monster was drifting away.”
Six thousand feet of celluloid ribbon later, the Jules Verne set a course back to America.
The resulting film was exhibited under the title, "Thirty Leagues Under the Sea,"
and later came to be known as "The Terrors of the Deep"...