Rachel Lance

I read this paper about carbon dioxide, and it wasn't extremely exciting.

It concluded essentially that carbon dioxide is bad for you and it hurts, which I already knew.

But something about the date bothered me.

It was published in 1941, which was obviously wartime, and it was published by a group of British scientists.

In scientific research, the paper usually comes out about a year after the research was done.

So that meant that these people were working on this question of carbon dioxide in 1940 in London.

The other thing that was happening at that time period was the Blitz.

So something about carbon dioxide was so critical to them that they were looking at it while they were being bombed.

From there, I just kept pulling at the thread until the entire story became evident of what they were actually working on.

They started out looking at submarine survival.

So the Allied militaries had built all of these submarines in preparation for World War II because they essentially knew some sort of conflict was coming.

But in the summer of 1939, three of them went down in rapid succession.

There was the USS Squalus, the HMS Thetis, and the French Fénix, which still remains lost.

However, when these submarines sank, the Allies realized that they didn't know very much about surviving inside them, escaping them, or even what to do if one of these accidents occurred.

So this research group that I was following, which was based out of University College London, UCL, and led by a scientist named JBS Haldane, were looking at these problems of undersea survival, of how people breathe inside enclosed spaces, and how people need to treat these breathing gases if they want to stay in these enclosed spaces on purpose.

Eventually, that transitioned into diving and diving technologies.

And all of those things together were used to scout the beaches of Normandy and facilitate the landings of D-Day.

It's loud.

That's my strongest impression.

The opposite.