In Chamber Divers, Rachel Lance tells two stories. First, the story of the scientists who enabled safe underwater operations. Prior to their research, underwater workers risked the bends, seizures, and death. Second, she exposed the men who stole credit from women who were “under-titled and underpaid.” A fascinating story of science and scientists, but I wish she’d been more enraged by the mistreatment of those women.
The author restrains her feelings towards the sexist men until the Acknowledgements at the end of the book. I would like to thank, first and foremost, all of the people who have taken or tried to take credit for my own scientific work. Without these men, I would not have known how to dig for this story, how to find the under-credited women and refugees within it, those people who were similarly under-titled and underpaid, and whose under-pay and under-titling were used to justify shifting their achievements into the portfolios of people against whom they had no standing to argue.
Author Rachel Lance is a biomedical engineer and blast-injury specialist who works as a scientific researcher on military diving projects at Duke University. Before returning to graduate school to earn her PhD, Dr. Lance spent several years as an engineer for the United States Navy, working to build specialized underwater equipment for use by navy divers, SEALs, and Marine Force Recon personnel.
I would have preferred her to take a more strident position against the sexism and the sexists.
The allies depended on German gas bottles scavenged from down Luftwaffe fighters. At a steady, preset rate, a shallow trickle of oxygen entered his breathing loop from a high-pressure bottle that had been liberated from the cabin of a downed Luftwaffe fighter plane and repurposed. The German gas bottles had proved superior to any being made by the Brits, and collecting these aluminum trophies was a silver lining to living among the bombings.
Both sides depended on amphetamines. Benzedrine pills. The drug could sometimes induce a paranoid psychosis akin to schizophrenia, but it would keep anyone awake. It would keep them moving. Later that same month, November 1942, the Royal Air Force flipped from a total ban to approval of the drug for pilots, because stable brain chemistry is not relevant if someone is dead from other causes. “He got a good night’s sleep before the Nazis caught him” has never been engraved as a compliment in any soldier’s epitaph.
In preparation for D-Day, the British had to abandon their hospitality. It had become something of a British household custom for the residents to offer passing troops whatever they could. Tea, as long as the pot held out. Biscuits, if there were any. Sandwiches and desserts, if soldiers were lucky enough to pass the right house. The custom had become so ingrained that when the military ran training exercises in the more isolated parts of Great Britain—the parts selected to provide realistic preparation for surviving in the bombed-out French countryside–they had to warn the citizens in advance not to give the troops food. Otherwise, it would not be much of a wilderness-training exercise.
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