Ben Franklin's Gulf Stream Drift

Now that a team of Russian researchers has finally poked through the last remaining ice sheath separating a world of crusty humans, Earthly life-forms, and all the toxins that each tow around, from the world’s deepest, darkest, coldest, most alien sub-glacial lake, any of the deep-sea studies of yesteryear can be picked apart and called up to remind us that yes, today’s feat was a long time coming.

But then there’s the cruise of the Ben Franklin, a truly remarkable bit of daring-do almost entirely forgotten to the seas of collective memory.

It’s the summer of 1969. The entire world cranes its neck upward, transfixed, huddling around radios and TVs and generally getting drunk off the first awe-inspiring images of small steps and giant leaps. It’s no wonder – if it isn’t an outright shame – that hardly anyone bothered to look below, down toward the nether reaches of oceanic gloom, where a crew of six American aquanauts crammed into the Franklin, a smallish research submarine, were drifting along the Atlantic seafloor at the Gulf Stream’s bidding.

It’s never been widely reported, but Franklin was straight up fascinated with the stuff of seas. Ship propulsion techniques. Anchors. Hull design. The best foodstuffs to keep a man sharp after two months off land. Shipwrecks. You name it – to all these he outlined “sundry maritime observations” in a 1785 letter to a scientist friend in France. And even if the existence of the Gulf Stream had already been well established since the early 1500s, it’s Franklin’s playing up in his letters this warm, rip-roaring current that would inevitably find his name enshrined on NASA’s yellow submarine.

The 50-foot, Swiss-built vessel launched off Florida, and quickly slipped into the Stream. The idea wasn’t so much to blast through the current in military sub fashion, but rather to surrender entirely to its pull, the crew going where it goes, all the while keeping a running log of depths, water temperatures and salinity, current speeds and freaky marine life. They even 3D photomapped the continetal shelf.

Needless to say, things were a bit cramped. Probably stunk up something fierce in there, too.

Ben Franklin interior (via NASA)

The Ben Franklin eventually surfaced off Nova Scotia after putting in a total of 1,400 miles over 31 days adrift. It’s long been decommissioned, of course, and yet much of our own current understanding of weather and ocean currents, and the interplay between the two, can trace squarely back to the sub’s sundry maritime observations.

Sometimes it’s all things strange and great happening here on this planet – alien lakes or hot currents or whatever – that, you know, are worth remembering.

ODDITY examines strange and esoteric phenomena and events from the remote, uncanny corners of technology, science and history.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @TheBAnderson

Top image via NASA