Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (62 page)

“Although we were not equipped to perform major excavation in the main portion of the wreck where the gold is located,” explained Tommy, “the importance of our progress in developing a range of capabilities with the emergency system cannot be overstated…. This will be of immense value over the winter as we complete the development of the full-up recovery system and prepare to embark on our intensive recovery effort next spring.”

In November, Tommy held a partnership meeting at a downtown hotel, where the team displayed the artifacts they had recovered from Galaxy: ceramic dishes, bottles, and jugs. In one large aquarium a lump of coal supported the child’s mug etched with the Ben Franklin maxims from
Poor Richard’s Almanac
. The jar of lady’s cold cream with the chestnut strand of hair sat under glass, preserved by the smoke of dry ice. Striking color photography hung on the walls, and television monitors ran tapes of the manipulator arm plucking the mug from the sediment and recovering the anchor. In his presentation to the partnership, Tommy discussed the 1987 operations at sea, elaborating on their technological and legal accomplishments, and he showed the partners stereo slides of the site and video of the vehicle working on the bottom. After the meeting he summarized the state of the partnership in another encouraging letter. “We have carefully analyzed the massive amount of data gathered during our operations last summer,” he wrote. “With the operational problems well in hand, there remains one major factor that could work against our ability to recover the gold in 1988: raising the funds in time to let contracts to build the ‘generic’ recovery system.” He told the partners they would need at least another $3.5 million to go forward with the next season. But few were quick to sign another check.

For partner Art Cullman, the summer of ’87 was everything but what he had expected. When Sidewheel looked nothing like a sidewheel
steamer and Tommy had to move on to another site, Cullman got worried. “By then,” said Cullman, “most of us were a little bit shaken.”

Partner Mike Ford saw two problems, one compounding the other. “Every-one was following like ducks in a line,” he said, “until there was equivocation on the target. Then I think some people were momentarily dis-illusioned, maybe thought, ‘My idol has failed me.’” At the same time, their idol was asking them for more money. But Ford viewed it philosophically. “In entrepreneurial ventures you always have tests; you have the pro forma and the actual, and invariably something happens in the actual which tests the mettle of the managers. It’s how they handle that that really determines what the group is made of.”

Others agreed. They had done time on the hot seat themselves, fending off competitors, dealing with surprises and crises, and generally watching their whole operation hang in the balance. So they could see it from Tommy’s perspective, and they knew Tommy would either get through it or he wouldn’t. “Business people are used to letting somebody else run with their football,” said Jim Turner. He and others thought, Tom, you work it out and let me know what happens. But still the partners talked.

“When something starts to go wrong,” said Buck Patton, “the phone rings off the hook in this city. ‘What do you think? Are you going into the next phase? I think we need to have a meeting, or maybe get together for a drink.’”

Late that fall, eight of the partners gathered at Patton’s office to talk with Tommy about their concerns. Money was one issue, but they also worried that Tommy tried to do too much, that he wouldn’t delegate. “He feels he has to do everything,” said Fred Dauterman, “otherwise it won’t get done right.” Patton wondered if they could persuade Tommy to limit the number of things he was trying to juggle: law, publicity, contracts, accounts payable, taxes, bookkeeping; let someone else handle those things.

But Tommy was launching a company that had a long start-up phase. There was no revenue, nothing sold, no transactions. Nothing yet could be systematized. That’s how Tommy perceived entrepreneurism: Plow new ground, learn new ways. But to do that you had to lead each step along the new path yourself. In time, Tommy could systematize
the functions, then develop a managerial team, and delegate fully. Until then, he had to oversee everything.

Bill Arthur, who had seen a thousand start-ups, was frustrated with Tommy for other reasons. “We were outta money!” he said. “And Tommy had that wide-eyed openness of the true scientist, like, ‘So? What’s to worry? Everybody knew we’d be outta money.’ We were having all these wonderful scientific papers advanced, but the investors don’t really give a sh—— care about his technical prowess. The reason we have investors, solely and exclusively, without any fear of contradiction, is gold!”

“Right now, Tommy, you have a failure of confidence,” said Arthur. “We’ve spent all the money, and no gold.” But Arthur saw a solution, and he had a proposal: Spread the risk; take all of that technical capability and go after several ships. “Let’s parlay this into a business,” said Arthur, “the recovery version of General Motors. Then let’s take it public, sell stock in the thing.”

Although that reasoning often worked well in the search for oil and gas and in similar ventures, it was the antithesis of Tommy’s methodical approach. He had watched treasure hunters make that mistake: throw in four or five more wrecks to sweeten the pie. But that didn’t spread the risk; it increased the risk by wasting money on these unlikely pursuits, hoping they would get lucky, then running short just shy of the good project. Long ago, Tommy had seen the wisdom of focusing on one promising wreck with a documented high value that they knew had not been disturbed. But he listened to Arthur. He always listened.

“I’m not calling the shots here,” said Arthur. “But I think we have a case of gold fever on the money side and giddy scientific pursuit on the other.”

Arthur was a smart man, a prominent professional, but Tommy had to separate the man from the idea; he had to assess Arthur’s inclination to package and sell. Arthur had said it himself: “My business is structuring deals. I’m really good at that.” His idea might be a good one—it might even avert a financial crisis—but it was not the right time to start a public company. Tommy would consider the idea, but he would have to find a way through the current crisis without mortgaging the future.

“Tommy’s tough,” observed Patton. “He’s smart and he’s tough. He listens to what I say and he listens to what others say, and then he decides what he’s going to do, and he goes and does it. I’ve seen some real tough guys, and he’s got my highest respect.”

I
N THE OFF-SEASON
, Tod reported to the Victorian on Neil Avenue and worked around the office. He saw Tommy frequently. “He lived in the office practically,” said Tod. “Every hour of the day he was working.” Tommy would stroll into the kitchen, rubbing the palms of his hands together in half circles, that Harvey grin on his face, his eyes bloodshot, to see if the coffee was on. Then he would disappear again behind the sliding oak door to the formal dining room to talk on the phone and figure on a legal pad. Tod found it curious that with all of the problems Tommy had to work out, he never seemed down. “I’ve never even heard him say anything negative about anyone,” said Tod, “or about anything. Usually he’s just burned out.” Tommy stuffed himself with supplements and vitamins and sometimes went for thirty hours at a stretch with no sleep. It seemed like he never slept. “He’s just so intense,” said Tod. “He just goes and goes and never quits.”

Tommy was worried, but he liked to worry. “The more you worry, the more you think,” he said, “and the more you think, the more you know, and the more you know, the better you’re able to deal with the situation. I’m not the type to worry to the point of dysfunction. The more I worry, the more energy I have.”

Besides worrying about money and his partners, Tommy also worried about technology and his engineers. At the partner meeting, he had told the partners nothing about the problems his engineers were having trying to design the “full-up” recovery vehicle. To be able to explore and work through the coal at the Galaxy site as he needed to, he was pushing his engineers, especially Hackman, to do things with this new vehicle that either no one had ever been able to do, or no one had ever even thought of trying. He had designed the system on paper the year before, then had to settle for the E version. Now he had more knowledge about the site to incorporate into his thinking, and he used that knowledge to run thought experiments with Hackman and the other engineers.

One of the most troublesome problems with deep-ocean vehicles was their limited reach. Manned and unmanned vehicles had manipulators, but often the joints were too stiff to operate or too clumsy for a smooth maneuver. Even if a manipulator moved smoothly and operated at its maximum flexibility at the shoulder, elbow, wrist, and hand joints, it typically reached out three feet and operated inside an envelope four by six inches. The jaws moved barely this way, barely that way, slightly up, slightly down. Maneuvering any submersible in close enough to use the manipulator sometimes proved impossible. Even an operator as skilled as John Moore sometimes nudged an artifact two inches, which was enough to put it out of reach. Then they had to shut down, lift the vehicle, move it over, and wait for the silt to settle. With such limited range, they often worked for no more than ten minutes before they had to lift off and relocate.

Tommy had pondered the problem for years, and he figured that one giant leap for mankind’s working presence in the deep ocean would be a robot that swiveled. He asked Hackman to think about this: What if they took the whole vehicle and put it on top of a rotating base, like a steam shovel or a crane? Hackman’s first thought was, “A crane’s got huge ball bearings, and those bearings and the gears and the hydraulic motors and the shafts will all be down in the mud.” He reminded Tommy, “We have a flying vehicle that we can pick up and rotate any time we want to.”

“I know,” said Tommy, “but it takes too much time.” He wanted Hackman to calculate how big a rotating base would have to be. In a few days, Hackman reported back. “It’s going to weigh five thousand pounds.”

“It can’t weigh that much,” said Tommy. “See what you can do.”

Hackman had learned never to say no to Tommy; he had a different way of dealing with Tommy’s ideas: He calculated exactly what it would take to do what Tommy wanted to do, then let Tommy decide for himself if it was worth it.

Hackman also had been around Tommy long enough to know that Tommy had a reason for suggesting an idea, and although that reason might not be apparent to anyone else, it was founded on something deep inside Tommy’s head that had gotten there through some combination
of his intellect, his experience, and his unique gift for viewing the world upside down. And often, after Hackman had stood on his own head and fiddled with the figures, he began to see things he hadn’t seen at first. Sometimes he surprised himself when he reexamined old assumptions and found ways he could make Tommy’s seemingly crazy ideas work. “This happened many, many times,” said Hackman.

But when Tommy told Hackman to look for a way to put the vehicle on a rotating base, Hackman thought, “If he wants to see on paper how ridiculous that idea is, I’ll show him.”

In all of his days working on top-secret ocean projects, Hackman had never heard of anyone even thinking about trying something so outrageous underwater. However, Tommy was right about one thing: If they could make it work, it would increase the effective reach of the vehicle a thousandfold.

Hackman started thinking about the problem the way Tommy would think about the problem. Why does it have to weigh five thousand pounds? Well, he figured, it has to weigh that much because I’m assuming we have to have those big ball bearings and some of these other things. Are those valid assumptions? he asked himself. Maybe not. Maybe we wouldn’t need those big ball bearings, after all; maybe we could put it on an oscillator, but then the whole vehicle would be sitting on a single shaft. A few quick calculations on bending loads told him that the weight of the vehicle would snap the shaft in two. He’d have to think of something else. But that was a start.

When he told Tommy how far he had gotten, Tommy thought out loud, “Maybe we can look at it more like the wing of an airplane, and instead of assuming the shaft would be rigid, let’s assume it’s going to be flexible.” Then they ran a thought experiment to narrow the probable range of flex.

“That’s how Hackman and I work really well together,” said Tommy. “He would tell me the problem very clearly, and then I’d just put that in my subconscious and think about it and some new idea would pop out, and we’d talk some more.”

In one of these sessions, Hackman realized, “If we’re going to make this thing flexible, I can put a little ring of rollers out here to take the bending loads, and I can go to a smaller actuator to rotate it.”
That made the whole base much lighter and more resilient. Hackman was pleased that they had solved a problem he had thought impossible to solve, but when he took the sketches to Tommy, Tommy wanted to know how much it would weigh now, and Hackman said he had reduced the weight to about half his original estimate. Tommy wanted to beat the original estimate by an order of magnitude, get it down to one-tenth, or 500 pounds. Hackman went back and pondered his sketches, and he saw new things. He sandwiched one ring into the other ring. Then he turned the rotary actuator upside down. Then he moved the hoses from the base to the vehicle. “I just kept working out the problems one by one,” said Hackman. By the time he had finished, he had the specs for a rotating base that weighed 450 pounds and allowed the vehicle to rotate 360 degrees.

But Tommy wasn’t through. Most manipulators were anthropomorphic, modeled after the human arm, but with only five to seven degrees of freedom. The human arm has twenty-seven. But even the human arm has only two segments, upper and lower, plus an “end effector,” or hand. Tommy wanted three upper arms and five lower arms, and at least twenty-seven degrees of freedom, and he wanted to do things the human arm could never do. He wanted to extend the reach by telescoping the shoulder, the equivalent of a human arm changing the TV channel without a remote. Just shoot the whole arm across the room. Many ocean engineers had tried to do this, but every solution Hackman had ever heard of was complicated, heavy, and expensive, and most increased the reach no more than a few inches. One group had created a cage on rollers that weighed five thousand pounds and slid forward like a barn door yet extended the reach less than two feet.