Diving History

Although Orville and Wilbur Wright are celebrated today as heroes for their revolutionary contributions to science and engineering - they are acknowledged as the first men to successfully achieve powered, piloted flight - their success was hard-earned. In fact, it took the self-taught engineers years of work and dozens of crashes before they managed a single 12-second flight! In this first installment of the brand new Epic Fails series, Ben Thompson and Erik Slader take listeners through the Wright brothers' many mishaps and misadventures as they paved the way for modern aviation.

By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She’d won Olympic gold and set a host of world records. But the greatest challenge remained: the English Channel. Only a few swimmers, none of them women, had ever made the treacherous twenty-one mile crossing. Trudy’s failed first attempt seemed to confirm what many naysayers believed: No woman could possibly accomplish such a thing. In 1926, Ederle proved them wrong.

On a foggy July evening in 1956, the Italian cruise liner Andrea Doria, bound for New York, was struck broadside by another vessel. In eleven hours, she would sink nearly 250 feet to the murky Atlantic Ocean floor. Thanks to a daring rescue operation, only 51 of more than 1,700 people died in the tragedy. But the Andrea Doria is still taking lives. Considered the Mt. Everest of diving, the Andrea Doria is the ultimate deepwater wreck challenge.

In 1937, a schoolteacher on the island of Maui challenged a group of poverty-stricken sugar plantation kids to swim upstream against the current of their circumstance. The goal? To become Olympians. They faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The children were Japanese-American, were malnourished and barefoot, and had no pool; they trained in the filthy irrigation ditches that snaked down from the mountains into the sugarcane fields.

In the early 1980s on a remote part of the Sudanese coast, a new luxury holiday resort opened for business. Catering for divers, it attracted guests from around the world. Little did the holidaymakers know that the staff were undercover spies, working for the Mossad - the Israeli secret service. Providing a front for covert night-time activities, the holiday village allowed the agents to carry out an operation unlike any seen before. What began with one cryptic message pleading for help, turned into the secret evacuation of thousands of Ethiopian Jews....

Dr. Francesca "Frankie" DeMarco, a beautiful Italian archaeologist, is searching an underwater site on the Adriatic Coast of Italy. Chasing stories of a mysterious group of Guardians, she runs into roadblocks. Someone is trying to keep her from discovering the truth. To unlock the mystery of the Guardians, Frankie and Mike Scott have to overcome a group of delusional fanatics. If they are successful, they might just find a religious artifact lost when the Romans overran the Temple in Jerusalem: the Breastplate of Judgement, worn by the Jewish high priest when he went before the Ark of the ...

Submersed begins with an investigation into the beguiling subculture of DIY submersible obsessives: men and women—but mostly men—who are so compelled to sink into the deep sea that they become amateur backyard submarine-builders. Matthew Gavin Frank explores the origins of the human compulsion to sink to depth, from the diving bells of Aristotle and Alexander the Great to the Confederate H. L. Hunley, which became the first submersible to sink an enemy warship before itself being sunk during the Civil War.

Georgia Windsor has a good job in New York, a charming best friend, and a perfectly adequate man, but she also has an undeniable urge to control it all. She's planned every last detail of her entire life, allowing for no surprises to throw her off balance, and she's not about to shift her trajectory now. But life has a funny way of changing our plans. After receiving news of her estranged father's death, Georgia is not only forced to confront the painful feelings she's tucked away for so long, but she's also forced to return to the one place she swore she'd never go back to: Sullivan's Island.

"If you're not strong enough to swim fast, you're probably not strong enough to swim 'pretty," said a young Esther Williams to theater impresario Billy Rose. Since the nineteenth century, tensions between beauty and strength, aesthetics and athleticism have both impeded and propelled the careers of female swimmers—none more so than synchronized swimmers, for whom Williams is often considered godmother. In this riveting history—the first of its kind—Vicki Valosik traces a century of aquatic performance, from vaudeville and dime museums to the Olympic arena.

Unique and compelling, Splash! sweeps across the whole of humankind's swimming history - and just like jumping into a pool on a hot summer's day, it has fun along the way.

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen’s career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners); twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles. Lynne Cox, adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica (“gripping”—Sports Illustrated) and Grayson (“wondrous, and unforgettable”—Carl Hiaasen), gives us in South with the Sun a full-scale account of the explorer’s life and expeditions.

Dive deep into the world of swimming with open water swimmer and coach Mikael Rosén as he explores the sport through eight different perspectives. With topics ranging from the vigorous mental and physical demands of the sport to gender and race politics, no listener will be left treading water. Rosén also provides a look into the lives of professional swimmers such as Michael Phelps and Sarah Sjöström, sharing insights into what makes these greats super swimmers. Packed with interesting history, science, and trivia, as well as useful charts, maps, sidebars, tips, and strategies.

When Oxford archeologist Mensun Bound, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the Deep" by the Discovery Channel, teamed up with a financier to salvage a sunken trove of 15th-century porcelain, it seemed a dream enterprise. The stakes were high: the Hoi An wreck lay hundreds of feet down in a typhoon-prone stretch of water off the coast of Vietnam known as the Dragon Sea.

Swim is a celebration of swimming and the effect it has on our lives. It's an inquiry into why we swim - the lure, the hold, the timeless magic of being in the water. It's a look at how swimming has changed over the millennia, how this ancient activity is becoming more social than solitary today. It's about our relationship with the water, with our fishy forebearers, and with the costumes that we wear. You'll even find a few songs to sing when you push out those next laps.

Discover the enduring legacy of Walter Beuttler, an exceptional man of faith who journeyed across the globe to share the knowledge of God. From the remotest islands to the densest cities, Beuttler's teachings transcended borders, languages, and cultures, enlightening hearts and minds wherever he ventured. For over two decades, Beuttler served as an instrument of God's word, drawing strength from an unwavering divine providence that guided him through extraordinary circumstances. Miraculously preserved amid mortal danger and graced by God's presence across 33 trans-oceanic flights, ...

These days, swimming may seem like the most egalitarian of pastimes, open to anyone with a swimsuit - but this wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, swimming was exclusively the domain of men, and access to pools was a luxury limited by class. Women were (barely) allowed to swim in the sea, as long as no men were around, but even into the 20th century they could be arrested and fined if they dared dive into a lake. It wasn't until the 1930s that women were finally granted equal access.

Get ready for test day the fast way! A quick and easy-to-digest story that includes 500 of the most popular GRE words. Sail around the tropics with Lilly and her coterie of marine scientists as they uncover the mysterious anomaly that is harming the coral reef. This book is a quick way to help you learn 500 of the top GRE vocabulary words. As you listen through, you will hear the GRE words. In most cases, you will be able to gather the meaning right from the context of the sentence or paragraph.

From the dramatic discovery of the world’s first analog computer to the incredible secrets uncovered in a sailor’s good luck charm, underwater excavation has revealed historical truths dating back to the beginning of modern civilization. As the exciting field of marine archaeology continues to grow, so do the astonishing discoveries from the ocean floor—with every sunken ship shedding light on moments in time that only the sea remembers. Shipwrecked! is a riveting deep dive into some of the world’s most incredible shipwrecks and what they reveal about human history.

The Civil War is over, but hostilities continue to rage. Can she protect her home from the ravages of divided loyalties? Missouri, 1865. Hester Cain’s world is unraveling. With her father and brother waging a guerrilla warfare against the victorious Union, the quiet young woman tries to keep the three orphans in her charge safe from the local militia’s harassment. And though she has no reason to trust the other side, she shocks herself by opening the door to a wandering Yankee soldier. Struggling to balance the rejection of her childhood sweetheart and a growing bond with her guest,...