What If You Were Told The Submersible You Were Boarding For $250K To Dive 12,000ft Had A Wooden Hull?
It is a very amazing thing to see how much content has been created out of the OceanGate Titan disaster. I won’t go on a diatribe about how so much is being made of the deaths of 5 highly privileged people in an act of dangerous stupidity, because, hey, insanity is how humanity got to the top of the animal food chain. Nuclear power, anyone? Or how about going back to when humans discovered how to make fire?
No, this is going to be quite a bit more esoteric because I work in an industry where carbon fiber/graphite were thought to be the materials in guitar making that would render wood completely and entirely obsolete. And it really started with two guys, Ned Steinberger and Geoff Gould, the former coming from cabinet-making and the latter coming from aerospace whilst also being a musician himself.
In musical instruments, the imperfections of wood lead to imperfections in an instrument’s sound. This is especially true with bass guitars/electric basses, where Leo Fender’s Precision Bass design originating in 1951 had these “dead spots” and “hot spots” on the neck where notes would ring out less than others, or they would ring out louder than others. Another challenge with wood is that it requires seasonal adjustment and in early bass guitar designs (read: Fender’s in particular) the truss rod used (technology dating from the 1920s) in the necks was discovered to cause many of the sonic imperfections, and create problems with stability over time.
The Fender bass became so ubiquitous for the next 20 years because basically, the design worked so well (and not all of them exhibited these imperfections) and had the sounds that worked well for live performance and studio recordings. But throughout the 1970s, numerous individuals used different approaches to making the bass guitar acoustically “balanced” before the signal was electrified and then amplified. These included laminated necks for stability and strength (the Fender design was one-piece with a thin fingerboard), laminated wood bodies for more rigid structure to increase sustain, improved truss rods, and more attention to detail in fret installation — usually marks of custom makers of higher end instruments.
In 1978 a professional player named Ken Smith was building basses with carbon graphite rods alongside the normal truss rod in his laminated maple bass guitar necks. This increased the sustain and fundamental note and reduced deadspots. But the overall construction was still fairly conventional, if also a substantial improvement over the “industry standard” which hadn’t changed since 1951.
Gould and Steinberger saw a more radical approach: if the wooden neck was susceptible to sonic flaws as well as requiring frequent seasonal adjustment, what would happen if a neck or an entire instrument was produced from this newfangled carbon graphite/carbon fiber?
Steinberger chose to make a headless instrument entirely out of an epoxy resin reinforced plastic (secret recipe!) while Gould started making woven graphite necks for Alembic and Music Man before making his own instruments under the Modulus Graphite name. The results were striking — longer sustain and completely balanced sound across all strings. All of this of course, came at a high price: A Steinberger L2A (active circuit, flagship model) had a street price in 1983 of somewhere around $2000 — $6100 adjusted for inflation in 2023. It was believed that this material was THE wave of the future, except that it wasn’t.
Part of this has to do with the cost of manufacture and low volume sales and production associated with it. Steinberger had a very difficult time getting his very popular basses to the market because each instrument was created at different timelines. Some went together faster than others. By the 1990s the music trend was to “grab and old Fender (bass) and lay down the groove”. The other part of it was that ultimately, this new material was effectively a “super wood” because the carbon fiber fabric was fibrous like wood! It wasn’t as impervious to temperature and humidity changes as it had been purported to be, and modern truss rods (to allow adjustment of the neck) were installed in carbon graphite bass guitar necks after all. In addition there was no trickle down effect to lower priced instruments, but the use of graphite rods has become a staple in modern, wooden-neck instruments.
This is where the connection between high-end, high technology bass guitars originating in the 1970s (Steinberger’s prototype bass guitar was built in 1979 and Gould’s first necks were produced in 1978) and a high-stakes careless science experiment called OceanGate actually comes into focus: OceanGate made a submersible hull out of wood, basically. High tech wood, but wood nonetheless. In addition, they laid out the hull completely incorrectly for how carbon fiber fabric must be laid out for a strong structure — it’s supposed to be woven at alternating opposing angles. So they made it out of crappy high tech wood. And then they didn’t cure it correctly.
Yes, everyone’s already talked about how carbon fiber/graphite doesn’t do well under compression. But in layperson’s terms…they’re not talking about how they effectively made a submersible hull out of wood. And if you were someone who didn’t know anything about physics or engineering, would you spend $250,000 to board a submersible with a wooden hull to deep dive 12,000ft?
My guess, not being a physicist or engineer, is that the hull absorbed water somewhere in a void or voids in the carbon fiber, which weighed it down to almost double its descent velocity, then water got in and crippled on board systems, and then under compression the hull did as carbon fiber does (car accidents, or when you crash and break a carbon fiber bike fork) — it shattered killing everyone instantly while leaving the titanium pieces intact.
Again, just a guess. But this is what happens when you make a deep sea submersible out of low-grade wood. And sell it as “disruptive” “innovation”.
