The Vancouver Maritime Museum has a collection of more than 170,000 objects including 35,000 artifacts, 20,000 books, 262 original paintings/artwork and 114,000 photographs This online collection gives you access to just a few of our hidden and not so hidden treasures.

 

Category Index > Category: Ships, World Famous > Artifact: BEN FRANKLIN (PX-15)
BEN FRANKLIN (PX-15)
Category: Ships, World Famous


The year was 1969, and the original television series "Star Trek" was still on the air, with fictional voyages of the Starship Enterprise going "where no man has gone before." But while the Enterprise and her crew visited distant worlds in search of new life and new civilizations, it was also a time of bold ventures into new frontiers, as men with the "right stuff" ventured out into space and deep into the earth's oceans. Both worlds of science and exploration merged dramatically in 1969 when the submersible BEN FRANKLIN (PX-15) made a 30-day dive, completely submerged, on a mission that made deep-sea history and earned a place in NASA's history books. NASA played a key role in the sub's mission and placed an observer and equipment aboard to learn more about how people respond and react to prolonged voyages in an enclosed capsule. To this day, the lessons of the BEN FRANKLIN's 1969 mission are used as NASA plans for the International Space Station and the first missions to Mars. Ironically though, BEN FRANKLIN is largely forgotten, largely because the sub surfaced at the end of its historic mission to a world swept up in the euphoria of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon while the sub was drifting a thousand feet beneath the sea in the Gulf Stream. In the aftermath of Apollo 11, space travel was in, and ocean exploration was out - until the Cold War revived the military's interest in the deep ocean for surveillance and the recovery of intelligence prizes like Soviet submarines lost in the deep sea. It was not until the late 1980s, the end of the Cold War, and spectacular deep sea discoveries like the sunken Titanic that deep ocean research, and explorers like Robert Ballard emerged on America's front pages and television sets. But by then BEN FRANKLIN was gone, "missing in action," it seemed, after a disastrous grounding in 1970 and the dismantling of the sub, with the parts disappearing into Canada. Now, after three decades, the sub dramatically "reemerged" on the Vancouver (British Columbia) waterfront. Gleaming white and bright yellow in her original colors, the sub stands two stories high overlooking the scenic vistas of Vancouver harbor in front of the Vancouver Maritime Museum. A SYMBOL OF GENIUS AND INITIATIVE BEN FRANKLIN is a symbol of Swiss genius and American "can-do" initiative. Built in Monthey, Switzerland between 1966 and 1968, PX-15 was the brainchild of famed inventor and scientist Dr. Jacques Piccard, who with his father, Auguste Piccard, pioneered the development of the bathyscaphe. PX-15 was developed with funding from NASA and Grumman Aerospace in the United States, reflecting Dr Piccard's ties to the US Government's "aquanaut" programs as well as the astronaut programs. Dr Piccard made world history on January 23, 1963 with Lieut. Don Walsh of the US Navy when they made a dive in Piccard's bathyscaphe Trieste into the Marianas Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean - seven miles down. Since then, no one has dived deeper. PX-15 was Piccard's foray into the mid-range depths of the ocean. Rated to dive to 3000 feet (900 meters), the submersible was intended for extended "drift" missions that could last months. NASA was particularly interested in these missions as an analog for extended space travel, and Grumman, NASA's partner in the LEM (lunar excursion module, or the "lunar lander") as well as other components in the Apollo program, was keen to investigate the potential of the submersible for exploration of the ocean as well as a probable model for future spacecraft. Many of the parts and systems inside PX-15 are similar to an Apollo spacecraft. The partially assembled PX-15 was shipped to Florida, completed by Grumman and named BEN FRANKLIN for the American patriot and scientist, who was the first to note and chart the presence of the Gulf Stream. As Ben Franklin, the submersible embarked with a seven-man crew, commanded by Dr. Piccard, on July 14, 1969, on a 30-day drift mission in the Gulf Stream. Their final destination, off Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, completed its unparalleled feat when they surfaced on August 14. No research sub has gone for a more extended dive. BEN FRANKLIN made a few more dives after 1969, including the first deepsea dive for Dr. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the wreck of the TITANIC. After running aground on a reef in the Bahamas in 1970, BEN FRAHNKLIN was sold to Canadian businessman John Horton. A Grumman crew disassembled and shipped the sub to Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, where Horton planned to rebuild it as a working undersea platform for divers working on undersea construction projects. But the costs were too great, and the demand for such a platform too small. Ben Franklin languished, disassembled and slowly rusting, for thirty years, forgotten by many. RESTORING A LONG FORGOTTEN PIONEER In December 1999, with the sudden news that space was no longer available to store it at a North Vancouver shipyard, Horton was faced with a decision to either move the submersible or scrap it. He donated the submersible to the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Museum's director James Delgado, an underwater archaeologist and no stranger to ocean research or submersibles, quickly agreed to spearhead the drive to save and restore BEN FRANKLIN. Donations from Vancouver businesses, and help from volunteer workers completed the $60,000 (Canadian) external restoration of the submersible. As part of the project, Delgado contacted former BEN FRANKLIN crewmembers and some of the project team from Grumman who originally worked on the sub's fitting out. The Grumman Archives, in Bethpage, New York, provided a number of details and photos, as did Grumman's project manager, Donald Terrana, now retired and living in Florida. Donations of original manuals and other details by the sub's original captain, Donald Kazimir, and crew members Chet May (NASA's representative on the 1969 drift dive) added more details and the human side to the sub's story. The reassembly of the sub's exterior ended in 2002, and with the assistance of Presence Suisse, the Swiss Consulate and UBS Bank, the Museum hosted a reunion of the sub's surviving crew that year. The interior remains unrestored. Many of the original details and equipment are still on board, but decades of flooding from a partially opened hatch left tons of water and filth inside that took the restoration crew over two years to clean. The Museum would like to open the sub to the public, for guided tours and school programs, but for now, if you go to the Museum's web page for 360 degree tours, you can explore inside the famous BEN FRANKLIN.

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