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moving around in three dimensions, in-
stead of two.” Lahey attended commer-
cial diving school, to learn underwater
welding and construction for dams,
bridges, and oil-and-gas installations.
“Just about anything you might do out
of the water you could do underwater,”
he said. “You bolt things, you cut things,
you weld things together, you move things,
you recover things.” Water conducts elec-
tricity, and sometimes, he added, “you can
feel it fizzing in your teeth.”
In 1983, when he was twenty-one, he
carried out his first submarine dive, to
fourteen hundred feet, to inspect an oil
rig off the coast of Northern California.
He was profoundly affected by the ex-
perience—to go deep one hour and sur-
face the next, with “none of the punitive
decompression,” he said. By the time Ves-
covo contacted him, Lahey had piloted
more than sixty submersibles on several
thousand dives. An expedition leader who
has worked with him for decades told
me that he is, “without question, the best
submarine pilot in the world.”
Lahey co-founded Triton in 2007. The
business model was to build private sub-
mersibles for billionaires, including aRussian oligarch and a member of a Mid-
dle Eastern royal family. (In the years
leading up to the first order, Lahey used
to be laughed at when he attended boat
shows; now there are companies that
build support vessels for yachts, to carry
helicopters, submarines, and other ex-
pensive toys.) But his deeper aspiration
was to make other people comprehend,
as Herman Melville wrote, in “Moby-
Dick,” that in rivers and oceans we see
“the image of the ungraspable phantom
of life; and this is the key to it all.” After
a few dives, many of Lahey’s clients
started allowing their vehicles to be used
for science and filming.
Vescovo didn’t care if Lahey sent him
to the bottom of the ocean in a window-
less steel ball; he just wanted to get there.
But Lahey declined to build anything
that didn’t have a passenger seat, for a
scientist; a manipulator arm, for collect-
ing samples; and viewports, so that the
occupants could appreciate the sensation
of submergence. Such features would
complicate the build, possibly to the point
of failure. But Lahey has a tendency to
promise the reality he wants before he’s
sure how to deliver it. “It wasn’t really abusiness decision,” a Triton engineer told
me. “He wanted to build this. Giving up
was not an option.” Lahey saw Vesco-
vo’s mission as a way to develop and test
the world’s first unlimited hadal explo-
ration system—one that could then be
replicated and improved, for scientists.
Vescovo flew to the Bahamas, and
Lahey took him for a test dive in Triton’s
flagship submersible, which has three
seats and is rated to a depth of thirty-three
hundred feet. The third seat was occu-
pied by an eccentric British man in his
thirties, named John Ramsay, who didn’t
seem to enjoy the dive; he was preoccu-
pied with what he didn’t like about the
submersible—which he had designed.“
I
never really had a particular passion
for submarines,” Ramsay, who is Tri-
ton’s chief submarine designer, told me.
“I still don’t, really.” What he does love is
that he gets to design every aspect of each
machine, from the central frame to the
elegant handle on the back of the hatch.
Car manufacturers have entire teams de-
sign a seat or a fender, and then produce
it at scale. But nearly every Triton sub-
MA marine is unique; Ramsay determines
GN
UM
Victor Vescovo made a fortune in private equity, but he couldn’t buy success in this—a richer man had tried and failed.