By KiddieDaily Editors · Jul 2, 2026 · 3 min read · Ages 8–10 · 1 source

Before the moon race, explorers wanted to conquer the ocean

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In 1916, 12-year-old Edwin Link, Jr., sat in his father’s workshop in Binghamton, New York, and drew a submarine. The detailed sketch echoed Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which transformed how the world imagined the deep via fiction’s most famous submarine, Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. Based on his annotations, 12-year-old Link wanted to design his own Nautilus to serve the U.S.

in World War I against mounting German U-boat threats. His father, who founded the Link Piano and Organ Company, probably disregarded the sketch as a young boy’s fantasy.  After dropping out of high school in 1922, Ed Link followed his father into the family business, learning how bellows and pneumatic pressure—the guts of organs—could be made to simulate movement. By 1929, he used that knowledge to build the world’s first flight simulator, a stubby box mounted on organ bellows that pitched and rolled like an aircraft in weather.  By the end of World War II, more than 10,000 of his “Blue Box” simulators had trained half a million pilots.

He sold the company in 1954 and returned to the sea—but not to support war. Link spent the rest of his life trying to prove that people could not only explore the ocean depths, but dwell there. In the 1960s, for one brief, dazzling decade, it looked as though the ocean might rival space as humanity’s next great frontier.

As astronauts circled the Earth, aquanauts moved into seafloor labs. The engineering of underwater habitation such as pressure vessels, life support, and decompression science was advancing fast enough that underwater hotels, underwater transit, and a sustained human presence in the shallow coastal ocean seemed not just possible but imminent. But even as Moon landings, space shuttles, and reusable rockets seized the headlines, Link, along with a stubborn handful of engineers, explorers, and flat-out dreamers, kept plumbing the ocean instead.

Now, with climate systems straining and the seabed coveted for rare minerals that power electronics, the century-old dream of touring and dwelling beneath the sea is inching forward, not with the idealism of the 1960s, but with the sober pull of climate and commerce. A sunlit apron of seafloor around 600 feet deep rings every continent, comprising seven to eight percent of the ocean, an area larger than North America. Marine life concentrates most densely in the shallowest waters of this continental shelf, 100 feet deep or less, in reefs, lagoons, and coastal inlets where a person can swim and scuba dive without specialized gear.

This was where the dream of touring and living beneath the sea began. In June 1932, Popular Science described a French engineer’s bold proposal envisioning an “electric submarine automobile”—an invention that captured the global zeitgeist, melding cars with subs. Passengers would descend through a hatchway into a sealed cabin mounted on tractor treads, then crawl along the seafloor peering through portholes, watching marine life glide by.  “The inventor is primarily interested in the possibilities of his vehicle as an amusement device,” wrote Popular Science, “and foresees ‘submarine sightseeing buses’” operating beneath the world’s great beach resorts. 

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