Alvin? From The Atlantic:
The 'Rock Star' of the Submarine World Just Turned 50
In 1956, a team of scientists convened in Washington to discuss the way forward in deep-sea exploration. They focused on the future because there was, at that point, no real past to speak of: At the time, the ocean floor was nearly as foreign to humans as the surface of the moon. We could guess what it might look like, based on the environments of shallower waters; we had as yet, however, no way to see the scene with our own eyes.
So the commission did what commissions do best: It drafted a resolution. One that, in this case, called for the United States to develop a national program to build underwater vehicles that would be capable of reaching depths never before possible. The manned mini-subs would be the maritime version of the rockets and capsules that NASA was then developing for the exploration of space: They would bring humans, for the first time, to the worlds beyond the Earth's surface.
Eight years later—on June 5, 1964—a team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute commissioned the vehicle that resulted: a little sub named, in a tribute to the oceanographer Allyn Vine, Alvin. In the 50 years since then, the three-seater mini-sub—the only one shared by the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — has, the Cape Cod Times writes, "easily become the rock star of WHOI's fleet."
That's in large part because Alvin has proved to be amazingly—almost miraculously—resilient. The little sub has, as of the end of last year, taken 4,678 dives. It has spent 32,611 hours—more than 1,300 days — under the ocean's surface, with an average dive length of nearly seven hours. It has carried 14,025 humans, usually one pilot and two scientists per dive, to comb the ocean floor. It recovered a hydrogen bomb that was lost in the Mediterranean after a mid-air plane collision. It helped to discover previously unknown life forms congregating around hydrothermal vents off the Galapagos Islands. Most recently it helped to document the sub-surface effects of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Most famously it explored the wreckage of the Titanic.
Quite the accomplished little craft. The thing is tiny. I majored in Marine Biology at Boston University and was at Woods Hole a couple times and saw Alvin on its carrier ship, the Lulu (named for Allyn Vine's mom).
