We all were recently caught up in the tragic fate of the Titan submersible.

The case-dominated headlines, and, for better or worse, captured the attention of the world.

As a result, the question of whether something so scary, so tragic, involving a submersible, had ever happened before arose.

The answer is yes.

Welcome to Marooned, harrowing tales of the catastrophically lost.

I'm Jack Luna. This is Aaron Abel.

The Johnson Sealing was a deep-sea research submersible

designed by American inventor and engineer Edwin Albert Link,

who began developing it in the late 60s.

Link, who was 69 years old at the time of the Johnson-Seelink disaster,

started off in the aviation business learning to fly planes

shortly after the end of World War I.

By the time 1926 rolled around, he and his brother George had opened their own flying school.

Link developed a flight simulator he called the Link trainer or Blue Box, which was used in

World War II to train pilots. All this to say that Edwin A. Link is considered a pioneer in aviation

and underwater exploration. In 1931, Link married a reporter from Bingham, Marion Clayton,

who had interviewed him about his flying school. The couple would go on to have two sons,

William, and Clayton.

Link eventually sold his aviation company for around $5 million,

opening the door, the hatch, to oceanography.

This was his next big love, and it all began with a trip to Miami in the late 1940s.

Link learned to dive, and by the early 1950s, he was exploring shipwrecks around Florida.

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