Hello everyone and welcome back to Scary Interesting.

If you're familiar with the channel, it should be abundantly clear that the margin for air between life and death underwater is small.

And so, it should come as no surprise that you probably wouldn't want to be at the forefront of such a dangerous industry.

So in this video, we're going to look at two stories of people who are exactly that and the results were horrifying.

As always, viewer discretion is advised.

The 1700s were an era of grand ambitions and reckless speculation.

Trade routes expanded, cities flourished, and the British Empire reached across the seas.

Wealth, once only reserved for aristocrats, began to trickle into the hands of merchants

and entrepreneurs, but with new opportunities came new schemes, some ingenious and others

disastrously misguided.

Among the many dreamers of this age was a man named

John Day. He was a carpenter and wheelwright from East Anglia and an unremarkable man by most

accounts, except for his unshakable belief that he could make history. He saw himself as an inventor,

a visionary, and most dangerously a man destined for fame. While others sought well through trade

or politics, his plan was to

build a submersible chamber, sink it to the depths of the ocean, and prove that a man could

survive underwater for hours at a time. And if he succeeded, he would only claim a fortune

but secure his place in history as a pioneer of deep-sea exploration. John, however, had no formal

education, no engineering background, and no particular expertise

in maritime science.

All he really had was an idea.

His great obsession was submersions, specifically the idea that a man could survive beneath

...