The sports card industry has grown at a wild pace reaching close to $13 billion in 2021,

and experts believe it will reach $49 billion by the year 2032.

My name is Jeremy Lee, and if you'd like to learn more through the experiences of lifelong veterans,

industry titans, and the critical thinkers who bring meaning to these historical artifacts,

tune into my podcast, SportsCards Live, wherever you get your podcasts.

At the end of James Cameron's 1989 underwater thriller The Abyss,

Oil-Rig diver Bud Brighman, played by Ed Harris, dons an experimental diving suit in which,

instead of air, he breathes a special oxygenated liquid.

This allows him to avoid the lethal effects of

extreme water pressure and descend to the bottom of a deep ocean trench to diffuse a nuclear

warhead. While certainly a memorable plot device, surely such a technology is pure science fiction.

Right? Well, not so much as you might think. The breathing fluid depicted in the film

oxygenated perfluorarbon actually exists,

and while scenes with the diving suit were filmed with Ed Harris holding his breath, an earlier

scene in which a rat is immersed in the breathing fluid was filmed for real.

While the Abyss is certainly the most famous depiction of liquid breathing, the technology

has been experimented with for over a century, and while it might not quite be ready for use

in deep-sea diving it may have life-saving applications in the field of medicine. The first

experiments with liquid breathing were conducted shortly after the First World War when

doctors began investigating the use of oxygenated saline solutions to help heal the lungs of soldiers

damaged by poison gas.

But it was not until the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s that research truly

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