Dr. Joe MacInnis was born in Barrie, Ontario, Canada on March 2, 1937 which makes him 84 today. His family moved to Toronto where he grew up after his father, a Royal Canadian Air Force instructor passed away in an airplane crash when Dr. Joe was only a few months old.
Dr. Joe (Pictured above, top row on far right) was the captain of the swim team at the University of Toronto and was an excellent swimmer. Dr. Joe earned an MD from the same school in 1962. Dr. Joe learned to scuba dive in 1954 when he was 17 years in Florida.
His incredible story spans six decades of pioneering undersea science and engineering projects.
Dr. Joe shared his story:
"As a young boy in Canada, big skies and big lakes went into me. They slowed me down, made me think, made me somehow, reverential. There was something about them that said: 'Come . . and find out.'
My father was a flying instructor in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His death in a mid-air collision brought the perils of human existence into my dawn-of-consciousness days.
As a teenager, I was captivated by the natural world—and the human family. To enhance my understanding of the natural world, I began to free dive and scuba dive. To satisfy my curiosity about the human family, I went to medical school..
These were the opening years of a new decade—the 1960s. Americans and Russians were putting the first humans into space and the deep ocean. Mercury astronauts were orbiting the earth. The U.S. Navy deployed a manned vehicle into the Mariana Trench that carried two men seven miles into the ocean. More than anything, I wanted to participate in this grand adventure!"
Dr. Joe's deep aquatic adventure began unfolding right after he graduated from medical school in the early 1960s at which point he was a "freshly-minted medical doctor, full of optimism about exploring a new frontier."
Today, as Dr. Joe reflects in the rear-view mirror of life he adds fascinating historical context and insight:
"Today, I’m a sea-weathered physician trying to push beyond my delusions to understand the lessons of my deep ocean odyssey. What really happened inside and outside those black depths?"
From the beginning, Mother Ocean and her cold, currents, darkness and pressure, was my master teacher. She taught me that life on-board a working ship, or within the claustrophobic confines of a research sub, forces you to make a pact with the ship, the sub and your mates. Part of that pact is self-reliance, respect for machinery, reverence for the sea around you and a love of laughter.
Every time you descend into her depths, Mother Ocean compels you to ask life-and-death questions. Are you prepared? What are your motives? Have you considered the harm you will do? Failure to find the right answers brings you to your knees in a heartbeat or a lifetime."
My love of challenge, search for status and affection for Big Oil and consumer capitalism made me complicit in tearing apart the biosphere. It lays bare the need for radical changes in my earth-ocean relationships. It’s a call-to-action to help build a steady-state, post-fossil fuel economy where Mother Ocean and the biosphere define the limits."
Genesis
The Rolex SEA-DWELLER is the stuff of legend. The story of Man and the Sea, as well as the story of Man and Machine, have captivated and fascinated the human imagination and psyche since the beginning of recorded history. This story of the exploration of inner-space tells how the science fiction of one century became the science reality of the next century, and how Rolex played a critical role in the history of The Right Stuff as well as mankind's conquest of the ocean.
This is the captivating story of man returning to live and work underwater in the DEEP-SEA, as depicted in the 1871 illustration seen below from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The SEA. It's Captain Nemo and the Nautilus come to life...This story is about astounding exploration, fueled by The Spirit Of Inquiry...So let's hop in The Rolex Time Machine and set out on a Fantastic Voyage...
French 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Illustration from 1871 depicts two men located in bottom left corner Dwelling under the Sea
Dr. Joe's underwater journey began with helping to colonize the continental shelf with the first aptly named "SEA-DWELLERS". In October of 1963 at age 26, Dr. Joe MacInnis joined the American project 'Man-In-SEA' research project spearheaded by Edwin Link in Key West, Florida as a medical advisor.
At the time J.F.K. was the President of the United States. As Dr. Joe drove across the Canadian border into the United State he was carrying a Green Card and a Draft Card. His Green Card permitted him to work in America and his draft card meant he could be called-up to be sent to Vietnam by the U.S. Military.
Dr. Joe expounds:
"I was headed to Philadelphia and Key West to study diving research at the University of Pennsylvania and join the American Man-In-Sea program. As I crossed the International Peace Bridge in Buffalo, New York, I had no idea of what lay ahead.
Americans and Russians were fighting a ‘hot’ Cold War. Fleets of nuclear powered submarines with ballistic missiles were deployed throughout the Atlantic and Pacific. Long-range B-52 bombers were flying non-stop missions with hydrogen bombs. The Cuban Missile Crisis had just happened; American forces were losing the fight in the jungles of Vietnam. But I was young, bursting with energy and oblivious. The only thing that mattered was: I had a job in America.
In 1963, my career was accelerated by the unthinkable. A billion dollar nuclear submarine was steaming slowly through the depths. A cooling pipe burst. The sub came to a stop, descended stern first and imploded. The USS Thresher and her 129 men were scattered into the depths.
The worst disaster in American submarine history confirmed how little was know about deep water and its effects on complex machines and human performance. Knowing they had no deep water search and rescue system for future accidents, the Navy began asking hard questions. Two of them were: how deep can humans dive? What systems do they need to work safely?
I spent the next eight years with American research teams trying to answer these questions. First, as medical advisor to Edwin Link’s Man-In-Sea project. In 1964, in the Bahamas, Robert Stenuit and Jon Lindbergh, son of the famous flyer, descended to 432 feet—the outer edge of the continental shelf—and took up residence in a small, inflatable dwelling.
As I monitored their health from our ship moored over their refuge, they remained submerged for two days. They made repeated forays to study the surrounding seafloor and returned to their gas-filled shelter to eat and rest. The multiple stressors on them included an exotic breathing mixture of oxygen and helium. When they surfaced, they had completed the longest deep dive in history.

1964 Jon Lindbergh & Robert Stenuit Man-In-Sea Mission
"We had gone deeper than the US Navy’s SEALAB program and Jacques Cousteau’s CONSHELF project. Suddenly, like them, we were at the centre of a movement to “colonize” the continental shelf by living under the sea. For a young diving physician, there was something about it that was very rewarding, but there was something about it that seemed threatening. Without asking, we had become trespassers . . . trying to bend Mother Ocean to our will."
A year later, I became medical director of Ocean Systems Inc., the world’s largest undersea engineering and diving company. My primary task was to monitor the health and safety of sixty commercial divers working on oil rigs in the Eastern Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. I spent time with dive crews in California, Louisiana and Norway. At our research facility in Buffalo, New York, I co-led a small team developing decompression tables to allow our divers to work at one hundred fathoms.
As the prime contractor to the U.S. Navy’s Supervisor of Salvage, we helped recover an H-bomb lost beneath the Mediterranean Sea and participated in the search for the USS Scorpion, a nuclear submarine lost south of the Azores. We recovered bodies and engines from Pan American Flight 712 in the Caribbean Sea and salvaged a B-52 bomber from the depths of Lake Michigan. These accidents took the lives of more than one hundred souls.
Every death was brutal. The B-52 was on a night training mission over Lake Michigan, flying 360 miles an hour at an altitude of 500 feet when metal fatigue split her left wing. Cartwheeling into the lake, her 25,000 gallons of jet fuel exploded in a fireball seen 20 miles away. During the savage operations, there were no signs of her nine-man crew. They had vanished on impact.
Research was an essential part of our work. In our steel chamber at Union Carbide’s Linde Plant in Buffalo, we dove to 400 feet, 500 and 600 feet. Our subjects were our field divers and volunteers from our research team. We measured physiological responses during ‘bounce’ dives and ‘saturation’ dives. The most challenging descent was a 48-hour saturation dive to 650 feet. Our objective was to apply what we learned in the lab to the ocean’s depths.
Our favourite research device was the first-ever lock-out sub. Deep Diver had two compartments: one for the pilot and an observer; a second for two divers who opened a hatch and slipped into the sea to work. Deep Diver had what every diver wanted: mobility. We used her for science dives and saturation dives. We flew with her to the Azores to assist the Navy in the hunt for the USS Scorpion and to Newfoundland to search for a Navy cable-burying machine on the Grand Banks. During a series of dives in the Bahamas, I monitored the health and safety of two men who dropped out of the sub at 700 feet.