Lynn Poole displays and discusses various symbols including: the skull and crossbones, horseshoe, swastika, barber pole, cigar store Indian, mortar and pestle, and chevron. Words can be symbols also. Latin, although not spoken today as a living language is still used in scientific communication. Latin began as the language of Rome and its vicinity, but through many conquests the Romans spread the use of Latin to the rest of Italy and what is now France, Spain, and North Africa. The Romans also conquered Greece, but since Green was also a highly developed literary language, the Greeks retained their own language. Latin also became the language of the Roman Catholic Church and medieval universities. Many scientific discoveries made during the Renaissance and the early modern period were given names in Latin. Even today Latin names such as Zea mays (corn) are used in scientific communication. Carl von Linné or Carolus Linneaus in Latin classified life forms in an orderly way using Latin terms. In his classification of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species, a dog would be animal, chordata, mammalia, carnivora, canidae, canis familiarus. The Babylonians were fond of the number 60, which is retained today in 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, and even 360 degrees in a circle, which is 6 times 60. Weights and measures have been standardized so that they mean the same thing all over the world.

The program opens with drawings of early, primitive underwater vessels and segues into a film of swimmers with aqualungs. A photo of Charles William Beebe is shown as oceanographer Dayton Carritt discusses Beebe's 1930s bathysphere. In 1953, Auguste Piccard built the first bathyscaphe, the "Trieste," a 50-foot untethered underwater vehicle, after many years of successfully using balloons to study the atmosphere. The "Trieste" operates on the Archimedes principle of water displacement, demonstrated by Dr. Carritt by dropping a tennis ball and a golf ball into water. Dr. Carritt explains in detail a schematic diagram of the "Trieste," showing how the ballast mechanism works with a small experiment and film clip of the procedure. In 1958, the Office of Naval Research bought the "Trieste" from Piccard for $185,000 to study the physical, chemical, biological, and geological characteristics of the ocean. Dr. Carritt interviews Dr. Robert Dietz of the U.S. Navy, who recounts his dive in "Trieste" with Piccard, describing what he saw and how he felt. Dr. Dietz also explains the "false bottom" or "deep scattering layer" and shows a graph of it. He discusses the drawbacks and the uses of bathyscaphes, such as deep sea salvage, mineral mining, and cable monitoring.