The 1993 Academy Award for costume design went to Eiko Ishioka for creating the magnificent costumes in the hit film, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Particularly stunning were the dresses worn by Wynona Rider in her role as Mina Harker, Dracula’s main love interest. The film is set in the late 1800s when women’s fashion featured a padded undergarment known as a “bustle” to accentuate the fullness of the buttocks. To further emphasize their protruding rear ends, many would bend forward as they walked, assuming a posture that came to be known as the “Grecian bend.” In a curious twist, this term also came to be applied to the workers who built the underwater foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883.
These workers often experienced excruciating pain when they returned to the surface of the Hudson River. Decompression sickness caused them to double over, a little like the bustle-wearing women with their “Grecian bends.” The gigantic pylons that support the bridge had to be constructed deep in the riverbed, and the construction workers labored in large, open-bottomed timber chambers, or caissons, on the floor of the Hudson. Inside these caissons, they toiled away, excavating soil and rock. The surrounding water exerted tremendous pressure on the chamber walls, so the air inside had to be pressurized to prevent the caissons from collapsing.
Since the extent to which a gas dissolves in a liquid is determined by the pressure exerted by the gas on the surface of the liquid (Henry’s Law), at high pressures, more nitrogen (which makes up 80 percent of air) dissolves. If the pressure is released too quickly, as it was when the bridge workers rose to the river surface, the nitrogen comes bubbling out of solution and causes the bends.
The risks of working in a chamber of compressed air at the bottom of a river were little understood in the late 1800s. Even the chief engineer of the bridge, Washington A. Roebling, didn’t appreciate the severity of the problem. In 1872, after spending twelve hours breathing pressurized air in a submerged caisson, he lost consciousness and became permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Over a hundred other bridge workers were afflicted by the bends, and three died.
The same problem plagued the builders of the Holland Tunnel—the first subway tunnel under the Hudson—until E. W. Moir installed decompression chambers at the work site. Moir realized that a victim of the bends could be treated by being placed inside a high-pressure chamber. There he would remain until the nitrogen in his body was forced back into solution and the gas was released at a controlled rate—a slow decompression. By the time the Holland Tunnel was completed, in the 1920s, the situation was well in hand, and not a single worker died from the bends. The tunnel was designed so that workers had to pass through decompression chambers, and those working under high pressure were only allowed to work for short periods. Today, scuba divers are well aware of Henry’s Law and know all about the importance of rising to the surface in a controlled fashion.
Robert Boyle, perhaps the greatest scientist of the seventeenth century, was the first to note that rapid decompression can cause previously dissolved gases to come out of solution. How did he prove it? He placed a snake inside a chamber, reduced the pressure, and observed a gas bubble forming in the snake’s eye. Such observations led him to formulate Boyle’s Law, which states that the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to pressure. Every diver or worker who has to inhale pressurized air had better keep this law in mind.
The bustle has long gone out of fashion, but some women still yearn for more ample buttocks believing that this makes for a more attractive figure. Plastic surgery can cater to their desires through implants filled with silicone or by injecting fat that was removed from other parts of the body by liposuction. These procedures carry minimal risk when performed by a qualified plastic surgeon but there are also clandestine practitioners with no medical training who claim to achieve the same results more cheaply by injecting silicone directly into the buttocks. Not only is this illegal, but dangerous. Besides infections, the silicone can travel to other parts of the body creating havoc, in rare cases even causing death. Any lady desiring an augmented derriere should consider a return to the bustle, available in several versions on Amazon.
