Dr. Bill Hamilton Named 2001 DAN®/Rolex® Diver of the Year
Dr. Bill Hamilton has been named the DAN/Rolex 2001 Diver of the Year. The award was to be presented at Seaspace ceremonies in Houston on June 9, but flooding cancelled the event. The award will be given at an as-yet unscheduled date and location in the near future.
This distinguished award honors an individual with an excellent record of public service in scuba diving, and who is also a strong advocate of DAN and scuba diving safety. The award includes a plaque and a specially engraved Rolex Oyster Perpetual Submariner Date dive watch.
Walter Fischer, president and CEO of Rolex Watch USA, endorsed the selection. "Dr. Bill Hamilton is an outstanding addition to the men and women who have preceded him as the Rolex/Dan Diver of the Year," Fischer said. "For the bulk of more than 40 years, Dr. Hamilton has devoted his career as a physiologist to matters relating to making diving safer, more effective, and better understood by everyone."
Dr. Peter Bennett, founder, president and CEO of DAN, praised the choice of Dr. Hamilton for the honor. "Bill Hamilton’s long productive career since the 1960s in diving physiology and medicine and his unique role in computing safe decompression tables for technical divers makes him most deserving of the DAN Rolex Diver of the Year," he said.
After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Hamilton worked with a commercial diving laboratory where he helped define human performance during the first saturation exposures to continental shelf depths, and later he worked on extending this to the present operational depths (over 1,000 fsw). He helped develop commercial bounce, saturation, and excursion decompression tables, and worked to facilitate the transition from lab to sea.
He and colleagues in his lab produced and helped disseminate the fundamental data on hyperbaric chamber fire safety now universally applied by both the diving and hyperbaric medical communities. This work has saved many lives, and it has helped make hyperbaric medicine and underwater dry-chamber welding feasible and safe.
Dr. Hamilton and his colleagues have developed many types of decompression procedures for a wide variety of diving and exposures to pressure, ranging from submarine free ascent to space travel to deep commercial diving, including detailed instructions for treatment of decompression sickness. This work resulted in and has depended on a comprehensive computer program called DCAP, the first such computational program designed for use by individual researchers. For NASA he developed excursion and decompression procedures for use with a hyperbaric lock on a space station, and he assisted in the implementation of enriched air in the neutral buoyancy pools.
Always a strong proponent of safe diving practices, Dr. Hamilton applied his experience with decompression, physiological effects of gases, and methods of managing exposure to oxygen to help divers avoid narcosis when diving beyond the "recreational" range. Unique decompression and operational methods using oxygen-helium-nitrogen trimixes that he helped produce in cooperation with safety-conscious divers were instrumental in the origination and development of the new field of "technical diving." He has helped apply this to the problems of deep cave diving, specifically on several record-setting cave exploration dives with scuba over the depth range of 200 to beyond 870 fsw.
Dr. Hamilton has had a strong relationship with NOAA for many years. He was responsible for developing most of NOAA’s nitrox saturation-excursion procedures for "habitat diving," including NOAA OPS and NOAA’s Repex procedures for repetitive excursion diving, and he has worked on excursion procedures using helium mixtures. Repex also resulted in a widely applicable algorithm for managing long term exposure to oxygen. Dr. Hamilton also helped prepare the NOAA oxygen exposure limits. He has been consultant and advisor to NOAA's Aquarius habitat project since the design stage, and he has produced decompression tables for use in evacuating the habitat. He prepared trimix tables for NOAA’s research on the USS Monitor, and this led to his production of a set of trimix tables for the NOAA Diving Program. He contributed to earlier editions and co-authored two chapters in the 2001 NOAA Diving Manual.
He has worked on development of rebreathers, including especially rebreather decompression procedures and integrated computers, safety practices, and instruction materials, and he has carried out rebreather training and intensive manned testing. He has helped in the development and assessment of several diver-carried decompression computers and dive recorders. He designed and helped evaluate an effective breathing gas heat regenerator for use in a stranded diving bell.
He has been organizer, chairman, and/or editor of several specialized workshops; one on the validation of decompression tables that provides simplifying guidelines for bringing new tables into operational readiness may be the most important of these. He has served as editor of Pressure, the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society’s newsletter. He worked on national standards for U.S. commercial diving; in that capacity he helped solve several challenging problems including eliminating some onerous and unworkable elements and establishing a uniform standard for effectiveness of decompression procedures. He conducted a worldwide survey for the U.S. Navy on air and oxygen-with-air diving practices.
Dr. Hamilton has received three different awards from the UHMS, and several from the diving community. He has been a strong supporter of DAN since its earliest days, including presenting at Divers Day symposiums. Major Hamilton served as a USAF fighter pilot in combat service in Vietnam, where he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and other decorations. As Life Support Officer he helped solve an equipment problem that had caused unsuccessful bailouts. He has recently proposed a radical new idea for protection against very high G-forces in fighter aircraft.
Previous DAN/Rolex Divers of the Year are Walt "Butch" Hendrick (1989); Jim Corry (1990); Michael Lang (1991); Drew Richardson (1992); Karl Huggins (1993); Dr. Glen Egstrom (1994); Marjorie Bank (1995); Dick Long (1996); Dr. Lee Somers (1997); Richard Dunford (1998); Dr. Hillary Viders (1999); and Greg Mackay (2000).
