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would be blue, with the color shading from light blue near the surface
to deep blue near the bottom.
There was to be viewing from two levels. To prevent visitors down-
stairs from seeing the tank bottom not far below their feet, I slanted
the top of the lower viewing window back toward the viewers. This
window also served to direct the visitor's attention up to the circling
fish above.
Finally, if we couldn't actually re-create the open sea, at least we could
give visitors an inkling of its immensity, and a huge window in the up-
stairs viewing area seemed just the ticket. Great advances had been made
in recent years in the manufacture and installation of very large pan-
els of strong, perfectly clear acrylic. We enlisted the talents of the Nip-
pura Company of Takamatsu, Japan, to produce what would be the
largest single window in the world: fifty-five feet long, fifteen feet high,
and thirteen inches thick. It was shipped over from Japan in five sec-
tions. Upon arrival in Monterey, each section was lifted from the truck,
lowered into the as-yet-roofless building, and laid flat on the bottom
of the tank. The Nippura technicians constructed an insulated house
over all five sections; they then slowly and uniformly heated the pan-
els to the correct temperature for the chemical bonding that would join
them into one massive window. At the end of this critical process, the
window was slowly cooled to room temperature.
The Bigge Company, specialists in moving large and fragile objects,
was hired to perform the delicate task of lifting and moving the giant
window into its place in the concrete wall on one side of the tank. First
their giant crane, which was parked on Cannery Row, tipped up the
thirty-eight-ton piece of plastic from a horizontal to a vertical posi-
tion. Then very slowly, an inch at a time, it was lifted and moved for-
ward until it was in place, resting on neoprene pads in the concrete
sill. Now the specialists from Nippura took over and injected silicone
sealant around the window's edge. After a week of cure time, the tank
was filled. Not a drop leaked from the window. The whole operation
was an impressive achievement.
Creating the three-dimensional curved back of the tank was a ma-
jor challenge for the engineers. Since a smooth, three-dimensional curve,
like the inside of an egg, was certainly not practical to form in con-
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