A short history of diving

[Canibul]

Well, hmm..all those card certifications..well..I dont know how much time I have spent hanging on decompression stops blowing air-rings with my bootie..but a lot. Under ice, installing oceanographic moorings, shipwrecks, freeing props, replacing zincs, inspecting bottoms, spearfishing, manned submersible support, I am not sure what a dive shop could teach me in a few dives that would equal 45 years of experience. I can dive to 50 ft. with a buddy, bounce to 100 ft. alone with this hookah. Thats good enough for me, actually. All the fun stuff seems to be shallower than 50 ft. anyway.

I did email exchange with a shop on Harbour Island, Bahamas, who would give me a check-out dive and issue new card, but thats a $ 400. r/t airfare, plus hotel, plus meals, etc. Oh, and plus the dive.

I did contact someone at PADI, and they wanted to know when I took the course and my instructors name...uh...Austin Texas, 1980, and I for sure dont remember any of their names....

[hellosailor]

<PADI,>
Sorry, but I just can't keep a straight face about the "certification of the day" club.<G> It's like getting a driver's license:
License for sedans
Additional endorsement for 2-doors
Additional endorsement for station wagons
Additional endorsement for daytime urban driving
Additional endorsement for daytime highway driving
Additional endorsement for night-time rural cross-country driving with passenger and radio in the vehicle...

At a certain point, no matter how popular and successful they may be, I just have to say "I'd rather be in Philadelphia." Eating spinach!<G>

[off-the-grid]

I realize this is an old thread, but why start a new one, when my question is very closely related.

A lot has changed in 3 years. First of all rebreathers are quickly becoming a VERY viable option even for non technical divers...although closed circuit could be considered sort of an intro to the tech world. The Sport and Classic KISS have exploded in popularity in the last few years. Just in my area alone, I've lost track of how many guys have switched over to CCR. Jetsam has had such success over the last few years that in the last year or so we're starting to see a lot more smaller, fully manual units and at lower prices. Not maintainence free, but less maintaince than units with electronics, and in the opinion of many, safer, since divers on these units must be more aware and don't become complacent, relying on the computer.

That being said, does everyone still feel for cruising, a few tanks with a small compressor is the way to go?

I don't see O2 being that much of an issue. My biggest concern is the availability...or high cost of having sorb shipped to more remote locations.

Also on a vacation, the breather is going to be much more valuable, because you want to get as much time in the water as possible. Whereas, when cruising I see it becoming more of a hassle, since you can pretty much dive every day of the week and with OC at a moments notice. Also if I wind up somewhere with bigger dives, there will likely be operators where you can rent doubles and get nitrox.

[hellosailor]

Small compressors are still expensive items and most expensive to maintain consumables costs, etc.) making them impractical for most recreational sailors. Considering how long it took the industry to get over the misnomer "Nitrox" (better called what it is, oxygen-enriched air) and how that's still so "special"...I'd wonder how many shops would be afraid to touch rebreathers because of O2 poisoning concerns and insurance. Very easy and tempting to go too deep on a recycler in crystal clear water, and most of the industry is after all targeted to less attentive [casual] divers.

Besides, the average shop can't make $40 selling a "VIP+" with an o-ring on a rebreather, can they? (sigh)

[off-the-grid]

I prefer the term voodoo mix myself.

There's not a lot of support, but in the caribbean you can sometimes find at least one operator at any given destination that supports them. Also more and more of the liveaboards are starting to have rebreather support. As long as you're going someplace where O2 is available, worst case, people will usually just ship enough sorb for their trip ahead of time to the shop they're diving with.

Of course none of this really helps if cruising long term and/or going someplace really remote.

True, but a less attentive casual diver isn't going to be diving a breather in the first place.

Not true...they can make a lot more than that. 3 tanks to get VIPed, 2 1st stages to rebuild, one of each needing to be O2 cleaned too, sorb, dissinfectant, sensors, batties. Shops can make a lot off the consumables needed for CCR. The only thing they wind up making less money on is the fills.

[off-the-grid]

Just talked to a friend, who just came back from Truk, and he said it was $220/keg of sorb over there!

That pretty much settles it for me.

I'm sure in other remote locations that aren't wreck diving meccas it will cost even more to have it shipped in.

[bastonjock]

i enjoyed reading your short history very much,there was a lot of stuff in there that i did not know about.One answer to early divers that i have never found out is "why were they called"?? urinators???

diving has come a long way in the last 40 years,mainly as a result of offshore oil and gas production.

Perhaps your brief history ought to contain a referrence to the human cost of the sport.Try finding a Saturation diver who worked in the 70s,most of them did not reach their 50th birthday.

in the early 80,s some accountant came up with the idea of EA diving.i was a "baby diver" then,i asked my boss if i could go to the job in Denmark,he told me that i lacked experience,next month im on a chopper out to denmark,the reason was that they were running out of divers,thirteen guys had got decompression sickness,they were dropping like flys,Hot water suits,EA and cold chambers do not contribute to safe diving,one guy got an embolisim in the scrotum,his whatnots swelled up big time,he had the local diving doctor in Denmark issue a Certificate to proove it

as a sport it is great fun

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by bastonjock

...One answer to early divers that i have never found out is "why were they called"?? urinators???

"Urinator" comes from the Latin verb “urinari”, meaning: "to plunge under water, to dive".

[SkiprJohn]

Great History! Sorry I missed it when you first sent it out. I started diving in the early 80s to clean the bottom of my boat and did many recreational dives since. I earned one card (a NAUI) just because my friends said I should and they wanted me to get in on the class to keep the cost down. Another friend was the instructor. I don't regret getting the card because it makes it easier to fill my tank but no one has ever asked me for it that I can remember. I just take my old tank in, they look at the tank, look at me and fill it.
Its great to see other sailors into diving as well. The two recreations are definitely compatible and I'd like to set up a compressor on my boat once I get her sailing again.
JohnL

[Stillraining]

Nice post Gord

I learned something to..i always thought Cousteau was credited for SCUBA..I guess not.

I basicly had to give up diving as I cant clear my ears any more..last dive it took me 30 min. to get down 35' on the anchor line and my mask was full of blood..no fun.

Edit..I use to have one of thoes old twin tube regulators I got as junk from an old dive shop..wish I still had it just for a wall ornament

[Chief Engineer]

In the Florida Keys....I spent most of a day there last April.

The Collection of Hard Hats is amazing, beautiful.

www.divingmuseum.com

Originally Posted by GordMay

Timeline of underwater technology:

- Several centuries BC: Relief carvings made at this time show (An ancient kingdom in northern Mesopotamia which is in present-day Iraq) Assyrian soldiers crossing rivers using inflated goatskin floats. Several modern authors have wrongly said that the floats were crude breathing sets and that they show (Click link for more info and facts about frogmen) frogmen in action.)

- 1300 or earlier: Persian divers using diving goggles with windows made of the polished outer layer of tortoiseshell.

- 15th century: Leonardo da Vinci made the first known mention of air tanks, in his Atlantic Codex, that systems were used at that time to artificially breathe under water, but he did not explain them in detail due to what he described as "bad human nature", that would have taken advantage of this technique to sink ships and even commit murders. Some drawings, however, showed different kinds of snorkels and an air tank (to be carried on the breast) that presumably should have no external connections. Other drawings showed a complete immersion kit, with a plunger suit which included a sort of mask with a box for air. The project was so detailed that it included a urine collector, too.

- 1531: G Roman Emperor uglielmo dives on two of Caligula's sunken galleys using a diving bell from a design by Leonardo da Vinci.

- Around 1620: Cornelius Drebbel may have made a crude rebreather.

- 1772: Sieur Freminet tried to build a SCUBA device out of a barrel, but died from lack of oxygen after 20 minutes, as he merely recycled the exhaled air untreated.

- 1776: David Brushnell invents the first submarine to attack another ship, the Turtle. It was used in the American Revolution.

- 1800: Robert Fulton builds the first practical submarine, the Nautilus

- 1825: William H. James designs a self contained diving suit that had compressed air in a iron container worn around the waist.

- 1829: Charles and John Deane, of Whitstable in Kent in England, designed the first air-pumped diving helmet. It is said that the idea started from a crude emergency rig-up of a fireman's water-pump (used as an air pump) and a knight-in-armour helmet used to try to rescue horses from a burning stable.

- 1837: Following up Leonardo's studies, and those of Halley the astronomer, Augustus Siebe developed standard diving dress, a sort of surface supplied diving apparatus.

- Around 1842: The Frenchman Joseph Cabirol started making standard diving dress.

- 1856: Wilhelm Bauer starts the first of 133 successful dives with his second submarine Seeteufel. The crew of 12 is trained to leave the submerged ship through a diving chamber.

- 1860: Ivan Lupis-Vukic, a retired engineer of the Austro-Hungarian navy, demonstrates a design for a self-propelled torpedo to emperor Franz Joseph.

- 1863: CSS Hunley is the first submarine to sink a ship Confederate States Navy during the Civil War.

- 1865: Benoit Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze designed a diving set with a backpack spherical air tank that supplied air through the first known demand regulator. The diver still walked on the seabed and did not swim. This set was called an aérophore. But pressure cylinders made with the technology of the time could only hold 30 atmospheres, and the diver had to be surface supplied; the tank was for bailout. The durations of 6 to 8 hours on a tankful without external supply recorded for the Rouquayrol set in the book "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas" by Jules Verne, are wildly exaggerated fiction. Judging by Jules Verne's inaccurate attempts in the book at describing how the Rouquayrol set worked, how the demand regulator works was not generally known or had already been forgotten when he wrote the book, which was published in 1870. But Jules Verne knew about the tendency of some divers surfacing into rain to want to stay underwater to keep out of the rain.

- 1866: Minenschiff, the first self-propelling torpedo, developed by Robert Whitehead, demonstrated for the imperial naval commission on 21 December.
In the late 19th century and after, industry could make high-pressure air and gas cylinders. That prompted a few inventors down the years to design open-circuit compressed air breathing sets, but they were all constant-flow, and the demand regulator did not come back until 1939.

- 1879: Henry Fluess invented the first closed circuit breathing device using stored oxygen and adsorption of carbon dioxide by a caustic soda or rebreather for the rescue of mineworkers who were trapped by water.

- 1893: Louis Boutan invented the first underwater camera.

- 1908: John Haldane, Arthur Boycott, and Guybon Damant published "The Prevention of Compressed-Air Illness", detailed studies on the cause and symptoms of decompression sickness.

- 1912: Haldane, Boycott and Damant published the U.S. Navy tested tables.
1915: Sir Robert Davis invented an oxygen rebreather called the "Submarine Escape Apparatus" to escape from sunken submarines. It was the first rebreather to be made in quantity. After that, various sorts of industrial oxygen rebreathers were made down the years for use in unbreathable atmospheres on land.

- 1916: Release of the first filming of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In filming the diving scenes, the actors used Oxylite rebreathers, likeliest connected to heavy helmet-type bottom-walking diving gear. In the 1930s sport spearfishing became common in the Mediterranean, and spearfishers gradually developed the common sport diving mask and fins and snorkel, and Italian sport spearfishers started using oxygen rebreathers.

- 1918: Ohgushi patented "Ohgushi's Peerless respirator". It was a constant-flow diving and industrial open-circuit breathing set. The user breathed through his nose and switched the air on and off with his teeth.

- Early 1930s: In France, Guy Gilpatrick invented waterproof diving goggles.

- 1933: Yves Le Prieur invented a constant-flow open-circuit breathing set. It could allow a 20 minute stay at 7 meters and 15 minutes at 15 meters.

- 1933: In France, Louis de Corlieu patents the first swimming fins.

- 1933: In San Diego (USA) the first sport diving club started, called the Bottom Scratchers: it did not use breathing sets or fins as far as is known.
- 1934: Charles Beebe dives to 3028 feet using a bathysphere.

- 1935: On the French Riviera the first known sport diving club started. It used Le Prieur's breathing sets. Its air cylinder was often worn at an angle to get its on/off valve in reach of the diver's hand; this would have caused an awkward skew drag in swimming.

-1939: the Frenchman Georges Commeinhes developed a two-cylinder open-circuit apparatus with demand regulator. The regulator was a big rectangular box between the cylinders. He offered this set to the French Navy, which could not continue developing uses for it because of WWII. In July 1943 he reached 53 meters (about 174 feet) using it off the coast of Marseille, But he died in 1944 in the liberation of Strasbourg in Alsace.

- 1939: Dr. Christian Lambertsen in the USA designed a 'Self-Contained Underwater Oxygen Breathing Apparatus' for the U.S. military. It was a rebreather. It was the first device to be called SCUBA.

- 1941: During WWII, Italy used rebreathers were used for one of the best known and most spectacular war actions: see Human torpedo.

- 1943: Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invented an open-circuit diving breathing set, using a demand regulator which Gagnan modified from a demand regulator used to let a petrol-driven car run on a big bag of coal-gas carried on its roof during wartime shortages of petrol. Cousteau has his first dives with it. This set was later named the Aqua-Lung. This word is correctly a trade name that goes with the Cousteau-Gagnan patent, but in Britain it has been commonly used as a generic and spelt "aqualung" since at least the 1950's, including in the BSAC's publications and training manuals, and describing scuba diving as "aqualunging". In October 1944 Frédéric Dumas reached 62 meters (about 200 feet) with this set.

- 1948: Auguste Piccard sends the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, on unmanned dives.

- 1950: Cousteau's Aqua-Lung became available (but very expensive) to industry and civilians in Britain. Siebe Gorman made it at Chessington.

- 1953: The National Geographical Society Magazine published an article about Cousteau's underwater archaeology at Grand Congloué island near Marseilles, and in French-speaking countries a diving film called Épaves (= Shipwrecks) came out. That started a massive public demand for aqualungs and diving gear, and in France and America the diving gear makers started making them as fast as they could. But in Britain Siebe Gorman kept aqualungs expensive, and many British sport divers had to use home-made breathing sets and ex-armed forces or ex-industry rebreathers, and some became expert at home-making diving demand regulators from industrial parts such as Calor gas regulators. Finally Submarine Products Ltd, in Hexham in Northumberland in England, designed round the Cousteau-Gagnan patent and made sport diving breathing sets accessibly cheap. In those times, free-swimming diving suits were not readily available to the general public, after the first rush of war-surplus frogman's drysuits ran out, and as a result many scuba divers dived in merely swimming trunks. That is why scuba diving used often to be called "skindiving".

1953: Captain Trevor Hampton founded the British Underwater Centre at Dartmouth in Devon, England.

- 1953 October 15: The BSAC was founded.

- 1954: USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, is launched.

- 1954: The first manned dives in the bathyscaphe FNRS-2.

- 1956: The first wetsuit was introduced.

- 1957 to 1961: The television series Sea Hunt introduced SCUBA diving to the television audience.

- 1958: USS Nautilus completes the first ever voyage under the polar ice to the North Pole and back.

- 1960: Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh, USN, descend to Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the ocean (about 10900m or 35802 feet) in the bathyscaphe Trieste.

- 1960: USS Triton completes the first ever underwater circumnavigation.

- 1965: The film version of James Bond in Thunderball came out and helped to make scuba diving popular.

- 1971: Scubapro introduces the Stabilization Jacket, or Buoyancy Compensator, in England commonly called stab jacket.

- 1983: The Orca Edge dive computer was introduced.

- 1985: The wreck of RMS Titanic was found.

- 1989: The film The Abyss helped to make scuba diving popular.

[SilentOption]

This is how military divers get around now.

[off-the-grid]

Very cool. I wonder why they don't use normal scooters, though.
Much more compact, and the bigger ones have decent speed with long run times.

[SilentOption]

The best scooters in the world are play toys compared to these machines. You have to consider the mission. The guys in the pictures are just playing around. A typical dive would include two divers, big rucksacks and weapons. That requires load carrying capacity, speed and range. The DPVs in these pictures run for up to six hours at near 3 knots with that load.

[off-the-grid]

I'm pretty sure the higher end models will do about 3 knots.

But as you said, they really don't have much room to carry gear, and even the top of the line rec models only run a little over 3 hours.

Have you seen that new SeaDoo looking model?
Can't remember the company right now, but it's basically a mini jetski.
Really expensive, really short run time, but I think it goes about 10 knots/12 on the surface.