November 11, 2023 • 22 mins
This 2015 episode examines that humans have always longed to explore underwater, but need to breathe air. From as far back as the 4th century B.C.E., clever inventors have been designing technology to give us face time with the creatures of the sea.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. When we talked about divers going to the
wreck of the Empress of Ireland in nineteen fourteen, I
found myself idly wondering exactly what the diving technology was
like that they were using at the time, and we
have a whole episode on that subject, not the specifics
of the dive to the Empress of Ireland or exactly
(00:23):
what they would have been using, but on the development
of diving technology, from the earliest diving bells up to
self contained breathing systems.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
This originally came out on December second, twenty fifteen. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm Holly from It's Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Wilson in the No Surprise department. The relationship that humans
have had with bodies of water throughout history has pretty
much always been one of fascination, and it seems like
we have always been trying to find ways to transcend
the limits of our pesky air breathing lungs so that
we can get some time underwater. You have surely heard
innumerable times that approximately seventy percent of the Earth's surfaces
(01:12):
water so it makes sense that curious humans would be
yearning to scope out the situation in the deep, and
while humans were diving on their own for centuries before
they started building assistance apparatus to do so. Today we're
going to talk a little bit just about the history
of the technology, specifically that's evolved over the centuries to
give us some FaceTime with the fish without suffocating. We're
(01:34):
going to cover inventions designed specifically to enable humans to
breathe underwater. While there are plenty of other advancements to
diving like fins and wetsuits, etc. We're pretty much focusing
on the air here and like things that have enabled
us to breathe. And as a heads up going into
this one in case you are a real dive historian,
(01:55):
I want to be clear that this is by no
means an exhaustive history on the matter. If you go
to any like even diving fan site and see their
discussion of dive history, there is usually a list roughly
one kilometer long of like various advancements that have been
made through the years, and so we can't really cover
all of those without just reading a long list, which
(02:16):
would be boring because it has developed incrementally over centuries,
and it includes the work of just multitudes, So there's
no way to include every single step in the course
of one of our podcasts, so we're hitting as many
of the key historical moments as possible.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
The first recorded account of some kind of diving technology
that was designed to let humans breathe underwater was mentioned
by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE in his Book
of Problems. I love that name. This was a diving bell,
and Aristotle described diving bells by saying, quote, they enable
the divers to respire equally well by letting down a
(02:54):
cauldron where this does not fill with water but retains
the air where it is forced straight down into the water.
You're having trouble visualizing that. It's like when you're a
kid and you're putting the cup down in the sink,
but in a way that's a vacuum, so that you
don't or it's not a value, doesn't let the water in,
you know what I'm trying to say. So as a note,
(03:15):
there is some debate about whether Aristotle actually wrote the
Book of Problems, So take that with a grain of salt. Yeah,
that's one of those many historical documents that people some
people anyways, believe actually was written by someone later and
then attributed to Aristotle. So also in the late fourth
century BCE, Macedonian king Alexander the Great is on record
(03:38):
as having employed a diving bell to explore the seas
that was beginning as early as age eleven, according to
this sort of legend, So during the Battle of tyr
he has said to have used a diving bell to
supervise the work of divers that were under his command
and were tasked with removing obstacles that would prevent passage
into port. And once again there is some debate about
(03:59):
the truth of that account.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
But there are, if you are a lover of visual mediums,
some truly spectacular renderings of Alexander the Great submerged in
the glass bell and observing the world from his underwater vantage.
Some of them almost look creepy. There's one that I
ran across where it looks like he is kind of
creeping on some lovers in a boat on the surface
(04:21):
of the water. And there are others that just sort
of look like him merrily sitting in his diving bell,
kind of enjoying his view of the world from there.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I'll see if I can find some pictures of this
to put in our show notes. A most basic and
classic example of a diving bell is narrow at the
top and open at the bottom, so bell shaped like
its name describes. As you push the bell straight down
into the water, the air is trapped inside of it,
so there's basically a bubble inside there in which a
human can breathe. That's fine for a limited time before
(04:55):
the oxygen is basically used up, and then you have
to come back to the surface. And in order for
a diving bell to counteract the buoyancy created by that
air pocket that enables breathing, it also has to be
quite heavy, so an open bottom diving bell also can't
go very deep into water. There's a Peruvian vase dating
back to around the year two hundred that depicts a
(05:17):
human figure and on huge that figure's face is painted
something that's been interpreted to signify goggles. The goggle interpretation
was arrived at due to the fact that this figure
is also holding fish in.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Each of his hands. Yeah, so it's a pretty cute
little vase. So then the next one of the next
sort of major steps of where we see some sort
of diving event happening in history is around fifteen hundred,
Leonardo da Vinci was sketching out ideas for what appeared
to be diving apparatus, but it seems that he never
(05:53):
actually built one.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Despite accounts going centuries back in the historical record, it
wasn't until the sixth teenth century that a successful diving
bell submersion was conclusively documented. In the fifteen thirties, Italy's
Lake Nemi was explored in a diving bell designed by
Gullielmo de Lorrena as part of an operation to salvage
(06:15):
barges that dated back to the time of Caligula.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
And in a write up in Scientific American that was
done in nineteen oh nine, there was an account of
this fifteen thirty five Lake Nemi dive, and it describes
the apparatus in the following way. Master Guriamo de Lorena
made a contrivance by which he entered the water and
made himself descend to the bottom of the lake, and
there he remained an hour more or less just as
(06:40):
he wished, until the cold drove him up again. With
this contrivance of his one can work sawing cutting corking
up tying ropes. One can also operate with hammers, chisels, pinchers,
and other such tools, though one can use but little
force because of the hindrance of the water.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So apparently this version of a diving bell left the
wearer with a lot of range of motion, so it
suggested that it was smaller a personal sized diving bell,
rather than one that could potentially accommodate multiple people inside
of it or more thoroughly cover the diver's body.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
There's also a Chinese text that was written in fifteen
eighty seven entitled The Exploitation of the Works of Nature,
and this featured some interesting illustrations of people that are
walking on the seafloor and they're tethered by ropes to
ships above, and they have tubes that are basically going
from their mouths all the way up to the surface,
presumably to breathe through. I keep thinking about these books
(07:37):
that I love by this woman named Marie Brennan, and
they're called The Natural History of Dragons, and they're kind
of like a faux regency feeling fantasy series about this
widowed lady who studies dragons, and there's a whole arc
involving another guy that's doing research in a diving bell
and how heavy the bell is and how cumbersome and
(07:57):
how tricky it is to get it in and out,
and how much it ways in the ship and what
it inconvenience that causes.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Uh, that's what I've been thinking about the whole time
we've been talking.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things like we
talk about it, and yes, they dropped it in the water,
but like if it tipped it all get to one side,
they basically had to pull the whole incredibly heavy thing
up and start over.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
So before we get to an advancement in this technology
that was made by a name very familiar to the podcast,
let's pause for a word from one of our fabulous sponsors.
In our recent episode on Sir Isaac Newton, we mentioned
(08:38):
Sir Edmund Halley, and it turns out that Halle also
figures into the human desire to explore underwater. In sixteen
ninety one, Halle completely changed things by adding a system
that could replenish the air in the diving bell. It's
almost always the case in the world of invention. However,
he was likely aware of and building on the work
(08:59):
of Danis Papa who in sixteen eighty nine came up
with a plan to pump fresh air into the diving bell.
Remember how he said before the break that he would
run out of oxygen, so this would get fresh air
in there.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yep. And we've talked many times about how most big
breakthroughs in science and technology are building on the work
of others, so this is a very similar situation. And
pepez proposed method featured the use of a bellow system
that would pump air into a bell at a constant pressure.
But when Halle devised his system, he used a different method,
likely to differentiate himself from Pepina and avoid any claims
(09:33):
of plagiarism.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Halley's diving bell was made of wood encoated with lead.
It covered sixty cubic feet, so that's one point seven
cubic meters of volume, and it had a glass top
so that divers would have light while they were in there.
There was also a valve on the bell attached to
a barrel that could supply additional air.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And the barrel was suspended in the water by a
rope and it could be pulled up to the surface
so they could rea fill it with fresh air and
then drop it back into the water, sinking thanks to
a weighted bottom, and Halle's design was the first that
enabled the equalization of pressure inside the bell and outside
the bell because of the valve system that was used
to supply this air, and it sometimes even referred to
(10:16):
as the precursor to the modern diving bell. Because of this,
Halle also ed in today's smaller bell shaped apparatus that
could be worn like a helmet, although its intent was
for the diver to be able to sort of get
out from the diving bell, not to be a separate
means to go underwater independently. And in a section of
Halle's seventeen fourteen to seventeen sixteen work titled Philosophical Transactions,
(10:39):
there is a section that is called it's a long
title the Art of Living underwater or a discourse concerning
the means of furnishing air to the bottom of the
sea in any ordinary depths. And in this section of
this work he detailed the data that he actually gathered
over years of experimenting with diving bells, and he explains
how his particular technology works.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
One thing he mentions in this writing is the information
gleaned from his testing but a gallon of air is
used up and no longer suitable for respiration after about
a minute. And quote though it's elasticity be but little altered,
yet in passing the lungs it loses its vivifying spirit.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Just kind of a poetic way to describe stale air.
Don't keep breathing that you're going to pass out. Yeah,
it's not going to work out well. In seventeen eighty eight,
there was another major advancement in diving technology and this
is made by John Smeaton when he invented the diving
air pump and Smeaton's pump required four men to operate it.
They were up on the surface and it ran air
(11:38):
through lines that attached to the top of the bell.
And Smeeton's pump more closely resembled the concepts that were
a big part of Denny Papa's work than the way
that Hallie eventually set up the air supply. And this
English engineer also redesigned the bell itself into a box
shape and he christened his a diving box, or rather
(11:59):
a diving check rather than a diving bell.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
One thing we should mention here, and it really goes
for advancement in any field is that none of these
new technologies were instantly adopted. In fact, even though Smeeten's
pumps really advanced the field of diving, Halle's diving bells
stayed in use until the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
An English inventor named William James designed a suit in
eighteen twenty five that had a coil of metal tubing
that wrapped around the diver's weight. The idea was that
air that was pumped into this tubing while they were
on the surface could provide a diver with an hour's
worth of underwater time, although there is no clear evidence,
like we don't have a data right up the way
(12:41):
that Halle did some of his that this suit was
ever actually tested.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
The following decade, inventor Augustus Zeeba invented what's considered to
be the first diving dress. It's designed built on the
work of John and Charles Dean, who had invented a
smoke apparatus to enable firemen to breathe and move freely
in burning buildings. The Deans also adapted their invention into
a diving helmet designed to sit on the diver's shoulders
(13:06):
that would be fastened there with straps to a waste belt.
The Dean's patent diving dress was completed in eighteen twenty eight.
It was a good functioning design, but if the diver
couldn't stay upright underwater, the helmet would fill with water.
As an aside, John and Charles Dean also publish what
is believed to be the first diving manual in eighteen
thirty six. Augustus Diiba's design, which came out in eighteen
(13:30):
thirty nine, sealed the helmet to a diving suit to
eliminate the problem of water rushing in if the diver
tipped over or fell.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, and keeping in mind that when you're walking, if
you've ever walked underwater, you know that the seafloor is
not exactly the most stable and constant of situations to
be stepping on. So it is a very real possibility
that divers would shift side to side or lose their balance.
In eighteen sixty the French team of Benoi Ukerole and
(14:00):
Augost de Nirouse came up with a suite design that
featured a compressed air reservoir in addition to an air
supply line. The idea was that for brief jaunts, the
diver could actually disconnect himself from that regular supply line
and rely solely on the compressed air reservoir that he
carried on his back.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
If you've ever seen the original illustrations Virguals Burns twenty
thousand leagues under the sea, the dive helmet in them
was based on these men's design.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
In eighteen seventy eight, a man named Henry flus ushered
in a new era of diving technology when he patented
a self contained underwater breathing unit. Flues's rebreather included a
rubber mask it is super creepy looking if you see
pictures of it, a breathing bag and a copper oxygen tank,
and a scrubber that would clean and refresh the air.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
The FLU system was closed, so the used air was
run through a link of rope yarn that had been
soaked in caustic potash, which is also known as potassium hydroxide,
to remove the carbon dioxide and make the air breathable again.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
A captain in the French Navy named eve La Prier
paid a visit to an industrial expo at Paris's Grand
Palais in nineteen twenty five, and this was a pivotal
moment because he saw a diver in a demonstration there.
And while this diver was showing off a torch that
could cut iron underwater, that was not what fascinated Prier.
He was in fact drawn to the man's breathing apparatus,
(15:24):
and this was simply a rubber tube was held in
the diver's mouth and it ran up to the surface
and connected to a pump outside the water. But he
also wore goggles on his eyes and a rubber clip
on his nose. That particular piece of diving technology was
invented in the nineteen teens by a man named Maurice Bernez,
and it's unusual because it let the diver wear a
simple bathing suit and experience some freedom of movement. All
(15:47):
of the other diving setups that eve le Priere had
seen up to that point in his navy career had
been these really heavy helmets and these lead soled boots
that would really hinder your ability to move, or you
would have minimal functions under the water. But even with
the Expo tank diver's incredible ability to move, however, he
(16:09):
wished he was still tethered by that hose to his
air supply, and so Prierra was inspired to combine that
freedom that he noticed from the heavy helmet and boots
with a way to carry air independent, completely independent of
a supply line.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
But first he very politely contacted Maurice Freney, the inventor
of a system that he had seen at the Grand
Pels demonstration, and he asked for permission to use that
system as a starting point for his own idea. And
so once he got that permission, he devised the system
that had a mouthpiece that attached to a bottle of
(16:45):
compressed air, which was a Michelin invention designed to inflate
car tires. Yeah, I loved this story because I love
that one he got permission from another inventor to kind
of take off on his ideas too, that he was
so resourceful and a genius that he adapted a tire
(17:05):
inflation system to use as the air supply for divers,
and even la Prier further refined the design until he
was confident enough to debut it publicly, and he again
credited his predecessor. It was known as the Ferne la
Prier device. It still had the mouthpiece and the compressed air,
but he had also added these leather straps that kept
(17:27):
the air canister on the diver's back. Eventually, Laprier moved
the canister around the chest so that it wouldn't bang
into things about people knowing about it, as anyone who
has ever walked behind anyone at a convention wearing fairy
wings can attest to be important. In nineteen thirty three,
La Prier presented this new version of his apparatus under
(17:48):
his name exclusively, rather than the hyphenated name that his
previous work had had before. And next up, a very
very famous name enters the picture in one that is
quite dear to me personally. But before we get there,
we're going to pause for a word from one of
our sponsors, eve Lea. Prierre continued to refine his underwater
(18:15):
breathing devices, and then in June of nineteen thirty nine
he had a visit from a naval lieutenant named Jacques Cousteau,
and the two men shared not only a naval background,
but also just a love of diving, and they really
hit it off. Several years later, in nineteen forty two,
Custeau once again visited La Prier this time with his
wife Simone and fellow diver Frederick Dubac. Cousteau had been
(18:39):
working on a diving device of his own and showed
it to La Prier. The elder diver offered him some feedback,
suggesting that Custeau altered the face mask designed. Specifically, Coustau's
version at the time only had a breathing hose to
the mouth, but La Prier thought the design would be
safer if the mask covered the wearer's entire face. Yeah, Priyear,
(19:01):
we had talked about him having a tube to the mouth,
but it really did have like a this funky little
apparatus around your face, so it was really really secure,
and he felt like Cousteau's might be a little unsafe
because it wasn't quite.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
As anchored around the whole head. And Jacques Cousteau partnered
shortly thereafter with Emio Gagne, who was a senior engineer
at a company called air Liquid that manufactured industrial gases,
and Cousteau's father in law, who also worked for air Liquid,
arranged this introduction of Cousteau and Gagne, and when Cousteau
and this man met, the engineer had actually been working
(19:36):
on a valve system already that would enable cars to
use natural gas instead of petrol, so once again there's
some borrowing from the automotive industry.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Jacques needed a similar valve for his diving design, but
one that would carry compressed air to the diver's lungs
through a breathing tube, and Gagniell designed a valve that
allowed the diver to control the flow of air by
only delivering a stream of it when the mouthpiece that
contained the valve was sucked on. This design reduced the
pressure of the air so that the intake would be
suitable for a human, and then a rubber men brain
(20:07):
released the air when the diver sucked.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
In, and after months of testing, Cousteau and Gagnon named
their device the Aquaalung and began to market it, and
Laprier's system, which had a continuous airflow system, was quickly
dropped in favor of the Cousteau Gagneo setup and its
demand valve.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The Aquaalung was offered commercially in France in nineteen forty
six and then in Great Britain in nineteen fifty, in
Canada in nineteen fifty one, and in the United States
in nineteen fifty two. It became the first commercially successful
scuba device.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Laprier harbored some concerns about the demand valve that Cousteau
and his partner had worked on. He was really concerned
that if a diver lost consciousness underwater, he would drown
because again the diver had to suck on that little
valve to get the airflow, whereas Laprier's full face mask
had this continuous flow, so it meant that even if
a diver passed out out, the mask wouldn't fall out
(21:01):
and they would still be getting an oxygen supply.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Just the same. La prier and adapted his own system
to offer diver regulated airflow. It was too late. Custeau's
system became the standard, and the two former navymen who
had once gotten along so beautifully wound up losing touch
because Custeau became famous both for his dive equipment and
for his underwater films. And we should also point out
(21:25):
that depending on which dive historian you ask or just
dive aficionado, the person actually credited as the first scuba
diver differs. The word which actually stands for self contained
underwater breathing apparatus was not actually coined until the nineteen fifties,
and that was when Christian James Lamberston came up with
(21:46):
a new name for the rebreather system that he had
been working on for the US Navy during World War Two.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Just the same the name has been retroactively applied to
numerous systems, and it is often associated with and sometimes
I scidentally credited to Custeau.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed Indistory,
(22:28):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. When we talked about divers going to the
wreck of the Empress of Ireland in nineteen fourteen, I
found myself idly wondering exactly what the diving technology was
like that they were using at the time, and we
have a whole episode on that subject, not the specifics
of the dive to the Empress of Ireland or exactly
(00:23):
what they would have been using, but on the development
of diving technology, from the earliest diving bells up to
self contained breathing systems.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
This originally came out on December second, twenty fifteen. Enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I'm Holly from It's Tracy B.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Wilson in the No Surprise department. The relationship that humans
have had with bodies of water throughout history has pretty
much always been one of fascination, and it seems like
we have always been trying to find ways to transcend
the limits of our pesky air breathing lungs so that
we can get some time underwater. You have surely heard
innumerable times that approximately seventy percent of the Earth's surfaces
(01:12):
water so it makes sense that curious humans would be
yearning to scope out the situation in the deep, and
while humans were diving on their own for centuries before
they started building assistance apparatus to do so. Today we're
going to talk a little bit just about the history
of the technology, specifically that's evolved over the centuries to
give us some FaceTime with the fish without suffocating. We're
(01:34):
going to cover inventions designed specifically to enable humans to
breathe underwater. While there are plenty of other advancements to
diving like fins and wetsuits, etc. We're pretty much focusing
on the air here and like things that have enabled
us to breathe. And as a heads up going into
this one in case you are a real dive historian,
(01:55):
I want to be clear that this is by no
means an exhaustive history on the matter. If you go
to any like even diving fan site and see their
discussion of dive history, there is usually a list roughly
one kilometer long of like various advancements that have been
made through the years, and so we can't really cover
all of those without just reading a long list, which
(02:16):
would be boring because it has developed incrementally over centuries,
and it includes the work of just multitudes, So there's
no way to include every single step in the course
of one of our podcasts, so we're hitting as many
of the key historical moments as possible.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
The first recorded account of some kind of diving technology
that was designed to let humans breathe underwater was mentioned
by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE in his Book
of Problems. I love that name. This was a diving bell,
and Aristotle described diving bells by saying, quote, they enable
the divers to respire equally well by letting down a
(02:54):
cauldron where this does not fill with water but retains
the air where it is forced straight down into the water.
You're having trouble visualizing that. It's like when you're a
kid and you're putting the cup down in the sink,
but in a way that's a vacuum, so that you
don't or it's not a value, doesn't let the water in,
you know what I'm trying to say. So as a note,
(03:15):
there is some debate about whether Aristotle actually wrote the
Book of Problems, So take that with a grain of salt. Yeah,
that's one of those many historical documents that people some
people anyways, believe actually was written by someone later and
then attributed to Aristotle. So also in the late fourth
century BCE, Macedonian king Alexander the Great is on record
(03:38):
as having employed a diving bell to explore the seas
that was beginning as early as age eleven, according to
this sort of legend, So during the Battle of tyr
he has said to have used a diving bell to
supervise the work of divers that were under his command
and were tasked with removing obstacles that would prevent passage
into port. And once again there is some debate about
(03:59):
the truth of that account.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
But there are, if you are a lover of visual mediums,
some truly spectacular renderings of Alexander the Great submerged in
the glass bell and observing the world from his underwater vantage.
Some of them almost look creepy. There's one that I
ran across where it looks like he is kind of
creeping on some lovers in a boat on the surface
(04:21):
of the water. And there are others that just sort
of look like him merrily sitting in his diving bell,
kind of enjoying his view of the world from there.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I'll see if I can find some pictures of this
to put in our show notes. A most basic and
classic example of a diving bell is narrow at the
top and open at the bottom, so bell shaped like
its name describes. As you push the bell straight down
into the water, the air is trapped inside of it,
so there's basically a bubble inside there in which a
human can breathe. That's fine for a limited time before
(04:55):
the oxygen is basically used up, and then you have
to come back to the surface. And in order for
a diving bell to counteract the buoyancy created by that
air pocket that enables breathing, it also has to be
quite heavy, so an open bottom diving bell also can't
go very deep into water. There's a Peruvian vase dating
back to around the year two hundred that depicts a
(05:17):
human figure and on huge that figure's face is painted
something that's been interpreted to signify goggles. The goggle interpretation
was arrived at due to the fact that this figure
is also holding fish in.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
Each of his hands. Yeah, so it's a pretty cute
little vase. So then the next one of the next
sort of major steps of where we see some sort
of diving event happening in history is around fifteen hundred,
Leonardo da Vinci was sketching out ideas for what appeared
to be diving apparatus, but it seems that he never
(05:53):
actually built one.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Despite accounts going centuries back in the historical record, it
wasn't until the sixth teenth century that a successful diving
bell submersion was conclusively documented. In the fifteen thirties, Italy's
Lake Nemi was explored in a diving bell designed by
Gullielmo de Lorrena as part of an operation to salvage
(06:15):
barges that dated back to the time of Caligula.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
And in a write up in Scientific American that was
done in nineteen oh nine, there was an account of
this fifteen thirty five Lake Nemi dive, and it describes
the apparatus in the following way. Master Guriamo de Lorena
made a contrivance by which he entered the water and
made himself descend to the bottom of the lake, and
there he remained an hour more or less just as
(06:40):
he wished, until the cold drove him up again. With
this contrivance of his one can work sawing cutting corking
up tying ropes. One can also operate with hammers, chisels, pinchers,
and other such tools, though one can use but little
force because of the hindrance of the water.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So apparently this version of a diving bell left the
wearer with a lot of range of motion, so it
suggested that it was smaller a personal sized diving bell,
rather than one that could potentially accommodate multiple people inside
of it or more thoroughly cover the diver's body.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
There's also a Chinese text that was written in fifteen
eighty seven entitled The Exploitation of the Works of Nature,
and this featured some interesting illustrations of people that are
walking on the seafloor and they're tethered by ropes to
ships above, and they have tubes that are basically going
from their mouths all the way up to the surface,
presumably to breathe through. I keep thinking about these books
(07:37):
that I love by this woman named Marie Brennan, and
they're called The Natural History of Dragons, and they're kind
of like a faux regency feeling fantasy series about this
widowed lady who studies dragons, and there's a whole arc
involving another guy that's doing research in a diving bell
and how heavy the bell is and how cumbersome and
(07:57):
how tricky it is to get it in and out,
and how much it ways in the ship and what
it inconvenience that causes.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Uh, that's what I've been thinking about the whole time
we've been talking.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things like we
talk about it, and yes, they dropped it in the water,
but like if it tipped it all get to one side,
they basically had to pull the whole incredibly heavy thing
up and start over.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
So before we get to an advancement in this technology
that was made by a name very familiar to the podcast,
let's pause for a word from one of our fabulous sponsors.
In our recent episode on Sir Isaac Newton, we mentioned
(08:38):
Sir Edmund Halley, and it turns out that Halle also
figures into the human desire to explore underwater. In sixteen
ninety one, Halle completely changed things by adding a system
that could replenish the air in the diving bell. It's
almost always the case in the world of invention. However,
he was likely aware of and building on the work
(08:59):
of Danis Papa who in sixteen eighty nine came up
with a plan to pump fresh air into the diving bell.
Remember how he said before the break that he would
run out of oxygen, so this would get fresh air
in there.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yep. And we've talked many times about how most big
breakthroughs in science and technology are building on the work
of others, so this is a very similar situation. And
pepez proposed method featured the use of a bellow system
that would pump air into a bell at a constant pressure.
But when Halle devised his system, he used a different method,
likely to differentiate himself from Pepina and avoid any claims
(09:33):
of plagiarism.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Halley's diving bell was made of wood encoated with lead.
It covered sixty cubic feet, so that's one point seven
cubic meters of volume, and it had a glass top
so that divers would have light while they were in there.
There was also a valve on the bell attached to
a barrel that could supply additional air.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
And the barrel was suspended in the water by a
rope and it could be pulled up to the surface
so they could rea fill it with fresh air and
then drop it back into the water, sinking thanks to
a weighted bottom, and Halle's design was the first that
enabled the equalization of pressure inside the bell and outside
the bell because of the valve system that was used
to supply this air, and it sometimes even referred to
(10:16):
as the precursor to the modern diving bell. Because of this,
Halle also ed in today's smaller bell shaped apparatus that
could be worn like a helmet, although its intent was
for the diver to be able to sort of get
out from the diving bell, not to be a separate
means to go underwater independently. And in a section of
Halle's seventeen fourteen to seventeen sixteen work titled Philosophical Transactions,
(10:39):
there is a section that is called it's a long
title the Art of Living underwater or a discourse concerning
the means of furnishing air to the bottom of the
sea in any ordinary depths. And in this section of
this work he detailed the data that he actually gathered
over years of experimenting with diving bells, and he explains
how his particular technology works.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
One thing he mentions in this writing is the information
gleaned from his testing but a gallon of air is
used up and no longer suitable for respiration after about
a minute. And quote though it's elasticity be but little altered,
yet in passing the lungs it loses its vivifying spirit.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Just kind of a poetic way to describe stale air.
Don't keep breathing that you're going to pass out. Yeah,
it's not going to work out well. In seventeen eighty eight,
there was another major advancement in diving technology and this
is made by John Smeaton when he invented the diving
air pump and Smeaton's pump required four men to operate it.
They were up on the surface and it ran air
(11:38):
through lines that attached to the top of the bell.
And Smeeton's pump more closely resembled the concepts that were
a big part of Denny Papa's work than the way
that Hallie eventually set up the air supply. And this
English engineer also redesigned the bell itself into a box
shape and he christened his a diving box, or rather
(11:59):
a diving check rather than a diving bell.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
One thing we should mention here, and it really goes
for advancement in any field is that none of these
new technologies were instantly adopted. In fact, even though Smeeten's
pumps really advanced the field of diving, Halle's diving bells
stayed in use until the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
An English inventor named William James designed a suit in
eighteen twenty five that had a coil of metal tubing
that wrapped around the diver's weight. The idea was that
air that was pumped into this tubing while they were
on the surface could provide a diver with an hour's
worth of underwater time, although there is no clear evidence,
like we don't have a data right up the way
(12:41):
that Halle did some of his that this suit was
ever actually tested.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
The following decade, inventor Augustus Zeeba invented what's considered to
be the first diving dress. It's designed built on the
work of John and Charles Dean, who had invented a
smoke apparatus to enable firemen to breathe and move freely
in burning buildings. The Deans also adapted their invention into
a diving helmet designed to sit on the diver's shoulders
(13:06):
that would be fastened there with straps to a waste belt.
The Dean's patent diving dress was completed in eighteen twenty eight.
It was a good functioning design, but if the diver
couldn't stay upright underwater, the helmet would fill with water.
As an aside, John and Charles Dean also publish what
is believed to be the first diving manual in eighteen
thirty six. Augustus Diiba's design, which came out in eighteen
(13:30):
thirty nine, sealed the helmet to a diving suit to
eliminate the problem of water rushing in if the diver
tipped over or fell.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah, and keeping in mind that when you're walking, if
you've ever walked underwater, you know that the seafloor is
not exactly the most stable and constant of situations to
be stepping on. So it is a very real possibility
that divers would shift side to side or lose their balance.
In eighteen sixty the French team of Benoi Ukerole and
(14:00):
Augost de Nirouse came up with a suite design that
featured a compressed air reservoir in addition to an air
supply line. The idea was that for brief jaunts, the
diver could actually disconnect himself from that regular supply line
and rely solely on the compressed air reservoir that he
carried on his back.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
If you've ever seen the original illustrations Virguals Burns twenty
thousand leagues under the sea, the dive helmet in them
was based on these men's design.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
In eighteen seventy eight, a man named Henry flus ushered
in a new era of diving technology when he patented
a self contained underwater breathing unit. Flues's rebreather included a
rubber mask it is super creepy looking if you see
pictures of it, a breathing bag and a copper oxygen tank,
and a scrubber that would clean and refresh the air.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
The FLU system was closed, so the used air was
run through a link of rope yarn that had been
soaked in caustic potash, which is also known as potassium hydroxide,
to remove the carbon dioxide and make the air breathable again.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
A captain in the French Navy named eve La Prier
paid a visit to an industrial expo at Paris's Grand
Palais in nineteen twenty five, and this was a pivotal
moment because he saw a diver in a demonstration there.
And while this diver was showing off a torch that
could cut iron underwater, that was not what fascinated Prier.
He was in fact drawn to the man's breathing apparatus,
(15:24):
and this was simply a rubber tube was held in
the diver's mouth and it ran up to the surface
and connected to a pump outside the water. But he
also wore goggles on his eyes and a rubber clip
on his nose. That particular piece of diving technology was
invented in the nineteen teens by a man named Maurice Bernez,
and it's unusual because it let the diver wear a
simple bathing suit and experience some freedom of movement. All
(15:47):
of the other diving setups that eve le Priere had
seen up to that point in his navy career had
been these really heavy helmets and these lead soled boots
that would really hinder your ability to move, or you
would have minimal functions under the water. But even with
the Expo tank diver's incredible ability to move, however, he
(16:09):
wished he was still tethered by that hose to his
air supply, and so Prierra was inspired to combine that
freedom that he noticed from the heavy helmet and boots
with a way to carry air independent, completely independent of
a supply line.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
But first he very politely contacted Maurice Freney, the inventor
of a system that he had seen at the Grand
Pels demonstration, and he asked for permission to use that
system as a starting point for his own idea. And
so once he got that permission, he devised the system
that had a mouthpiece that attached to a bottle of
(16:45):
compressed air, which was a Michelin invention designed to inflate
car tires. Yeah, I loved this story because I love
that one he got permission from another inventor to kind
of take off on his ideas too, that he was
so resourceful and a genius that he adapted a tire
(17:05):
inflation system to use as the air supply for divers,
and even la Prier further refined the design until he
was confident enough to debut it publicly, and he again
credited his predecessor. It was known as the Ferne la
Prier device. It still had the mouthpiece and the compressed air,
but he had also added these leather straps that kept
(17:27):
the air canister on the diver's back. Eventually, Laprier moved
the canister around the chest so that it wouldn't bang
into things about people knowing about it, as anyone who
has ever walked behind anyone at a convention wearing fairy
wings can attest to be important. In nineteen thirty three,
La Prier presented this new version of his apparatus under
(17:48):
his name exclusively, rather than the hyphenated name that his
previous work had had before. And next up, a very
very famous name enters the picture in one that is
quite dear to me personally. But before we get there,
we're going to pause for a word from one of
our sponsors, eve Lea. Prierre continued to refine his underwater
(18:15):
breathing devices, and then in June of nineteen thirty nine
he had a visit from a naval lieutenant named Jacques Cousteau,
and the two men shared not only a naval background,
but also just a love of diving, and they really
hit it off. Several years later, in nineteen forty two,
Custeau once again visited La Prier this time with his
wife Simone and fellow diver Frederick Dubac. Cousteau had been
(18:39):
working on a diving device of his own and showed
it to La Prier. The elder diver offered him some feedback,
suggesting that Custeau altered the face mask designed. Specifically, Coustau's
version at the time only had a breathing hose to
the mouth, but La Prier thought the design would be
safer if the mask covered the wearer's entire face. Yeah, Priyear,
(19:01):
we had talked about him having a tube to the mouth,
but it really did have like a this funky little
apparatus around your face, so it was really really secure,
and he felt like Cousteau's might be a little unsafe
because it wasn't quite.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
As anchored around the whole head. And Jacques Cousteau partnered
shortly thereafter with Emio Gagne, who was a senior engineer
at a company called air Liquid that manufactured industrial gases,
and Cousteau's father in law, who also worked for air Liquid,
arranged this introduction of Cousteau and Gagne, and when Cousteau
and this man met, the engineer had actually been working
(19:36):
on a valve system already that would enable cars to
use natural gas instead of petrol, so once again there's
some borrowing from the automotive industry.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Jacques needed a similar valve for his diving design, but
one that would carry compressed air to the diver's lungs
through a breathing tube, and Gagniell designed a valve that
allowed the diver to control the flow of air by
only delivering a stream of it when the mouthpiece that
contained the valve was sucked on. This design reduced the
pressure of the air so that the intake would be
suitable for a human, and then a rubber men brain
(20:07):
released the air when the diver sucked.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
In, and after months of testing, Cousteau and Gagnon named
their device the Aquaalung and began to market it, and
Laprier's system, which had a continuous airflow system, was quickly
dropped in favor of the Cousteau Gagneo setup and its
demand valve.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
The Aquaalung was offered commercially in France in nineteen forty
six and then in Great Britain in nineteen fifty, in
Canada in nineteen fifty one, and in the United States
in nineteen fifty two. It became the first commercially successful
scuba device.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
Laprier harbored some concerns about the demand valve that Cousteau
and his partner had worked on. He was really concerned
that if a diver lost consciousness underwater, he would drown
because again the diver had to suck on that little
valve to get the airflow, whereas Laprier's full face mask
had this continuous flow, so it meant that even if
a diver passed out out, the mask wouldn't fall out
(21:01):
and they would still be getting an oxygen supply.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Just the same. La prier and adapted his own system
to offer diver regulated airflow. It was too late. Custeau's
system became the standard, and the two former navymen who
had once gotten along so beautifully wound up losing touch
because Custeau became famous both for his dive equipment and
for his underwater films. And we should also point out
(21:25):
that depending on which dive historian you ask or just
dive aficionado, the person actually credited as the first scuba
diver differs. The word which actually stands for self contained
underwater breathing apparatus was not actually coined until the nineteen fifties,
and that was when Christian James Lamberston came up with
(21:46):
a new name for the rebreather system that he had
been working on for the US Navy during World War Two.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Just the same the name has been retroactively applied to
numerous systems, and it is often associated with and sometimes
I scidentally credited to Custeau.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since
this episode is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
You can find us all over social media at missed Indistory,
(22:28):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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