A Brief History of Diving Technology

Humans have always longed to explore underwater, but the need to breathe air has been an obstacle. 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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class funhoustuffworks dot Com.
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly from Thanks
for acb well then 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

(00:23):
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 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

(00:43):
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 going to cover inventions designed specifically to enable humans
to breathe underwater. While there are plenty of other advancements

(01:04):
to diving like fins and wetsuits, et cetera, 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, 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

(01:26):
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 would be boring because it has developed incrementally over
centuries and it includes the work of just multitudes. So

(01:47):
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. 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

(02:10):
Aristotle describes diving bells by saying, quote, they enable the
divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron,
for 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.

(02:30):
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,
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

(02:50):
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 Go is on record
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

(03:12):
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
the truthfulness of that account, but there are, if you
are a lover of visual mediums, some truly spectacular renderings
of Alexander the Great submerged in a glass bell and

(03:32):
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 of the water.
And there are others that just sort of look like
him merrily sitting in his diving bell, kind of enjoying

(03:52):
his view of the world from there. I'll see if
I can find some pictures of this to put in
our show notes. A most basic and kloe last 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.

(04:15):
That's fine for a limited time before 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

(04:38):
the year two hundred that depicts a 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 each of his hands. Yeah, so it's a
pretty cute little vase. So then the next one of

(05:01):
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 actually built one. Despite accounts going centuries back
in the historical record, it wasn't until the sixteenth century

(05:23):
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 Lorena as part of
an operation to salvage barges that dated back to the
time of Caligula, and in a write up in Scientific

(05:44):
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
Gurielmo 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 he wished, until the cold drove him

(06:05):
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. So apparently
this version of a diving bell left the wearer with
a lot of range of motion, so it suggested that

(06:26):
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. 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

(06:47):
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 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

(07:07):
regency feeling fantasy series about this widowed lady who studies dragons,
and there's a whole arc involving another guy that's doing
research and a diving bell and how heavy the bell
is and how cumbersome and how tricky it is to
get it in and out, and how much it weighs
in the ship and what it inconvenience that causes. That's
what I've been thinking about the whole time we've been talking. Yeah,

(07:29):
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. 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, so to get back

(07:50):
to the story of diving technology. In our recent episode
on Sir Isaac Newton, we mentioned Sir Edmund Halley, and
it turns out that Hallie also figures into the human
desire to explore underwater. In sixteen ninety one, Halley completely
changed things by adding a system that could replenish the
air in the diving bell. It's almost always the case

(08:12):
in the world of invention. However, he was likely aware
of and building on the work of Danie 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. Yep. And
we've talked many times about how most big breakthroughs in
science and technology are building on the work of others,

(08:33):
So this is a very similar situation. And Pepe's 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 Pepin and avoid any claims
of plagiarism. Halley's diving bell was made of wood encoated

(08:56):
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,
and the barrel was suspended in the water by a
rope and it could be pulled up to the surface

(09:17):
so they could refill 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 as
the precursor to the modern diving bell. Because of this.

(09:37):
Halle also Inventeday'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, there is
a section that is called it's a long title the

(10:00):
part 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. One thing he mentions in this writing
is the information gleaned from his testing. But a gallon

(10:22):
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. 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.

(10:43):
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 through lines that attached to
the top of the bell. And Smeaton's pump more closely
resembled the concepts that were a big part of Denny

(11:04):
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 a diving chest rather than
a diving bell. 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,

(11:28):
even though Smeeton's pumps really advanced the field of diving,
Halle's diving bells stayed in use until the eighteen hundreds.
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

(11:50):
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
that Halle did some of his is that this suit
was ever actually tested. The following decade, inventor Augustus Zeba
invented what's considered to be the first diving dress. It's
design built on the work of John and Charles Dean,

(12:12):
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 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 under water,

(12:36):
the helmet would fill with water. As an aside, John
and Charles Dean also published what is believed to be
the first diving manual in eighteen thirty six. Augustus Zeba's design,
which came out in eighteen thirty nine, sealed the helmet
to a diving suit to eliminate the problem of water
rushing in if the diver tipped over or fell. Yeah,

(12:57):
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 was a very real possibility that
divers would shift side to side or lose their balance.
In eighteen sixty the French team of Benois Rouquerout and

(13:18):
Auguste Denerrouse 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. If you've ever seen the original illustrations Virgials
Burns twenty thousand leagues under the sea, the dive helmet

(13:40):
in them was based on these men's design. 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 Flus'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

(14:02):
scrubber that would clean and refresh the air. The FLU
system was closed, so the used air was run through
a length 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 breatheable again.
A captain in the French Navy named Vel Prier paid

(14:22):
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 Priere. He
was in fact drawn to the man's breathing apparatus, and
this was simply a rubber tube who was held in

(14:44):
the diver's mouth and it ran up to the surface
and connected to a pump outside the water. And 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 a new because it let the diver wear
a simple bathing suit and experience some freedom of movement.

(15:05):
All of the other diving setups that eve Le Prier
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 around.
You would have minimal functions under the water. But even
with the Expo tank diver's incredible ability to move however

(15:26):
he wished, he was still tethered by that hose to
his air supply, and so Prier 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. But first he very politely contacted
Maurice Ferney, the inventor of the system that he had

(15:49):
seen at the Grand Palais 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 compressed air, which was a Michelin
invention designed to inflate car tires. Yeah, I loved this

(16:10):
story because I love that one he got permission from
another inventor to kind of take off on his ideas,
and two that he was so resourceful and a genius
that he adapted a tire inflation system to use as
the air supply for divers. And even la Prier further

(16:30):
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 the air canister on
the diver's back. Eventually, la Prier moved the canister around
the chest so that it wouldn't bang into things about

(16:53):
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 his name exclusively,
rather than the hyphenated name that his previous work had
had before. And next up, a very very famous name

(17:15):
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. So
jumping back to diving technology, eve Le Prier continued to
refine his underwater 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

(17:36):
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 Frederic Dubac.
Cousteau had been working on a diving device of his
own and showed it to La Prier. The elder diver

(17:57):
offered him some feedback suggest that Custeau altered the face
mask designed. Specifically, Cousteau's version at the time only had
a breathing hose to the mouth, but the Prier thought
the design would be safer if the mask covered the
wearer's entire face. Yeah, Prier, 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,

(18:21):
so it was really really secure, and he felt like
Coustau's might be a little unsafe because it wasn't quite
as anchored around the whole head. And Jacques Cousteau partnered
shortly thereafter with Emio Gaigne, who was a senior engineer
at a company called air Liquid that manufactured industrial gases,
and Coustau's father in law, who also worked for air Liquid,

(18:42):
arranged this introduction of Custeau and Gagne And when Cousteau
and this man met, the engineer had actually been working
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. 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,

(19:04):
and Gagnol 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 released the air when
the diver sucked in, and after months of testing, Cousteau

(19:26):
and Gagnon named their device the Aqua Lung and began
to market it, and La Prier's system, which had a
continuous air flow system, was quickly dropped in favor of
the Cousteau Gagne set up and its demand valve. The
Aqua Lung 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

(19:48):
in nineteen fifty two. It became the first commercially successful
scuba device. Laprier harbored some concerns about the demand valve
that Cousteau and his partner had worked on. He was
really con learned 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

(20:08):
full face mask had this continuous flow, so it meant
that even if a diver passed out, the mask wouldn't
fall out, and they would still be getting an oxygen supply.
Just the same, Laprier 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

(20:30):
Custeau became famous both for his dive equipment and for
his underwater films. And we should also point out 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,

(20:53):
was not actually coined until the nineteen fifties, and that
was when Christian James Lamberston came up with an name
for the rebreather system that he had been working on
for the US Navy during World War Two. Just the same,
the name has been retroactively applied to numerous systems, and
it is often associated with and sometimes accidentally credited to Cousteau.

(21:16):
So if you're interested in learning more about the various
people who have been called the first scuba diver. Go
to our parents site HowStuffWorks dot com and perform a
search for the word scuba and one of the articles
that will come up is called who was the first
scuba diver? And it was written by Chuck of stuff
you should know. Yeah, and so once Cousteau's system was developed,
we were pretty much solid in terms of as as

(21:38):
Tracy mentioned, it just commercially took off like wildfire. And
there have been a lot of tweaks since then, but
it's still basically the same concept. Have you ever been
scuba scuba diving? No, I can't pass the swim test.
I never had either. I've been snorkeling, but not scuba
diving ditto, And snorkeling is even not so great a

(21:59):
situation for me. I'm that person that always dunks underwater
and just munges the whole thing up like an idiot.
I'm not agreeing with that statement, but I just have
never learned. And it's one of those things where most
of the times that I could maybe learn our times
that I am on vacation and want to do something else. Yeah,

(22:22):
I you know, have volunteered at places where having a
dive certification would have been super handy, but I didn't
do it because I'm not a strong swimmer. I cannot
pass that test. It reminds me about when my mother
learned life saving as a teen. Uh huh. She passed
her life saving exam, but was politely told that she
might be better off not trying save it drown I'm

(22:44):
a drowning person. Do you have listener mail? I do. Indeed,
it is from our listener Ben. He's not the only
person that wrote us about this, but I'm going to
read his. Hi Holly and Tracy. First of all, thank
you so much for the podcast. It really brightened my
day when a new show pops up on my phone. Hooray.
I thought i'd fill in. I thought I'd write in

(23:05):
to fill in one of the blanks on your recent
Isaac Newton episode. I thought this would be a good
pairing since Sir Edmund Halley makes appearances in both. In
that episode, he says, you weren't quite sure why Leibnitz
or we have gotten a note that some people pronounce
it Leibniz. Yeah, we got a lot of other emails
about that that didn't mention it, so we haven't really

(23:25):
at checked. Yet it literally just came in just now. Yeah,
So I am not sure on which is right, but
I wanted to acknowledge that that may not be the
quick pronunciation. But we had been wondering why he had
waited so long to claim that he had invented calculus.
So Ben is a good man, he says. I was
intrigued by this question, and I set out on a

(23:46):
knowledge quest at my girlfriend's university's library to find some answers.
I tracked down a wonderful book, Philosophers at War by
Alfred Rupert Hall, which, aside from having a detailed account
of the Newton Leibnitz controversy, was also filled with some
wonderfully snarky commentary written in the margins by a student
from the nineteen eighties. That is, to me one of
the great joys of library books. But that's an aside.

(24:07):
According to Hall, Ben says Leibniz was pushed to claim
invention of calculus in seventeen oh five when Newton published
a tract called on the Quadrature of Curves, and Leimnitz
got a little bit spooked by this article because Newton
had never fully published his method of calculus before, which
he called fluxions. He published snippets of it in geometrical
form in principia. That's another one we may or may

(24:30):
not be pronouncing exactly correctly, and he described it in
partiality in correspondence. But this is the first time he
publicly disclosed his full algebraic method. Hall suggests that it
wasn't until Quadrature was published that Leibnitz realized the total
similarity between Newton's fluxions and his own differential calculus. Before this,
he probably thought Newton's work was just a series of

(24:51):
ad hoc mathematical devices. Once Leibnitz realized that Newton was
claiming invention of something so incredibly similar to his own calculus,
he was obviously unhappy. In the next year, seventeen oh six,
Lee Misth wrote an anonymous review of quadrature in which
he claims he invented it first, and the whole who
invented calculus hooplaw only grew from there. That's spectacular, And

(25:13):
he also wrote as he also attached pictures of some
of the snarky comments, which was very sweet and so entertaining,
so I appreciate it. Cheers Ben Ben thank you so much.
That was awesome. I am that's one of those deep
dives that you like to get into when you're doing
research on like a podcast episode, but sometimes eventually the

(25:33):
clock has ticked by and you run out of time
to go down every avenue. So I'm glad we finally
have some closure on why that happen. You would like
to write us, you can do so at History Podcast
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(25:56):
Miston History. If you would like to learn more about
what we talked about today, mentioned it already in the episode,
but if you go to our parents' site, how Stuff Works,
type in the word scuba or diving in the search bar,
you're going to get a lot of content. And there
are actually a few different articles written by Chop from
Stuff you Should Know a while back when he was
regularly writing articles that are fantastic and just a wealth

(26:17):
of other delightful things. So you can do that. You
can visit us at Misstonhistory dot com. For an archive
of all past episodes of the podcast, as well as
show notes on any of them that Tracy and I
have done together, and the occasional other blog poster goodie,
and there's always, you know, usually some pictures attached to
episode pages, which is kind of fun for some people.
So we encourage you to visit us at how Stuffworks

(26:38):
dot com and missed Industry dot com for more on
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