Timeline of underwater technology

Timeline of underwater Technology

=Pre-industrial=

Several centuries BC: (Relief carvings made at this time show 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 frogmen in action.)

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

15th century: collector, too.

1531: Guglielmo de Lorena dives on two of Caligula s sunken galleys using a diving bell from a design by Leonardo da Vinci.

Around 1620: .

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 invented the Turtle_(submarine), first submarine to attack another ship. It was used in the American Revolution.

=19th century=

1800: Robert Fulton builds a submarine, the Nautilus (1800)

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

=Diving helmets appear=

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.

1829: E.K.Gauzen, a Russian naval technician of Kronshtadt naval base (a district of Saint Petersburg), offered a diving machine . His invention was an air-pumped metallic helmet strapped to a leather suit (an overall). The bottom of helmet was open. The helmet was strapped to the leather suit by metallic tape. Gauzen s diving suit and its further modifications were used by the Russian Navy until 1880. The modified diving suit of the Russian Navy, based on Gauzen s Invention, was known as three-bolts equipment .

1837: Following up Leonardo s studies, and those of Edmond 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 started the first of 133 successful dives with his second submarine Seeteufel . The crew of 12 was trained to leave the submerged ship through a diving chamber.

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

1863: CSS Hunley was the first submarine to sink a ship, Confederate States Navy Housatonic , during American Civil War).

=The first diving regulator=

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 (Greek for air-carrier ). But air pressure tanks 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 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 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-propelled (locomotive) torpedo, developed by Robert Whitehead (to a design by Captain Lupius, Austrian Navy), demonstrated for the imperial naval commission on 21 December.

=Gas and air cylinders appear=

Late 19th century: Industry began to be able to 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: The first certainly known rebreather (its absorbent was caustic soda), was invented by Henry Fluess in 1879 to rescue mining who were trapped by water.

1893: Louis Boutan invented the first underwater camera.

1900: John P. Holland builds the first successful submarine, Holland (also called A-1 ).

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 decompression tables.

=Rebreathers become practical=

1915: Sir s.

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.

1914-1918: existed for all or part of this period.

1918: Ohgushi (he was Japanese) 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.

=Swim-diving starts=

The 1930 s: In France, Guy Gilpatrick started swim-diving with waterproof goggles, derived from swimming goggles (which were originally intended to keep salt water out of the eyes at the surface). Sport spearfishing became common in the Mediterranean, and spearfishers gradually developed the common sport diving mask and fins and snorkel, and Italy sport spearfishers started using oxygen rebreathers. This practice came to the attention of the Italian Navy, which developed its manned torpedo which had a big effect in World War II.

1933: In France, Louis de Corlieu patented the first swimming swimfins.

In San Diego (USA) the first sport diving club started, called the Bottom Scratchers. It did not use breathing sets as far as is known. Its main aim was spearfishing.

Yves Le Prieur invented a constant-flow open-circuit breathing set. It is said that it could allow a 20 minute stay at 7 meters and 15 minutes at 15 meters. In 1935 the French Navy adopted it.

1934 In France a sport diving club started, called the Club des Sous-l Eau. It did not use breathing sets as far as is known. Its main aim was spearfishing.

1934: Otis Barton and William Beebe dived to 3028 feet using a bathysphere.

1936: On the French Riviera the first known sport scuba 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 hydrodynamics in swimming.

1937: The American Diving Equipment and Salvage Company (now known as DESCO) developed a heavy bottom-walking-type diving suit with a self-contained mixed-gas helium and oxygen rebreather.

=The diving regulator reappears=

1937 Georges Commeinhes developed a two-cylinder open-circuit apparatus with demand Regulator. The regulator was a big rectangular box between the cylinders. Some were made, but WWII interrupted development.

1939: Georges Commeinhes offered his breathing 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. His invention was submerged by Cousteau s invention.

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.

WWII began.

1941 to 1945: During .

Hans Hass later said that during WWII the German diving gear firm Dräger offered him an open-circuit scuba set with a demand regulator. It may have been a separate invention, or it may have been copied from a captured Commeinhes-type set.

1943: s publications and training manuals, and describing scuba diving as aqualunging .

1944 October: Frédéric Dumas reached 62 meters (about 200 feet) with a Cousteau aqualung.

1945: .

Among the war news, the world s public heard about frogmen.

1946: Jacques-Yves Cousteau-type aqualungs went on sale in France.

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

Siebe Gorman and/or Heinke started making Jacques-Yves Cousteau-type aqualungs in England. Captain Trevor Hampton had a dive with one.

1948 or 1949: Rene s Sporting Goods shop in California imports aqualungs from France. Hollywood sees them and gets interested.

1950: Jacques-Yves Cousteau-type aqualungs went on sale (but very expensive) to industry and civilians in Britain. Siebe Gorman made it at Chessington.

A British naval diving manual printed soon after this said that the aqualung is to be used for walking on the bottom with a heavy diving suit and weighted boots, and did not mention Cousteau.

A report to Cousteau said that only 10 aqualung sets had been sent to the USA because the market there was saturated.

1951: The movie The Frogmen (movie) was released. It is set in the Pacific Ocean in WWII. In its last 20 minutes it shows USA Frogman#Errors_about_frogmen, using bulky 3-cylindered aqualungs on a combat mission. This equipment use is anachronistic (in reality they would have used rebreathers), but it shows aqualungs were available (even if not widely known of) in the USA in 1951.

1951 December: The first issue of Skin Diver Magazine (USA) appeared. The magazine ran until November 2002.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau-type aqualungs went on sale in Canada.

1952: Jacques-Yves Cousteau-type aqualungs went on sale in the USA.

=Public interest in scuba diving takes off=

1953: The National Geographical Society Magazine published an article about Cousteau s underwater archaeology at Grand Congloué island near Marseille, and in French-speaking countries a diving film called �paves ( 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 and Heinke kept aqualungs expensive, and restrictions on exporting currency stopped people from importing them. Many British sport divers used home-made constant-flow breathing sets and ex-armed forces or ex-industrial rebreathers.

:In those times, free-swimming diving suits were not readily available to the general public, after the first rush of war-surplus frogman s Diving suit#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. Others dived in home-made drysuits, or in thick layers of ordinary clothes. :After the supply of war-surplus frogman s fins dried up, for a long time fins were not available to the public, and some had to resort to such things as gluing marine ply to plimsoles.

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

Rene s Sporting Goods shop (now owned by Spirotechnique) became U.S.Divers, which is now a leading maker of diving equipment.

1953 October 15: The BSAC was founded.

1954: USS Nautilus (SSN-571), the first nuclear-powered submarine, is launched.

The first manned dives in the bathyscaphe FNRS-2 .

First scuba certification course in the USA offered by the Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation.

1956: The first wetsuit was introduced.

Around this time some British scuba divers started making home-made diving demand regulators from industrial parts including Calor Gas regulators. (Since then, Calor Gas regulators have been redesigned, and this conversion is now impossible.) See Diving_regulator#Twin-hose, home-made.

Later, and any firm could legally copy it.

1957: The television series Sea Hunt began. It introduced SCUBA diving to the television audience. It ran until 1961.

1958: USS Nautilus (SSN-571) completed the first ever voyage under the polar ice to the North Pole and back.

1959: NAUI is founded.

1960: Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh, USN, descended to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the ocean (about 10900m or 35802 feet = 6.78 miles) in the bathyscaphe Bathyscaphe Trieste : see at [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/savageseas/deep-side-journey.html this link] and[http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/education_diving_records.html this link]

USS Triton (SSRN-586) completed the first ever underwater circumnavigation of the world.

In Italy, sport diving oxygen rebreathers continued to be made well into the 1960 s.

1965: The film version of James Bond in Thunderball (using both sorts of open-circuit scuba) came out and helped to make scuba diving popular.

1966: PADI starts.

1968: First known rebreather with electronic parts: the [http://dg8fz.dyndns.org/~karl/dg8fz/rebreather/Electrolung/index.htm Electrolung].

1971: Scubapro introduces the Stabilization Jacket, now in England commonly called stab jacket.

1983: The Orca Edge (the first dive computer) was introduced.

1985: The wreck of RMS Titanic was found.

1989: The film The Abyss (including an as-yet-fictional deep-sea liquid-breathing set) helped to make scuba diving popular.

The Communist Bloc fell and the Cold War ended. After that, the world s armed forces had less reason to requisition rebreather patents submitted by civilians, and sport diving automatic and semi-automatic mixture rebreathers started to appear. See rebreather history link below.

1997: The film Titanic (1997 film) helped to make underwater trips onboard MIR (submersible) submersible vehicles popular.

=Other diving history timelines (external links)=

There are other diving history chronologies at:-

[http://scuba.about.com/library/weekly/aa100198.htm scuba.about]

[http://www.scubaorlando.com/scubahistory.htm subaorlando.com]

[http://dg8fz.dyndns.org/~karl/dg8fz/rebreather/gallery.htm rebreather history]

[http://hem.passagen.se/mathrim/dykning/history.html hem.passagen.se]

[http://marinebio.org/Oceans/S_C_U_B_A/index.asp marinebio.org]

A series of pages:-

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History1.htm (introduction)

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History2.htm (early to 1715)

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History3.htm (1776 to 1865)

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History4.htm (1873 to 1917)

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History5.htm (1920 to 1939)

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History6.htm (1940 s to 1960 s)

http://www.aqualifediving.com/History7.htm (1962 to 1990 s)