History of Scuba Diving

Compared with humankind’s desire to explore the underwater wilderness of the ocean, the history of scuba diving is relatively short. Essentially, the first steps towards scuba diving were taken in 1535, when Guglielmo de Loreno created the world’s first diving bell, which kept a pocket of air around the diver as they descended under water.
 
In 1650, Von Guericke developed an air pump that would be used by divers for nearly 300 years, while 17 years later Robert Boyle discovered the concept of the bends by observing a gas bubble in the eye of a viper that had been compressed and then decompressed.

A major step forward was taken in 1691 by Edmund Halley, yes the man who discovered Halley’s Comet, when he patented a diving bell that could be connected by a pipe to barrels of air, which could be replenished from the surface. The road to the scuba tank had now begun.

In 1715, John Lethbridge built a diving engine, which was comprised of an underwater oak cylinder that was supplied with air from the surface.
The diving helmet came into being in 1823 when Charles Anthony Deane created the smoke helmet for firefighters. The helmet was used for diving as well as it could be fitted over the head and was held on by weights with air supplied from the surface. Five years later, Deane, with his brother John, created a diving suit that was secured to the helmet with straps.

In 1837, Augustus Siebe sealed the diving helmet to a rubber-suit that was watertight. This suit was used in the salvage of the British Warship HMS Royal George in 1839, eventually being adopted as the diving dress for the Royal Engineers. Four years later, the first diving school was established by the Royal Navy in England.

A huge step forward in the road to the scuba was made when, in 1865, Benoit Rouquayrol and Aguste Denayrouse created an apparatus for underwater breathing, consisting of a horizontal steel tank of compressed air on the diver’s back, which was connected to a mouth-piece. The diver was connected to the surface by a hose that pumped fresh air into the tank, which operated at low-pressure.
In 1876, Henry Fleuss created the first self-contained diving rig that used compressed oxygen, which proved to be a major innovation in terms of diving.

Over half a century later, William Beebe descended to 1,426 feet in a bathysphere attached to a barge by a steel cable in 1930.
Another component of the scuba diving rig was created in the 1930s when Guy Gilpatric created rubber goggles with glass lenses that could be used in diving, as well, by the mid-1930s, fins and snorkels had been patented.

 The Rouquayrol and Denayrouse apparatus was improved upon by Yves Le Prieur in 1933 when he combined it with a demand valve and high-pressure air tank to give the diver complete freedom from hoses and lines.
In 1942 and 1943, Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan re-tooled a car regulator to make it work provide compressed air to a diver on the slightest intake of breath automatically. This was the beginning of the self contained breathing apparatus as we now know it, however at that time it was called the aqua-lung.
A record dive was made with the aqua-lung in 1947 when a diver descended to a depth of 307 feet in the Mediterranean Sea.
The chronicle of the creation of the Aqua-Lung was published by Cousteau in his book The Silent World in 1953.

From there, various updates were made to the overall design of the scuba suit, but generally it remained the same in appearance.
Of course, since that point, improvements have been made in terms of safety and efficiency, making the scuba suit available to millions, at a relatively cheap cost.

From those humble beginnings centuries ago, the scuba has gone through various incarnations, through various stages to bring it to the form we know today. This is by no means the last point in the evolution of the scuba, as new ideas and innovations are always being made around the world.
Who knows, maybe one day we won’t even need air tanks anymore, stranger things have happened in the evolution and history of scuba diving.