What is Scuba Diving?
Scuba diving is a mode of underwater diving where the diver uses a self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (scuba), which is completely independent of surface supply, to breathe underwate.
Underwater diving, also called underwater swimming, swimming done underwater either with a minimum of equipment, as in skin diving (free diving), or with a scuba (abbreviation of self-contained underwater-breathing apparatus) or an Aqua-Lung. Competitive underwater diving sports include spearfishing and underwater hockey, sometimes called “octopush.”
The history of scuba diving – much less the history of all diving in general – could fill volumes. It’s an endeavor marked by the contributions of literally hundreds of individuals, some household names recognized by non-divers and others forgotten even by the most learned dive historians. But, all made the sport of scuba diving what it is today.
Scuba diving is a young activity – not even a century old if you go back to its earliest vestiges. It’s only 40 or so years old if you go back to when recreational scuba diving began largely as we practice it today. At this writing, quite a few of diving’s earliest contributors and pioneers are still with us.
However, they hint at possibilities to come: With innovations in materials lighter and more compact versions could be feasible. There’s little doubt there would be reasonable demand for a hard suit that’s not prohibitively expensive, rated to 100 metres (330 feet) for two or three hours, and simple and light enough for a single person to operate with little or no surface support. Will it happen? Perhaps sooner than you imagine.
There are probably hundreds of perspectives on the scuba diving timeline. For this very brief treatment, we’ll trace diving through five rough time blocks, following it from its inception as an obscure activity that relied primarily on homemade gear to a mainstream sport enjoyed by millions of people daily.
The Eclectic Calling of scuba diving: 1930’s and 1940’s
Scuba diving’s roots begin with a rare breed of adventurer who explored the underwater world more than a decade before the invention of the open-circuit scuba regulator. Although hard hat commercial and military diving had established themselves firmly by the 1930s, these divers (almost exclusively male) forayed underwater with snorkels fashioned from garden hoses and handcrafted spears, notably along the French Mediterranean coast and in southern California, USA. Almost the only commercially available equipment at the time was crude goggles and Corlieu fins. However, even these were hard to come by, so many early sport divers made due with homemade goggles and old-fashioned arm power for swimming. The primary motivator for these early explorers was underwater hunting.
Perhaps the best-remembered pioneer from this era was Guy Gilpatric, an American journalist who explored the French Mediterranean. Gilpatric wrote what may be the first sport diver manual of any kind – The Compleat Goggler. Gilpatric introduced several people to his new sport, both personally and through his book. Among these was an ambitious young man named Jacques Cousteau.
Cousteau recounts his early years in scuba diving in his classic, The Silent World. Cousteau explains that he began diving as a hunter. In the 1930s, he and his close companions Frederic Dumas, Philippe Tailliez and others, speared fish – some weighing more than 120 kg/280 lbs. Unlike some of these early explorers, however, their purpose for diving began to stray from hunting. They found themselves drawn to the sea’s mysteries and decided to explore the last frontier on earth.
Quickly reaching the practical time and depth limits of breath-hold diving, Cousteau wanted an air supply, but not clunky hardhat gear. In The Silent World he observed, “We wanted breathing equipment, not so much to go deeper, but to stay longer, simply to live awhile in a new world.”
They experimented with the early pure oxygen rebreathers in use by military divers. While some early sport divers got good use from these, Cousteau and his companions quickly rejected it. The shallow depths imposed by breathing pure oxygen did little to expand their capabilities. They played with the “Le Prieur” compressed air device, but it proved impractical because its continuous air flow drained cylinders too rapidly. What they needed, Cousteau determined, did not exist. In 1942, Cousteau brought Emile Gagnan into the picture. Gagnan wasn’t a scuba diver, but a compressed gas engineer. Cousteau asked Gagnan to design a compressed air device that would deliver air at the surrounding water pressure only when the diver inhales.
0 Comments