Mailing List Archive

Mailing List: techdiver

Message Display

  I apologize for submitting this same matter again, but on reflection I
suspect that its previous submission went unnoticed because (a) it was at the
tail end of an overlong message about various things, and (b) Techdiver was in
a rush of correspondence about other topics.

  What can Techdiver's readers report about any prize ignoramus-isms about
diving gear in fiction or the press etc, that have caught their attention?
  There is the common newspaper habit of calling aqualungs "oxygen cylinders".
  Comic strip artists can be treated as a sample of the non-diving public
forced to draw diving gear. In comics, wearisomely, the standard-issue diving
set including for combat frogmen seems to be a two-cylinder twin-hose aqualung
with one breathing tube coming from each cylinder top with no regulator. E.g.
events set in a German wartime port, with two German standby frogman with
anachronistic Cousteau aqualungs on sitting on a wharf in case of anything.
  (Not the only wartime anachronisms that I have seen! In "Ogpu Prison" (one
of Sven Hassel's many 1939-1945 German soldier novels) he mentions Russians
with Kalashnikovs, which were not invented till 1947! (whence the name AK47).)
  Only twice have I seen a rebreather in a comic. Once was in the 1960's UK
comic `Eagle', set at the current time, underwater action, and one man on each
side wore a well-drawn rebreather, with the fullface mask air-pilot-shaped but
with eye windows like a gasmask or the fullface mask that came with the old
Siebe Gorman Salvus light oxygen rebreather. (I have seen that sort of
fullface mask on an aqualunger in a newspaper cartoon.) Once in a young
children's comic I saw a `frogman' with a breathing set composed of a flat
circular fullface mask with a big round window, connected by a wide tube to a
canister on the chest with no bag or tanks.
  Recently an Icelandic trawl-maker's advertisement in a fishermen's (not
sport angling) periodical showed a man in scuba gear sitting on the seabed at
a drawing board designing a trawl; his aqualung was as described above with no
regulator; each cylinder had 4 bands round and two valves on top, and had
likely been drawn using a blowtorch or resuscitator as model. His bubbles came
from somewhere above his left shoulder that was hidden by his head. But his
fullface mask was a good copy of a real Spirotechnique fullface mask.
  And in "10000 leagues under the sea" have a read of the mess that Jules
Verne got into trying to describe the Rouquayrol-Denayrouze breathing set!
(The real set had a demand regulator, and its (spherical) tank could take 30
ats and was only a bailout and the set was surface-supplied. But Jules Verne's
fictional version could last 6 to 8 hours without surface supply on a 50-at
tank!!?! and he does not mention the demand regulator, which likely by his
time was already forgotten. If only knowledge of the demand regulator had
survived until modern-type air cylinders could be made!)

Navigate by Author: [Previous] [Next] [Author Search Index]
Navigate by Subject: [Previous] [Next] [Subject Search Index]

[Send Reply] [Send Message with New Topic]

[Search Selection] [Mailing List Home] [Home]