Mailing List Archive Mailing List Archive
Many will already know that:- (0) Rouquayrol & Denayrouze in France in the 1860's invented a sort of aqualung called the aerophore; it had a genuine regulator, but its spherical `cylinder' could only hold 30 bars and was a baleout; the diver walked on the bottom and was surface supplied. (Jules Verne's fiction story `10000 leagues under the sea' used it without a surface air line and wildly exaggerated its duration to 6-8 hours! :-) ) The Seibe Gorman hardhat kit soon swept the field, and the aerophore regulator was forgotten by the time men could make proper compressed gas cylinders. (Else we might have had aqualungs and scuba diving since 1900! Alas what three generations of our seaside-holidaying ancestors missed! :-( :-( ) (1) Cousteau & Gagnan invented the aqualung as we know it in 1943. (2) Before 1939 in the French Mediterranean there was a scuba diving club using constant-flow compressed-air sets invented by a man called Le Prieur. But they were not available to Cousteau in the war. Before that there were other constant-flow compressed-air sets industrial and underwater, but they achieved little. (3) A Frenchman called Commeinhes invented a true aqualung in 1939 or a bit before, and offered it to the French Navy, which accepted it, but the war and German occupation interfered with that and with much else, and Commeinhes died in the army in the liberation of Strasbourg in Alsace. But I read of someone after the war ended diving with a Commeinhes-type aqualung. But in `Diver' magazine (UK) (March 1995, page 35) Barnard Eaton, discussing the relative claims to priority of Cousteau and Hans Hass as the starter of sport diving, writes "In 1941 he [= Hans Hass] visited the Draeger Works in Lubeck [in north Germany]. His aim was to acquire suitable [8] underwater breathing apparatus, and there were two sorts that Draeger could supply. The first was an oxygen recycling apparatus which had been developed for submarine escape. The second was a modernised version of an automatic lung, for use with compressed air, developed in the mid-19th century [9]. Hass chose the recycling apparatus because ...", and lists advantages of oxygen rebreathers. [8] Previously Hans Hass had used home-made surface-supplied diving helmets. [9] This sounds like that Draeger had developed a demand-supplied aqualung in wartime Germany! Anyone got any more information on this? Was it ever issued or used? Did they develop it independently, or from captured French Commeinhes sets, or what? (So it seems that the innumerable war story comic-strip drawings of German wartime frogmen wearing what are clearly Cousteau-type aqualungs, may possibly not be so anachronistic after all!) PS 1: Re Hans Hass's rebreathers, I read that his rebreathers have the bag on the back because he did not care for the appearance of having a breathing bag on his chest (i.e. likely he disliked the `frogman look'). :-) PS 2: In the early days of diving in Britain, aqualungs were so expensive that many BSAC divers made their own aqualungs. This may have had unexpected consequences:- At a diving gear repairer's in Jan 1992 I saw a customer's early Russian aqualung that had found its way to England. A thin manifold meandered and looped from one of its cylinder tops to the other. At the middle of the manifold the on/off tap pointed down the cylinders, on the back of where the regulator screwed into a big screw-socket. Nowhere was the 'A'-shaped screwed clamp so familiar in the West. The breathing tubes had cloth outsides like on gasmasks. It had a pressure gauge. The Russians, on hearing about aqualungs, may have designed their own from scratch; but it would have been easier surely for them to get one from the West somehow and copy it, sticking to its tried and tested main features, for they were no respecters of patents. Why then no 'A'-clamp but instead the big screw socket like on some butane cylinders? That the Russian for aqualung is "akvalang", and not some word made up in Russian, points to English, and likelier to Britain than to the USA. Since during the Cold War the USSR would have got no official help from the West in developing diving gear, did an agent of theirs, told to look in England first since they had heard of aqualungs in English text, go to a diving club or diving centre claiming to be an ordinary new member, and thus get an aqualung of the type commonest then among British sport divers when factory-made aqualungs were absurdly expensive in Britain? If so, it would be an ironic result of Siebe Gorman's diving gear price policy at the time if the strange-looking aqualung that I saw at that repairer's, USSR armed forces and organized sport standard issue, was not Cousteau-Gagnan pattern but an improved copied descendant of the BSAC's old help in need, an ex-RAF pilot's oxygen cylinder and a converted Calor gas regulator!
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]