Mailing List Archive

Mailing List: techdiver

Message Display

  At a diving gear repairer's in Liverpool (UK) in late 1991 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 and industrial rebreathers. 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
here? 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]