EN
ES
DE
Before the Aqualung
Divers have always wanted to breathe underwater. The history begins not with Cousteau but with diving bells — hollow chambers lowered onto the seabed that trapped air, giving divers a few extra minutes. By the 17th century, Edmond Halley (of the comet) had built a wooden diving bell supplied with weighted barrels of fresh air. It worked, after a fashion.
The 19th century brought the hard-hat diving suit — a copper helmet bolted to a rubberized canvas suit, air pumped from the surface. Royal Navy salvage divers used this system to recover the HMS Royal George off Portsmouth in the 1830s. It was dangerous, slow, and limited to whatever distance the air hose could reach.
Self-contained apparatus was the dream. Several inventors tried. In 1925, French naval officer Yves Le Prieur attached a compressed-air cylinder to the body with a manually-operated valve that released a steady flow of air — wasteful, but self-contained. In 1939, the British designed closed-circuit oxygen rebreathers for combat swimmers — effective, but lethal below 6 metres due to oxygen toxicity.
The Aqualung Moment: 1943
On 4 June 1943, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and engineer Émile Gagnan tested the device they called the Aqualung (Aqua-Lung) in the Marne River near Paris. The system used a demand regulator — originally designed to inject cooking gas into car engines during France's wartime petrol shortage — to deliver compressed air at ambient pressure, matching the diver's breathing cycle exactly. It worked perfectly on the first test. Cousteau spent 11 minutes at 5 metres and then went deeper.
The device was patented and put into production. By 1946, Cousteau and his crew were diving the Mediterranean with it. By 1952, he had acquired the converted minesweeper Calypso and begun the documentary work that would make him the most famous ocean explorer in the world.
The 1950s and 60s: Sport Diving Emerges
The Aqualung reached the United States when US Divers (a Cousteau enterprise) began importing it in 1949. Entrepreneurial diving instructors began offering courses. In 1952, the Underwater Society of America was founded. In 1959, NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors) was established as the first formal diver-training organisation. In 1966, PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) launched with a curriculum designed to produce competent recreational divers quickly and safely.
The equipment evolved rapidly during this era. Buoyancy control devices replaced the dangerous practice of strapping lead weights directly to the body and hoping to maintain depth. Dive tables derived from US Navy decompression research gave divers a way to calculate no-decompression limits. Regulators became smaller, more reliable, and cheaper.
The 1970s-90s: Certification Goes Mass Market
By the 1970s, recreational scuba had become a global sport. PADI in particular built its certification system into a franchise model — standardized curriculum, branded materials, instructor certification — that created consistent training quality across 180 countries. By 2000, PADI had issued over 12 million certifications.
Technological development continued: Nitrox (enriched-air mixtures with higher oxygen content) allowed longer no-decompression limits at moderate depths. Dive computers replaced physical dive tables in the 1980s and became standard equipment in the 1990s. Wetsuit design improved; drysuits became accessible to recreational divers; buoyancy systems became more sophisticated.
Today: From Recreation to Exploration
Modern scuba encompasses everything from a first pool lesson to extended-range technical dives using trimix to 150 metres. Cave diving has extended human reach into the world's underwater cave systems — the Sac Actun system in Mexico's Yucatan, the longest underwater cave in the world at 372 km, was mapped entirely by cave divers. Rebreather technology has made closed-circuit diving accessible at the recreational level. Freediving world records now exceed 250 metres.
Cousteau's 11 minutes in the Marne in 1943 started all of it.