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History of diving

Article · January 2008

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Thijs J. Maarleveld
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History of diving

1. Under water at first

For centuries people have dived apne, that is to say while holding their breath. In greek pneo means
breathing, whereas the prefix a- stands for ‘no’ or ‘without’. Economic reasons to dive ‘without
breathing’ were for instance the procurement of sponges, corals and pearls. For the latter purpose
the practice continues to the present day, notably in certain areas of the Pacific. Working depths of
up to 40 m are not unusual. Divers engaging in this practice must be very fit and well-trained.
Nevertheless their life expectancy is not very high at all. Risks are considerable, but fatigue and
wear are also part of the equation.

From a very early date such divers also engaged in the retrieval of goods that were lost at sea. The
Persian king Xerxes is known to have given such a commission to a diver named ‘Skyllias’ in 480
BC. Skyllias is therefore the earliest documented diver-salvor in history. Xerxes was concerned
with the loss of the Persian fleet he had sent out in his expedition against the Greeks and that had
been caught in foul weather while rounding Cape Magnesia. Skyllias was to bring valuables to the
surface. Apparently he was very successful. According to the historian Herodotus (485-425) he
abandoned his client shortly after completing the job, while keeping most of the salvaged material
himself. Apparently the salvage industry was as susceptible to controversies and jealousies in those
days as it is today. It is not the only instance from classical antiquity. The Romans had a sort of
corporation of divers, called urinatori. The Rhodian Sea Laws (Lex Rhodia) got their application
partly in order to resolve the disputes resulting from salvage.

Artist impression of Urinatori retrieving amphorae. Although it is hard to date intrusions, French
researchers interpret some evidence of interventions on classical shipwreck sites as evidence of
their activities (drawing Serge Ridard).
More than 2000 years after Xerxes and Skyllias, the same techniques were similarly applied. A
good example is the operation organized by William Phips. Since the end of the sixteenth century
both the Dutch and the English tried to breach the trade monopolies that Portugal and Spain had
agreed upon at Tordesillas in 1494. All through the 17th and 18th centuries they continued to
stimulate privateers and interlopers that tried to harm the Spanish and the Portuguese. Such

The world according to the Tordesillas treaty of 1494.

activities varied from finding uncharted sea-routes to smuggling and piracy. But William Phips had
his own specialism. He made trained divers retrieve precious cargo from the sunken remains of a
Spanish silver fleet that had been lost in the Caribbean in 1643. They dived with exactly the same
techniques as Skyllias had done: apne. Although the technique is called free diving in English, this
term is hardly appropriate in this context: the divers William Phips employed were slaves. There
was no way they could appropriate part of the booty in the way Skyllias had done. All proceeds and
honour went to Phips who was hailed as a hero and knighted when he came back to England in
1687.

The pastime and tradition of going for Spanish silver actually predates the example of Sir William
Phips highlighted here. The image below dates from 1622 and the tradition lasts well into the 21st
century. It has incorporated any type of diving technology that has been developed since.
2. The tube, the bucket and the barrel

Apne diving has its limits, although free-diving fanatics setting both distance and depth records of
over 200 m seem to think otherwise. In trying to find solutions to remain under water longer than
several minutes, three simple devices have been explored and further developed: the tube, the
bucket and the barrel. Practically all diving technology is based in one of these devices or a
combination of them.

The tube is perhaps the first device that comes to mind for people who want to breathe underwater.
There are many stories in fiction in which the hero hides underwater while breathing through a reed.
Nevertheless, the tube as such is not as helpful as many first users suppose. Human lungs are not
capable of drawing a vacuum. In fact the limit is at about 60 cm water column at the very most. An
effective snorkel that is helpful in free diving is much shorter. Longer hoses and deeper depths will
simply not work, unless…… fresh air is pumped into the hose at pressure. There is no sign that
such a principle has ever been used before the development of effective pumps and fire-hoses in the
17th century.

Fire hoses of substantial length were developed during the 17th century. The picture shows a scene
of experimentation in Amsterdam with machinery developed by Jan van der Heyden.

A problem with any hose supplying a diver with pressurized air is that it may snag, bend and fold in
a way that blocks the airflow, with fatal results. The hose should be flexible, but certainly not too
flexible. The oldest diving suit that has been preserved anywhere in the world dates from the 18th
century and has a very specific solution for this problem. The hose is composed of lath-turned
wooden tubes that are interconnected with leather sleeves. The suit itself is also made of leather.
The diver crawls into it through an opening in the front and the shoes are integrated. The design of
the shoes clearly demonstrates in which region and cultural context the diving suit has been made. It
is also where it is kept in a museum: the West Coast region of Bothnia in northern Finland. The
diving suit is the central showpiece of the museum of Raahe / Brahestad. It is just one example of
an early application of a tube through which a more or less constant flow of air is pumped for a
diver to breath from.

The oldest diving suit to have been preserved is kept in the museum of Brahestad / Raahe.

An important example of the archaeological application of the same technique is the device that
Count Adolphe von Morlot used near Morges in his settlement research in Lake Geneva in 1854.
Again a hose, into which air is pumped through a very simple pump (it reminds one of a bicycle
pump), is the most important part. In Morlot’s case it was connected to a diving cap closing around
his head, rather than to an integrated dress.

Count Adolphe von Morlot collecting antiquities from the shallow rim of Lake Geneva near Morges
in 1854.
The same technique was further improved to develop into the standard diving dress with copper
helmet and leaden weights, rubberized canvas suit and leaden shoes. Central to ‘standard hard hat’
diving equipment is that it is fed through a safe air pump operated by two individuals. The name of
Augustus Siebe and the date of 1837 are closely connected with its introduction. So is its practical
application by the Deane brothers in salvage operations around Britain. Simultaneously, similarly
designed equipment was also developed elsewhere, but world wide Siebe Gorman has been the firm
who marketed the most successful versions. This outfit has been the standard for all sorts of diving
for over a century and continued to be used for heavy construction diving into the last quarter of the
20th century.

A standard diving pump on display in Strandingsmuseet in Thorsminde and a standard hard hat
diver at the site of the Bremer Cog in 1962.

Just like the tube, we also know the bucket as a solution to hide under water in fictional stories. The
scoundrel Til Eulenspiegel allegedly used this technique. His legendary feats were first published in
1515. It begs the question, whether the technique actually is very efficient for the scoundrel’s
purpose. One needs a lot of force or weight to counter the bucket’s buoyancy. But the principle is
sound enough. When one carefully lowers a bucket upside down into the water, no air will escape.
If the device and the air bubble that it contains are large enough to easily reach it with one’s mouth,
one can breathe from the bubble. In this way it is easy enough to extend one’s stay under water
considerably as compared to the few minutes allowed by holding one’s breath, although with every
breath the bubble will contain less oxygen. In practice, the simple technique has been used in
simple, heavily weighted diving bells. A good example is the bell used in the late seventeenth
century by Hans Albrecht von Treileben for the recovery of guns from Swedish warships, such as
Kronan.
 Von Treileben’s diving bell

The third simple device is the barrel, and again its first deployment is known from fiction. There is
a legend which has Alexander the Great being lowered underwater in a barrel in order to satisfy his
equally great curiosity. Allegedly, this happened close to the city of Tyre. The interesting thing is
that the legend appears both in western European medieval texts and in Islamic ones. The
supporting illustrations give all the technical detail one could expect.

Nevertheless, the technique has extensively been used in early diving as well as in more modern
forms. In principle, the pressure in a well-made barrel will remain more or less the same as at the
moment when it was closed, even when it is lowered to a considerable depth. This is different from
what happens in the open system of the bucket. Early applications include the diving machine that
Jacob Rowe developed late in the seventeenth century. In this machine, the diver is enclosed in a
‘barrel’, but his arms protrude through tightly sealed sleeves. In other words the diver has the use of
arms and hands. But the difference in pressure inside and out is a major problem of such a device.

Jacob Rowe’s diving engine

Another very similar machine was used by John Lethbridge in the twenties of the 18th century. Both
Jacob the diver and John Lethbridge regularly dived in commission of the Dutch East India
Company VOC. Historically informed underwater archaeological exploration has seen a range of
operations following in their footsteps.

John Lethbridge’s machine

The diving time in such ‘engines’ is limited by the limited amount of air that the barrel can contain.
Both machines are fitted with vents that can be opened as soon as the machine breaks the surface
after a dive. John Lethbridge used a pair of bellows to force fresh air in during each diving interval.

Later developments based on the barrel principle are the closed diving bell and the atmospheric
diving suit. The fact that its inner space and the diver who sits there need not be pressurized can be
a great advantage in deep and prolonged dives. On the other hand this also means that such bells
and suits should be very heavily constructed. In closed bells for (very) deep diving this has the
related disadvantage that port-holes should be very small. They give even less opportunity for
observation than the device that Alexander the Great allegedly used.

This is not to say that diving history did not see many varieties of closed deep diving observation
bells, either for more persons or for one, such as illustrated here for the first half of the 20th century.
In more modern saturation diving systems, the closed diving bell is the most important transport
and equalizing medium between different components.

The atmospheric diving suit is built on the same principles as the closed diving bell, but includes
some sort of articulated limbs, that can be operated by the diver / pilot. A fine 19th century example
is kept in the Musée de la Marine in Paris. The most well-known varieties are the so-called JIM-
suits.
Constructed by the brothers Alphonse and Theodore Carmagnolle around 1880, the left hand suit is
the oldest atmospheric diving suit presently on display in a museum (Musée de la Marine, Paris). It
has been patented in December 1882. The right hand suit was constructed in 1913 by the German
firm Neufeldt & Kuhnke in Kiel. The firm’s proficiency in the production of heavily built one-
cylinder hot bulb Diesel engines, composed of many cast iron parts seems to be evident from this
suit’s design. The German Navy bought a couple of them and equipped ‘Panzertaucher’ with them
right into the second world war.

In England the development of Atmospheric Diving Suits built less on iron castings. The name of
inventor Joseph Salim Peress (1896-1978) is closely connected with it. Peress first experimented
with a solid stainless steel suit in 1918. In 1922 he patented a spherical joint that superficially
resembles the articulations developed by the Carmagnolle brothers, but which uses a fluid to
equalize pressure. This guarantees that the articulations are easy to move. In 1932 the patent was
used in the Tritonia suit, illustrated below. Although officially called Tritonia, the suit was nick-
named Jim-suit, after Peress’s chief diver Jim Jarrett. In the sixties Peress was involved with the
development of a more modern version. When it was launched in 1972, it was officially baptized
JIM. Atmospheric Diving Suits continue to be used. They may be relatively clumsy, but keeping the
operator at atmospheric pressure rules out most of physiological inconveniences that are otherwise
associated with the diving profession.
The Tritonia Atmospheric Diving Suit (ADS) was used to explore the wreck of the RMS Lusitania,
1935.

A JIM suit of 1972 side by side with a contemporary Athmospheric Diving Suit of the U.S. Navy
with integrated propulsion
3. Integration of the different techniques.

As far as we know, the combination of the three basic approaches, the tube, the bucket and the
barrel started in the seventeenth century. The astronomer Edmond Halley (1656 – 1742), so well
known for the comet he described, had an interest in many aspects of physics. As such he also
addressed the issue of diving. Building on previous designs of diving bells and thus on the principle
of the bucket, he integrated the principles of the tube and the barrel into a more versatile system. In
simple open bell-diving the diver can leave the bell apne. But in Halley’s system the diver dons a
cap with a hose, the open end of which is kept by a diving tender in the bell. Evidently, this method
of diving is not unproblematic. The diver who leaves the bell can only breathe when he or she is
more or less level with the air-bubble in the bell. Withstanding the overpressure when swimming up
a bit may be feasible, but swimming down deeper than the magic 60 cm below the air-bubble’s
deepest end, means that the diver should take care to close both nose and mouth in order to avoid
unacceptable suction on the lungs. In simple bell-diving the diver’s breathing will rapidly reduce
the oxygen content of the submerged air-bubble. This puts a limit to the diving time, as the diver
will faint if continuing for too long. Halley’s system provides for replenishing of the oxygen supply,
by adding air that has been compressed in a barrel. This particular use of a barrel is different from
the principle allegedly used by Alexander. Likewise, however, it continued to be used in all sorts of
later diving equipment, notably in the form of steel, aluminium or composite cylinders containing
any type of breathing mixture, such as compressed air.

Halley’s diving bell: one diver dons a cap with an air-tube which the other keeps in the bell’s air-
bubble. Its contents are refreshed with a barrel with compressed air. The water / air interface in the
bell is not indicated, but the diver outside should be careful not to dive much deeper for the system
to work.
That Halley’s ideas were adopted in practice is evident in several ways. In the 18th century, the
Swedish scientist and diving contractor Mårten Triewald deployed a very similar bell with air
refreshment. Modern open bell diving systems generally have one diver that leaves the bell on a
tube or umbilical whereas a second diver tends that umbilical and stays in the bell, just like Halley’s
tender.

Mårten Triewald’s diving bell with refreshment barrels

A modern open diving bell, as used on dynamically positioned vessels, is similar to Halley’s ideas
in that one diver leaves the bell, whereas a second diver stays there to tend the air tube or umbilical.
4. Self-contained or surface supplied

All techniques discussed above are in some way surface dependent. This is evident for all
equipment based on a tube through which the breathing air is supplied. It is, to use the technical
term, Surface Supplied Equipment, SSE. The open diving bell illustrated above is as much SSE as
standard hard hat equipment. One could argue that the bucket and the simplest of diving bells are
more or less self-contained as no breathing gas is directly supplied from the surface. Leaving Til
Eulenspiegel’s simple, but not very practical solution aside, this reasoning is hardly valid. Due to
their sheer weight, there is no way one can operate a diving bell without extensive support at the
surface. The same applies to all devices that are based on the principle of the barrel, although some
of the newest Atmospheric Diving Suits are self-propelled and can operate autonomously in the
same way as one-person submarines.

Although Surface Supplied Equipment satisfies many demands, there have been ranges of reasons
to find more flexible and self-contained solutions. All such solutions focus on reducing the wastage
of breathing gas and on increasing the amount of breathing mixture the diver can carry along. A
first practical step is to compress and thus containerise the air supply. Halley did this in his wooden
barrels. Metal containers were first used for the purpose in the 19th century. High pressure steel
cylinders have become the standard in 20th century systems. But compacting gas is only one aspect.
Catering for the reduction of wastage is another. In some SSE systems, such as the standard diving
dress with copper helmet, the diver is provided with a free flow of breathing air. The capacity of the
constantly operated air pump is equal to that task. But containerized air will quickly run out in free
flow. The French mining engineer Benoît Rouquayrol realised this when he wanted to develop a
rescue device for mineworkers and he developed the idea for a ‘demand valve’. In his system a
canister with compressed air is fitted with such a valve or regulator and a hose with mouthpiece.
The regulator reduces the pressure of the compressed air in such a way that it is equalized with the
surrounding environment. This means that no free flow occurs when the mouthpiece is enclosed by
a person’s lips. The flow will start only on demand, in fact automatically on inhalation. Rouquayrol
baptized his device aerophore. With the help of Navy officer Auguste Denayrouze, it was made
suitable for diving in 1865.

Rouquayrol-Denayrouze diving set of 1865. Besides its canister with which it can be used
autionomously, this version has been fitted with a supply hose from the surface. The ability to
convert from ‘SCUBA’ to ‘SSE’ is also present in contemporary equipment.
Jules Verne in his 20.000 miles under the sea of 1870 was evidently inspired by the Rouquayrol-
Denayrouze diving set.

The invention certainly inspired Jules Verne. Otherwise the Rouquayrol-Denayrouze equipment
was far less influential than one would expect. Even as late as the 1920-ies the French Navy
Commander Yves le Prieur developed a diving set that had a cylinder of compressed air with a
hand-regulated valve instead of a demand-valve. It fed a free flow of air into a mouthpiece or a full-
face mask and was used with some success. It even inspired the establishment of the first
recreational diving club. A real breakthrough for self-contained diving on compressed air, however,
had to wait for the development of the Aqualong or Self-Contained Underwater Breathing
Apparatus (SCUBA) by the French engineer Émile Gagnan in 1943 and its successful subsequent
marketing by Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

The Rouquayrol-Denayrouze equipment and the Aqualong or SCUBA are in fact very similar. So is
the equally French system that was developed by Georges Commeinhes, just before the war. All are
open circuit systems, using compressed air. The demand valve reduces the amount of air that is
spilled, but each breath of air is exhaled. No economy is made of its oxygen content.

5. Closed circuits

Quite simultaneously with the development of autonomous open-circuit systems other engineers
were working on quite different solutions. Just like Benoît Roquayrol they were first and foremost
concerned with developing a rescue device. Not so much to escape from the dangers of poisonous
fumes in closed mines, but especially from sinking submarines. The deployment of submarines in
war brought them under attack. The hazard to their crews is obvious, but slow suffocation in a
paralyzed submarine would be avoidable if there was a means of escape. With limited space and
concentrating on the most essential, oxygen kits were developed. Each crew member would be
issued with such a unit from which a couple of breaths could be taken on escape in the event of a
calamity. As is usual with military equipment, each navy had its own version. Oxygen rebreathers
that were used to escape from poisonous gas attacks on battlefields were a source of inspiration. In
England it was the Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus, developed in 1910 by Robert Davis of

A Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus

Siebe, Gorman & Co. that set the standard right through the Second World War. Besides an oxygen
cylinder and a filtering canister binding exhaled CO2, it features a bag or counter-lung that can also
serve as a lifejacket when inflated at the surface. Breathing from and in the bag, the available
oxygen is used with enormous economy and no bubbles escape. This characteristic of a closed
circuit apparatus has added value in a military context.

Specific military purposes call for utmost secrecy. The regular bubbles that are produced by any
open circuit system are seen as much to revealing for autonomously operating military frogmen,
whether their task is intelligence, sabotage or attack. The other characteristic equipment of light

Military frogmen use oxygen rebreathers for secrecy. The equipment that was first developed just
before WW1 has been improved ever since.

diving or frogman equipment, such as half-masks, rubber suits and fins were developed analogously
with rebreathers and SCUBA.

The use of a rebreather as an escape device may be safe enough, but using it in regular diving is
actually very dangerous. If the gas contains too much CO2, the diver will easily faint. If it is too rich
in oxygen, oxygen poisoning will easily ensue, especially when diving deeper than 10 m. Many of
the military rebreathers have specific blending tricks. They attracted the attention of rcreational
divers as well. However, it was only after the development of electronic blending control that
rebreathers really started to be usable for other than military purposes. Commercially they start to
be deployed in the 1970-ies and they have gained popularity with ever more advanced electronics in
recreational tech-diving. The reduction of wastage of breathing gas is brought to its limits. The
amount of breathing mixture the diver can carry along is optimized accordingly. One could argue,
however, that this is counteracted by the need of surplus equipment to allow for acceptable safety.

6. Understanding physiological limits

A review of the history of diving is not complete without reference to the dangers of compression.
Extending diving time was central to all technicalities discussed above. But it is not just the supply
of breathing air that defines the limits. Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to find out about
the other limits by trial and error, with many accidents and deaths as a result. In principle, scientific
understanding of the physical laws and physiological processes that divers have to learn about, has
been available to a sufficient level for a very long time. In the years of thriving scientific
experimentation and discovery in the 17th century, so often referred to as the Scientific Revolution,
it was not only the diving bell as such that was subject to experimentation. Robert Hooke (1635 –
1703), who was well known to Edmond Halley, experimented with compression and decompression
of animals. Robert Boyle (1627 –1691), another scientist who was active in the circles of the Royal
Society, not only developed Boyle’s law, but observed the formation of gas bubbles in
decompressed tissue as early as in 1667. However, the lines between scientific discussion and full
awareness in the in the trade tend to be long. On the shop floor, awareness was often vague, if
present at all. The rules of thumb to avoid ‘decompression sickness’ were crude. Every time the
limits were approached this was marked by accidents or near accidents.

It was only in the late nineteenth century that the specialist discipline of hyperbaric medicine
developed. The Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane (1860–1936) is regularly cited as one of
its founding fathers. Socially motivated he was concerned about occupational hazards and
especially the occupational impact on human physiology, the respiratory system and ensuing
occupational diseases. His concern related to mine workers and caisson labour especially, but
evidently had tremendous bearing on diving. He was the one to explain the role of CO2 in producing
the respiratory incentive, and the poisonous risks of CO. He also developed decompression tables.
As such he produced an indispensable tool for diving. Since his efforts, a long row of such tables
has been produced for different applications in diving. For a very long time the U.S. navy tables
have been the standard for air diving, whether it be professional or recreational. They were designed
for acceptable risk under military circumstances where a diver would want to optimize one, well-
prepared dive. Repetitive diving at work puts other demands and so does the use of different
breathing mixtures. To cater for this, the available background information, tables and tools have
been extended considerably. They continue to be extended in order to cater for two separate but
interrelated developments. More and more diving systems are integrated. On the one hand this
makes working at ever deeper depths commercially feasible. On the other hand experiments in so-
called tech-diving also breach ever more complicated physiological barriers. Some of these
experiments are part of physiological and diving medical research. Most of it is recreational
activity, but the two interrelate intricately. By their sheer number, recreational dives can produce
quantitative data that informs diving medical research.
7. Mixed gas and saturation systems

During the first half of the 20th century the separate navies of the world experimented with different
filters for binding CO2 in rebreather gear and with different ways of blending the breathing mixture.
Reducing the risks of oxygen poisoning was one reason to do so. The other reason is quite opposite.
Normal air only contains a limited amount of oxygen (21 %). Would a richer blend benefit the
diver? How far could one go? After the Second World War research into the effects of blending
gases as breathing medium really took of. Military purposes were still a major driving force during
the Cold War, but commercial interests grew as well. Theoretical considerations and empirical
testing went hand in hand. Extending diving time evidently was a big issue. Some experimented
with richer Nitrogen – Oxygen blends that later became a standard as NITROX. Other
experimenters were focused on depth and replaced nitrogen with inert gases in order to avoid
nitrogen narcosis. The Swiss physicists Hannes Keller and Albert Bühlmann developed theoretical
models and decompression tables that would fit the use of mixtures. In practice they experimented
with diving depths of 120 to 150 meters in the late nineteen-fifties and reached 225 meters in 1961.
As a result they were offered a well-funded research contract by a combination of the U.S. navy and
the oil industry. Deploying loads of equipment they breached the 1000 ft or 300 m limit in
December 1962. It was not an unqualified success as two divers died during the operation.

Peter Small (left) and Hannes Keller are being kitted up for their experimental 1000 ft dive on
December 3 1962. Hannes Keller successfully survived, but Peter Small and a rescue diver died that
day.

Nevertheless, it was a historical day for Mixed gas diving. Whatever mixtures Bühlmann and Keller
experimented with, it was a mixture of Helium and Oxygen, which became standard for deep diving
as HELIOX. TRIMIX is a mixture of Helium, Nitrogen and Oxygen and as such it is a sort of
intermediate between NITROX and HELIOX.

The disproportionate duration of decompression, led both the French and the American navies
subsequently to start a programme of prolonged under water stays. Divers would live in underwater
laboratories or habitats for days on end. Their tissues would become fully saturated with gases and
decompression would only have to take place once. The first larger habitat, SEALAB, was launched
in 1964. Others were to follow later. The lab was put at a depth of 58 meters. The four saturation
divers were called ‘aquanauts’. It was the time, after all, during which imaginations were triggered
by American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts alike. The aquanauts lived in SEALAB for 11
days, while making regular sorties. HELIOX hampered their communication. Voices are much
 distorted by the mixture as President Lyndon B. Johnson found out when he congratulated the
divers through a telephone line. The interview was not deemed suitable for broadcast.

The interior of SEALAB 1 and the construction of SEALAB III that was to be deployed at a depth
of 300 m in 1969

SEALAB and its French counterpart CONSHELF laid the basis for full operationalization of
saturation diving systems in the 1970ies. The oil industry and the exploration of the continental
shelves had by then become the major driving force.

A typical transportable saturation diving unit as used in the offshore oil industry. The closed diving
bell is clearly in view.

The physiological and medical understanding and the technological solutions not only
inform commercial diving, but are likewise at the basis of recreational tech-diving, with rebreathers,
and oxygen, NITROX and TRIMIX supplies at high pressure.

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