Jacques Cousteau

Jacques Cousteau was born, 1910, in Ste-André-de-Cubzac, France, and was educated at the Brest Naval Academy. In 1943 he and Émile Gagnan invented the first self-contained underwater breathing diving device, which they called the Aqualung. this scuba gear allows divers to breathe compressedair from tanks carried on their backs.
He commanded the research ship Calypso from 1950. He founded and directed many oceanographic institutions. In 1957 he became head of the Conshelf Saturation Dive Program experiments, in which people live and work for extended periods in deep water along the continental shelves. He also conducted archaeological research, exploring shipwrecks.
Cousteau, concerned with preservation as well as exploration, has done much to educate the public about the sea and sea creatures. His books include The Silent World and The Living Sea.
He was one of the first to develop underwater color photography, he invented a process for using television underwater. His films The Silent World, The Golden Fish and World Without Sun won academy awards. But he is perhaps best known for his Emmy-award-winning television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which premiered in 1968.

With the oceans covering about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, it´s not strange that humans have been curious about the ndersea since the beginnings of history. Roger Bacon, a 13th-century English friar, wrote about the possibility of submarine operations. Leonardo da Vinci, the famous inventor, designed a diving helmet of leather. It had spikes to protect the diver from the monsters that most people thought was in the oceans, and a breathing tube from the helmet to the surface with a cork float.
In 1716 the English mathematician and astronomer Edmund Halley, who discovered Halley's Comet, invented two types of diving bells. One was made of wood and looked like an upside-down trashcan with holes in it. The two holes were not to see out of but to let light in. Air was provided by two huge barrels that was sent down from surface to bottom loaded with fresh air, and a tube brought the air from the barrel to the bell and the diver who was inside of it.
Halley's second diving bell was made of lead. There was a seat inside for several divers, and the air-supply system was essentially the same as for the first bell. Halley and four other daring divers reportedly stayed at 18 meters for an hour and a half in the lead bell. Their only problem, he reported, was a pain in the ears. In those days they did not understand the problems of the pressure in the water.
Modern exploration of the undersea world began seriously in June 1943, when Jacques Cousteau made his first dive with a revolutionary breathing device he had developed with Émile Gagnan, a French engineer. Captain Jaques Cousteau , at the time a French Navy gunnery officer, had not been satisfied with the superficial probing of the ocean surface. It was not enough that humans could stay underwater and look only as long as they could hold their breath.
Gagnan had designed a gas-flow demand regulator for use on automobiles and in hospital operating rooms during World War II. Cousteau thought that the invention could be modified for use underwater. The two tried several concepts and finally came up with a successful model of an open-circuit, compressed air scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus). Not only did Cousteau realize his own dream of flying underwater like a fish, but he also enabled many others to peer into the ocean and study its secrets.