|
 This
was the way in which most predictions about the sea foresaw the proper
apparel for working under the sea:
heavy diving armour. It was a reasonable call, since for
over a century diving suits were growing heavier and as man worked in
deeper and deeper waters the tendency was to try to keep out the
pressures of the sea with kits that were less suits than diving bells
with legs. There were all sorts of diving armours by
the 1930s; ones with claws, ones with huge barrel joints, some you
could sit down in and even diving suits built for two.
Then there was an enterprising chap who reasoned
that lobsters are able to live in the depths of the sea thanks to its
chitinous plating. Always one to learn from nature, he built a
suit of diving armour plated like the dinner platter inhabitant only to
discover on his first test dive that the pressure was bending the
plates and painfully pinching his anatomy in very unfortunate places.
Apparently the wellbeing of lobsters had nothing to do with
pressure-resistant plates.
 All that changed when Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan
invented the Self Contained Underwater Breathing
Apparatus or Scuba for short. This simple little device
was a regulator that delivered air at exactly the right pressure with
every breath a diver took. With the pressures inside and
outside the diver's body neatly evened out, man was free to swim like
a fish-- at least, within reasonable limits.
The
aqualung put paid to the armour bit, but now the race was to do scuba
one better. Scuba was fine as far as it went, but it was only
really useful in relatively shallow waters. Down to thirty feet
you could stay underwater indefinitely, below that you were limited to
only a few minutes before you had to take precautions against the
bends. Go too deep and ordinary air became toxic and you had to
go on all sorts of exotic gas mixtures with only a sip of oxygen.
So, the next step was to come up with ways to allow
divers to go deeper longer, such as 1968's Electrolung, the first
electronically regulated, closed circuit, mixed gas rebreather.
That may sound complicated, but it wasn't a patch on attempts
like the radiothermal diving suit that used a decaying radioactive
isotope to keep divers warm deep, cold waters.
But no matter how you sliced it, divers were still
limited by the awkward problem that they either had to carry their air
with them or be tethered to the surface by air lines. Either
way, it meant that in the future, man would still be a visitor to the
sea rather than a resident.
Or did it? |
