Teen-Age Guide to Skin and Scuba Diving

DIVING

Chapter 1

HISTORY

No one really knows when diving first began or who the first divers might have been, but historians do know that the art dates to the very earliest of times. Archeologists have unearthed accumulations of deep-water shells in the caves of prehistoric time, indicating that our oldest ancestors shared our inclination for adventure and discovery. Some sources feel that ancient man forged to the ocean depths in search of food. Whatever the reason, diving has a history almost as long as life itself.

Written records of ancient times are studded with exploits of intrepid divers. Of course, many of these accounts have to do with diving in connection with naval warfare. The Greeks of ancient times were highly skilled in skin diving. More than four hundred years before Christ, Herodotus set down the story of Scyllis, a now famous Greek diver employed by Xerxes to recover treasure from sunken Persian ships. When his job was done, the conqueror tried to detain Scyllis, but the diver escaped over the side. During a storm he wreaked his revenge by cutting the anchor cables of Xerxes’ fleet. The confusion he caused won him a place in history. Scyllis then completed his escape by swimming nine miles to Artemisium.

Alexander the Great used divers to destroy the harbor defenses of Tyre about 300 B.C. Some what later the Byzantines outwitted the Romans who sought to blockade their country by cutting the anchor cables on the Roman ships. Byzantine divers then tied strong ropes to the keels of the Roman ships and the citizens massed and hauled the helpless Roman ships to shore.

Diving in these early times wasn’t always motivated by wars or blockades. Skin divers of the South Seas have spear-fished for thousands of years, and have sought pearls, sponges, shells, and coral from the ocean depths. Often their equipment has consisted of no more than a heavy stone or stones that helped them to get to the bottom in the quickest possible time.

Aside from rocks, early divers — according to the writings of Aristotle — were sometimes equipped with crude breathing tubes. The first diving equipment that bore the slightest resemblance to types of apparatus we use today was depicted in a book written by Vegetius in A. D. 375. Vegetius drew a picture of a diving hood that was connected by a long tube to a float on the surface.

Leonardo da Vinci sketched similar crude diving outfits, and so did other ancients, but their efforts showed a lack of understanding of how quickly and how great water pressure increases with depths. Their ideas were less than practical.

The undersea diver of the early 1800’s was not much better equipped than his counterpart of the most ancient times. Diving bells of one type or another were tried; crude diving helmets, supplied with air from hand pumps or from bellows were tested. The adventuresome diver achieved depths of 60 feet with these devices, but not much deeper. Archeologists have determined that the primitive cave dweller descended to 80 and 100 feet and could remain submerged at these depths for as much as two minutes.

However, the development of the air compressor early in the 1800’s made way for the modern era of under-Sea diving. Man now had a way to reduce the volume of air he needed and to drive it to the ocean depths. In 1819, a naturalized Englishman named Augustus Siebe developed an underwater system that was to become the forerunner of our modern-day deep-sea diving outfit. By the Siebe method, air was supplied to the system’s metal helmet and exhaust air escaped under the diver’s jacket which was open at the waist. In 1837, Siebe modified his diving apparatus, developing a closed suit and a helmet-mounted exhaust system.

Courtesy of the U.S. Navy

The diving hood of Vegetius goes back to A.D. 375.

The principles first put into operation by Siebe are used in deep-sea diving outfits to this day. The heavy sphere-shaped helmet, the watertight rubber suit, the weighted belt, the leaden shoes have been popularized in scores of movies and in hundreds of novels.

The working principle of this traditional deep-sea outfit is easy to understand. The heavy belt and the shoes overcome the buoyancy of the suit and the helmet. A hose supplies air to the diver; it is equipped with a non-return valve that prevents air from escaping up the hose in the event the air pressure drops. The helmet is also equipped with an exhaust valve.

With the development of the closed suit diving system, man could now probe the ocean depths with greater ease than ever before. But the suit he found to be cumbersome and, in addition, his mobility was harnessed by his dependence on a surface supply of air. Other developments, designed to free him from this dependence, would soon follow.

The problem of achieving mobility underwater without being encumbered by an on-the-surface supply of air is one that man sought for centuries to solve. Giovanni Borelli (1609-1679), an Italian astronomer and mathematician, designed what has been cited as man’s first self-contained diving system. Though crude by present-day standards, it demonstrated man’s desire to equip himself with a portable supply of air to carry out his undersea explorations.

James’s self-contained system.

Borelli’s apparatus.

Borelli’s apparatus consisted of a large air bag that fitted over the diver’s head and which was equipped with a glass port for vision. Air circulated through a tube running outside the air bag and into a smaller bag where the moisture that had collected in the