Diving before the Aqua-Lung.

Diving bells

One early design on record is Edmond Halley's diving bell. The Royal Society holds a pen sketch of it dated 30 September 1691 (archive reference MS/247, f97), and records that the design was reported at Society meetings in late September and October that year. A similar sketch survives in the rough minutes of those meetings. The Society's own catalogue entry is unclear about who drew it: its description credits David Gregory, while the same record's creator field says "Unknown".

Wikipedia adds John Lethbridge's 1715 underwater "machine", in effect an atmospheric bell worked from the surface, and lists early self-contained attempts: Sieur Freminet's 1771 dress with a compressed-air reservoir, Sieur Touboulic's 1808 oxygen rebreather patent (no prototype known), equipment by Paul Lemaire d'Augerville and William H. James in 1824 to 1825, and Charles Condert's 1831 apparatus tested in the East River.

The Deane brothers and Augustus Siebe

The copper diving helmet began as a firefighting tool. The Whitstable Museum says Charles Deane patented a smoke helmet in 1823 for rescuing people from burning buildings. The Science Museum Group describes Deane as a former merchant seaman whose copper helmet was fed with air through a leather hose from a pump, for fighting fires on land and at sea. It holds a copper helmet made by Augustus Siebe between 1820 and 1829 (object 2019-100), catalogued as probably a smoke helmet used by the Deane brothers of Deptford, and calls it the only known surviving example of its type.

The move from fire helmet to diving helmet is dated slightly differently by each source. Grace's Guide says Charles Deane commissioned Siebe to make smoke helmets in 1827 and that the design was then adapted for diving with his younger brother, John Deane. The Whitstable Museum says the brothers converted it for diving around 1827 and dates their work on the helmet to 1825 to 1830. The Science Museum notes that the Deanes' early suit was an open one that had to be worn upright, working like a diving bell, or it would flood.

The Whitstable Museum says that by 1829 the Deanes, working with Whitstable salvage crews, had raised copper from the wreck of the Carn Brea Castle off the Isle of Wight.

Siebe's closed dress

Grace's Guide gives Siebe's birth as about 1788 and his death as 15 April 1872 at his home in Denmark Street, London. It says he was born in Prussia, while an 1873 obituary it quotes says Saxony. The date of his closed helmet, sealed to the dress, is also disputed:

• Grace's Guide says Siebe and the Deanes produced a full kit with a copper helmet fixed to a corselet in 1830, with George Edwards suggesting the sealing flange.
• The 1873 obituary quoted by Grace's Guide credits Siebe with a closed helmet sealed to a rubber dress in 1837.

Grace's Guide says Siebe supplied diving dress in 1840 to Colonel Pasley of the Royal Engineers, who was clearing the wreck of HMS Royal George at Portsmouth, and that by then the outfit was known as "Siebe's patent diving dress" even though Siebe held no patent on it. After Siebe retired in 1868 the firm passed to his family and later became Siebe, Gorman and Co.

The Mary Rose

The Mary Rose Trust says that in June 1836, while John Deane was working on the Royal George (sunk in 1782), fishermen asked him to free nets that had snagged on the seabed. On diving, he found the snag was timbers of the Mary Rose. Between 1836 and 1840 Deane recovered an 11-foot brass gun with a Latin inscription dated 1532, then more guns, shot, timber and part of a mast; the finds were auctioned in Portsmouth on 12 November 1840. Who dived the wreck first is not settled. Another Mary Rose Trust page, which we saw only as a search summary and could not open, says Gosport diver Henry Abbinett was also hired to investigate and that both men applied for salvage rights, which went to Deane. We could not confirm that account.

Rouquayrol and Denayrouze: air on demand

Equipment that supplied air on demand, rather than as a constant flow, appears in France in the 1860s. Blutime Scuba History, a site devoted to the history of diving equipment, says Benoit Rouquayrol patented a self-breathing apparatus in April 1860; a search summary of Wikipedia's article on him gives the date as 14 April 1860. Blutime says he filed a mask with nose clip and mouthpiece, called the "Isolator", in January 1862, and patented a surface pump in 1863.

Blutime says the French Navy tested the system successfully in 1864 and asked naval officer Auguste Denayrouze to develop it, after which the two men patented versions with a surface-fed intermediate tank and with an autonomous high-pressure tank. Wikipedia calls their 1864 apparatus the first diving suit to supply air on demand, while noting that it still needed surface supply for any useful endurance. A search summary of Wikipedia's Denayrouze article says mass production began after the French Navy Minister ordered the first units on 28 August 1865. Blutime says the system won a gold medal at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition and inspired the diving gear of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Henry Fleuss and the first rebreathers

The sources disagree on when Henry Fleuss's oxygen rebreather was created. The History of Diving Museum says he built what it calls the first functional rebreather in 1876 and was granted a patent in 1878. Grace's Guide and Wikipedia put both the patent and the first practical apparatus at 1878, and Grace's Guide says Fleuss produced the first practicable self-contained oxygen apparatus with Siebe and Gorman around 1880.

Grace's Guide says Fleuss tested the device in 1879 with an hour in a water tank and then an open-water dive to about 5.5 m. The History of Diving Museum says that in November 1880 Siebe Gorman diver Alexander Lambert used the Fleuss rebreather to close a floodgate in a flooded tunnel under the River Severn, walking about 1,020 feet in.

Wikipedia says Robert Davis of Siebe Gorman introduced the Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus in 1910, the first rebreather made in quantity, which the Royal Navy adopted in 1927, and that Drager tested an injector-driven rebreather in 1911.

Japan: the Ohgushi Peerless Respirator

An article by Oliver Jarvis on UW360 (28 January 2016) says Tokyo pearl merchant Watanabe Riichi worked with blacksmith or machinist Ohgushi Kanezo, and later with Captain Kataoka Kyuhachi, on a breathing device, and that the first Ohgushi Peerless Respirator was patented in Japan in 1918. The article says a Japanese Navy demonstration at Yokosuka Harbour reached 60 metres, without giving a year. Its headline asks whether this was "the first ever regulator?" as a question rather than a claim.

Wikipedia describes the device as combining rebreather-style technology with a reserve of compressed air, delivered through a valve the diver controlled by hand. The machinist's name varies: most sources use Ohgushi Kanezo, while Wikipedia says recent Japanese sources call him Iwao Ogushi. The International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame lists Watanabe, Ohgushi and Kataoka as joint members; we could not open its profile page to confirm the year they were inducted.

Yves Le Prieur and Maurice Fernez

Yves Le Prieur, born in Lorient on 23 March 1885 and a 1902 entrant to the French naval school, first saw Maurice Fernez's surface-supplied breathing device at an industrial exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1925, according to the Blutime biography. (Blutime gives his death as 2 June 1963 in Nice; Wikipedia says 1 June.) Le Prieur replaced the surface air line with a portable compressed-air cylinder, a Michelin bottle of the kind used to inflate tyres, fitted with a regulator. The "Fernez-Le Prieur" apparatus was presented at the Tourelles swimming pool in Paris on 6 August 1926, according to both Blutime and Wikipedia.

How to describe that apparatus depends on the source:

• PADI's blog (an article originally by Bridget Pearson for Diviac, updated 24 April 2023) credits Le Prieur with the first S.C.U.B.A. device, in 1926.
• Wikipedia calls it the first open-circuit scuba, but notes that the diver adjusted a constant flow by hand and that endurance was low, unlike the 1864 demand regulator.
• Some secondary articles credit Le Prieur alone, while Wikipedia and Blutime describe a joint Fernez-Le Prieur effort, with Fernez later leaving its development to Le Prieur.

Blutime says Le Prieur patented his "autonomous gear" in 1933, and Wikipedia says he moved from a mouthpiece to a full-face mask from that year. In 1935 he and film director Jean Painleve founded a diving club in Paris, which Blutime calls the first diving school, with Le Prieur as its first instructor. Its name is given two ways: Blutime calls it the Club des Sous l'Eau, while a 2016 Daily Mail piece, seen only in a search summary, calls it the Club des Scaphandres et de la Vie Sous l'Eau.

The step that followed, a fully automatic demand regulator on a cylinder the diver carried, is the story of the Aqua-Lung. In the United States, military rebreather work was going on at the same time, told on Lambertsen and the word SCUBA.