by Brad Matsen
Gagnan could not swim, so he didn’t test the system himself, but on the drive back to Paris, he relived the first dive of the self-contained breathing apparatus as Cousteau described it in detail. Gagnan rode in silence for a few minutes, envisioning a diver with his head up, and the mouthpiece above the level of the regulator. With the diver’s head down, the mouthpiece would be below the level of the regulator. The problem must have had something to do with the difference in water pressure in different positions. Then, as though a light had clicked on, Gagnan had the answer. If a diver could inhale easily and the air did not free-flow when he was horizontal, all they had to do was relocate the exhaust port from the mouthpiece to the same level as the diaphragm, which would mean that the pressure on each would always be equal. It didn’t matter if the diver was horizontal or not; it mattered only that the regulator and the exhaust valve were in the same plane. In Gagnan’s workshop, he and Cousteau substituted a mouthpiece venting into a second hose running to an exhaust valve mounted inside a metal shield on top of the regulator. Gagnan considered the two-hose solution to be less than elegant, but it worked.
A week after the test dive in the Marne River, Cousteau’s furlough ended. He had no choice but to return to Toulon with Simone and their sons. Cousteau, Gagnan, and Air Liquide knew that the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus was a breakthrough with enormous commercial potential, especially in sales to the navy. Scientists, too, might buy the equipment, which could revolutionize underwater research. Beyond that, the two inventors of scuba saw only limited applications for amateurs. Military and scientific sales would certainly be enough to justify an investment in production lines and a distribution network, so they began the yearlong process of filing for patents immediately. The apparatus they described in their application included the entire assembly of tanks, harness, regulator, double hoses, exhaust port, mouthpiece, and the reserve air valve. They called it Scaphandre Autonome, or Aqua-Lung. Gagnan promised Cousteau that he would ship him a working prototype by late May or early June.
Back on the Mediterranean, the Cousteaus decided to live communally with Dumas; Tailliez; Tailliez’s wife and newborn child; Claude Houlbreque, a former sailor on Dupleix who had been a cinematographer in civilian life; and Holbreque’s wife. Together, they rented Villa Barry, a sprawling turn-of-the-century home with a vegetable patch and a garden of pines, in the seaside village of Bandol, two miles from Sanary-sur-Mer. Wartime shortages and the other hardships of the occupation were growing steadily worse on the Riviera, but sharing food-gathering chores, meals, and companionship at Villa Barry made life a little more bearable. Cousteau and Tailliez had orders to report for muster in the morning at the navy base and to keep their eyes open for unusual activity among the occupation troops. Otherwise, their days were their own.
In early June 1943, Gagnan charged the three tanks of the improved Aqua-Lung with compressed air, crated it up, and put it on a southbound freight train as part of an Air Liquide shipment. The crate, marked as scientific equipment, arrived in Toulon ten days later and was transferred to a local train for the brief trip to Bandol. When a messenger brought the word of its arrival to Villa Barry late on a warm afternoon, Cousteau drove to the station alone to avoid attention from the Italian troops in the rail yard. He was back home at dusk, and unloaded the crate into the workroom at the back of the villa. After a dinner of beans, bread, butter, and agonizing anticipation, the household gathered to look at the invention that Cousteau had told them was the stuff of wild dreams.
For weeks, they had talked about it whenever the topic of conversation turned to diving. Cousteau had explained the simple mechanism of the regulator, the strength of the new steel tanks that allowed the air inside to be compressed to many atmospheres, and the intricacies of the intake and exhaust valves that would allow a diver to breathe easily in any attitude underwater. Together, they speculated that hunting fish and lobsters was going to be as easy as plucking vegetables from a stall table in the market. Most of all, Cousteau insisted, the Aqua-Lung meant the end of experiments with dangerous gases and holding their breath to shoot film underwater.
Early the following morning, before the sunbathers were out, the household trooped in pairs through the pine garden to a quiet inlet with a gently sloping beach out of sight of the sentries in the city center. Dumas carried the Aqua-Lung, but when they reached the water, he helped Cousteau into its harness and followed his instructions for double-checking that the air was turned on, the tanks were secure, and the two hoses were firmly attached to the regulator. As the best free diver in France, Dumas would stay on shore to be ready if something went wrong. Simone, in mask, fins, and snorkel, would swim out to watch over her husband from above and signal to Dumas if he got into trouble. Cousteau spat into his mask and rinsed it in the sea, a trick Les Mousquemers had learned for keeping it clear of mist. He fitted the mask tightly to his face, covering his nose and eyes to his brow, clamped the mouthpiece between his teeth, looked around for a moment at his friends, and waddled into the water. When Cousteau was chest deep he stopped and lay facedown to gauge his buoyancy with the tanks of air on his back. He and Gagnan had designed the Aqua-Lung to be slightly buoyant in seawater because adding weight was simple and subtracting it was impossible. Dumas waded out and cinched a belt around Cousteau with 5 pounds of lead, but it wasn’t enough. He added two pounds more, stepped back, and watched his friend sink slowly into the crystal clear water.
Cousteau breathed effortlessly, delighted by the distinctive whistle of air when he inhaled, the rippling of the bubbles over his head when he exhaled, and the snap of the regulator as it released each breath. He let his arms stream along his sides, fluttered his legs, and glided slowly over the sloping sand. The light danced down from the surface and flashed off the bottom until it gave way to a canyon full of dark green sea grass. Cousteau coasted to a stop. He exhaled until his lungs were nearly empty to find out what that did to his buoyancy. As expected, he sank slowly until he inhaled and began to rise toward the surface. Taking a single breath from his tanks turned him from a negatively buoyant object into a positive one. His lungs, he realized, were a sensitive ballast system. He steadied himself with his arms and swam smoothly down to about 30 feet. Cousteau felt a squeeze in his ears and sinuses, but no other effects of the pressure and no change that he could sense in the flow of air. The regulator was operating efficiently at 2 atmospheres of pressure.
Cousteau smiled into his mouthpiece as he reached the bottom of the little canyon, greeted by a flashing school of bream, round and flat as saucers. He hung on to one of the rough, limestone walls and did a quick check of his equipment, patting his harness and weight belt, shrugging his shoulders to be sure the tanks were riding well, and adjusting his mouthpiece. Cousteau looked up at the surface, which was shining like a rippled mirror. Directly above him, Simone was a small, silhouetted doll against the dazzling sheet of light. The doll waved at him. He waved back.
Cousteau held on to his rocky anchor and studied his bubbles on their way to the surface. They swelled and flattened into mushroom shapes identical to jellyfish as they rose through the water. Since the bubbles flowed from the regulator behind his head, the water in front of him was clear, which gave him a moment of elation as he thought about diving with his camera.
“I thought of the helmet diver arriving where I was on his ponderous boots and struggling to walk a few yards, obsessed with his umbilici and his head imprisoned in copper,” Cousteau remembered about that moment. “On skin dives I had seen a helmet diver leaning dangerously forward to make a step, clamped in heavier pressure at the ankles than the head, a cripple in an alien land. From that day forward, we would swim across miles of country no man had known, free and level, with our flesh feeling what the fish scales know.”
He looked again at the bream nosing curiously around him. They always return to the horizontal from a burst up or down, Cousteau concluded, because the horizontal must be the ideal attitude for moving in a mediu
m eight hundred times more dense than air. Any other attitude required an expenditure of energy. Cousteau kicked and rolled through several revolutions on an axis from his head to his feet, turned a somersault, and did a barrel roll he remembered from flight school. He exhaled, sank headfirst to the bottom, balanced upside down on one finger, and laughed so hard he lost his mouthpiece. Taking a breath was slightly more difficult with his head straight down than in any other attitude, and Cousteau made a mental note to report that to Gagnan. He flipped upright, kicked hard, and soared upward through his own bubbles until he was just 10 feet below the surface. He swam out into deeper water and dove to 60 feet. Nothing he did changed the steady whistle, gurgle, and snap of his breathing. The regulator worked perfectly with his body in any attitude.
Three full tanks of air gave him sixty minutes at 60 feet. Cousteau had used up fifteen minutes. Despite the chill of the deeper water he was going to stay as long as he could. He swam over familiar limestone chasms that narrowed and turned into tunnels that had terrified him as a free diver afraid of being trapped inside with no air. Now he coasted fearlessly into one of them. The brilliant light from the surface dimmed as though it were being peeled away in layers, his tanks scraped against the rocks above him, and he felt the first twinge of claustrophobia. Cousteau’s instinct for self-preservation overcame his passion to explore. He’d done enough on his first test dive. Before heading for the surface he rolled on his back to take a look at the roof of the tunnel, and saw that it was alive with lobsters. Hundreds of them were backed into niches in the limestone, their eyes glowing like fireflies in the dim light, their antennae flailing as they tried to get a fix on the giant intruder. Cousteau thought about his family and friends in ill-fed France, grabbed a pair of lobsters, backed out of the tunnel, and kicked for the surface. Simone saw him rising, swam down to him, and took their catch the rest of the way to the beach. He made five more trips into the lobster bonanza, Simone shuttled their catch to shore, and Jacques Cousteau became the first meat diver with the enormous advantage of being able to breathe underwater and swim like a fish.
A little over a month later, on July 30, Georges Commeinhes dove to 160 feet off Marseille with his firefighting apparatus modified for use underwater. Cousteau heard about the dive, but he didn’t know whether Commeinhes had been able to solve the problems with the regulator that allowed him to swim free in any attitude with the Aqua-Lung.
6
SHIPWRECKS
DURING THE TWO WEEKS after Cousteau made his first dive, everyone at Villa Barry took a turn with the Aqua-Lung. Simone became the first woman scuba diver, and though the tanks were too heavy for the children to lift safely, they practiced breathing with their heads underwater in the shallows. The Aqua-Lung continued to work perfectly, though the fear kindled by memories of sudden catastrophes with the Fernez pipe and rebreathers lingered. Each uneventful dive added to the suspicion that such astonishing freedom beneath the sea had to come at a higher price. Tailliez requisitioned a compressor from the navy base and with an unlimited supply of air they were making several dives a day. The divers reported on the ease of stalking prey, the delivery of air by the regulator at any attitude, and the utter bliss of swimming free underwater. After Tailliez’s first dive, he led the household in a toast to escaping the world of the land and the abolition of gravity, after which everyone dug into heaping platters of fish and lobster.
“We were living in the middle of a war on pure fantasy and lots of beans,” Tailliez wrote later. “When we got the Aqua-Lung, it was a miracle. We experienced in three-dimensional space the intoxication of diving without a cable. Back on shore, we danced for joy.”
“Tailliez, Dumas, and I had come a long way together,” Cousteau remembered about that time. “We had been eight years in the sea as goggle divers. Our new key to the hidden world promised wonders.”
At the end of June, Cousteau sent word to Gagnan that their invention was working better than his wildest expectations. He asked him to file separate patents on the exhaust port and the air reserve valve immediately, and to send more Aqua-Lungs as soon as possible. With one Aqua-Lung, he could put meat on the table. But the Kinamo underwater camera was in good shape, and he and Simone had stockpiled spliced reels of 35 mm film. Cousteau needed more than one scuba diver to make the movie he had been dreaming about for most of his life.
The poster for Cousteau’s first underwater film (© LAPI/ROGER-VIOLLET)
While they waited for Gagnan to ship them another Aqua-Lung, Cousteau and the other divers of Villa Barry concentrated on putting food on the table. “Tailliez went to the country and returned with five hundred pounds of dried beans, which we stored in the coal bin and ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with an occasional maggot to break the monotony,” Cousteau wrote later. He and the others cautiously stalked fish to supplement their tedious diet, being careful to avoid expending too much energy underwater.
Two more Aqua-Lungs finally arrived at the end of July. The timing was just right. In midsummer the Mediterranean was as warm as a bath, and the occupation troops had fallen into languor because nothing of consequence was being contested on the sultry southern coast of France. Cousteau continued his observations for the resistance, and started making occasional trips around Marseille, which he never explained to the rest of the household. On a visit in late July to gather information on mines and debris in the harbor, he came across a map on which the wreck of a British ship was pinpointed off Planier Island lighthouse.
The 5,000-ton steamer Dalton had left Marseille on a winter night in 1928 with a cargo of 1,500 tons of lead, sailed straight into the island, and piled up on the rocks. Lighthouse keepers rescued all hands—every one one of them drunk—and together they stood on the shore and watched Dalton’s stern settle into the sea, leaving the bow just below the surface to mark her tomb. She lay in clear water on a sloping bottom, unlike most sunken ships, which reposed in the murky, hard-used shallows of harbors, on surf-torn coasts, or in the unreachable darkness of the abyss. Dalton was perfect for filming a shipwreck.
Cousteau carried the identification card PAC had somehow procured that certified him as a marine biologist. “When I showed my ordre de mission, even the most brutal-looking Hitlerite was impressed,” Cousteau remembered. “The word kulture (which was on the card) had a magic effect on them and we could work without much bother.”
PAC’s magic documents provided plenty of cover for the expedition to Planier Island with Tailliez, Dumas, cinematographer Claude Houlbreque, and Roger Gary, a friend from Marseille who knew the local waters. In early August, they took the weekly supply boat to the island with three Aqua-Lungs, nine spare tanks, the compressor, gasoline, spears, film, and the Kinamo. Leon Veche and Cousteau had modified the camera with a valve through which they could pressurize the housing from a tank of compressed air. Increasing the pressure to 10 atmospheres inside the housing exerted the same outward force as the inward force of water at a depth of 150 feet, as deep as they would go on any filming dive. Leaking seals were a plague of the past. Veche also built a new brace for the camera with a pair of pistol grips, one of which also held the shutter release. The Aqua-Lungs were identical to the prototype Cousteau used in the first test dives, with the same rectangular Bakelite regulators.
The lighthouse crew on Planier Island were frazzled from hunger and the anxiety of months of expecting an attack from the Germans or Italians. They welcomed the good-natured Frenchmen with their wild plan to dive beneath the sea to make a motion picture of their shipwreck. They were also delighted to share meals with their guests, who told them they would produce enough fish and lobsters to feed a bottomless pot of bouillabaisse.
For a free diver, swimming into a cave or the hull of a shipwreck was an invitation to disaster, but scuba divers with Aqua-Lungs could go anywhere. Still, when Cousteau, Dumas, and Tailliez swam into Dalton’s gaping hatch 50 feet beneath the surface, they looked down the dark tunnel of the hold and knew that their freedom could be dan
gerous. The ship had broken into two pieces. They swam at a gentle downward angle through the maw of torn steel at the fracture until they could see the stern lying on the bottom like half a ghost ship with its two masts still standing. They had no way to know their precise depth, but estimated that they were at 100 feet, about 30 feet above the tempting wreckage of the stern. They were breathing easily, but with hand signals and head shakes they held a mimes’ conversation in which they decided to surface instead of testing the limits of the Aqua-Lungs on that first dive.
Over their lunch of fish stew and bread, Cousteau, Tailliez, and Dumas reviewed their reconnaissance into Dalton. They were perfectly comfortable at 100 feet. The regulators clicked and gurgled with the same rhythm regardless of the depth. They felt fine after the dive, but they had talked to hard-hat salvage divers and knew that the pressure on the gases, fluids, and tissues in their bodies increased by one atmosphere for every 33 feet of depth. The risk of a painful or even fatal attack of the bends increased with every minute they spent at depths greater than 2 atmospheres.
That afternoon, they returned to the wreck with the camera. They wore enough weight so they began to sink as soon as they stopped kicking their fins. Cousteau hovered above to film Dumas and Tailliez as they descended along the wrinkled steel plates of the ship’s corroding flank. Looking as comfortable as a pair of giant groupers, the divers cruised through the aquamarine water with their trails of bubbles glistening like moonstones and popping and burbling toward the surface.
