Diving Before the Renaissance

Prolific pioneers such as Jacques Cousteau, Hans Hass, William Beebe and Otis Barton emerge when the history of scuba diving is called to question. Men whose passion drove them well beyond the limits of nature to find ways to stay in the ocean for longer the lungs allow. Fundamental plans for most of the equipment were inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci, without whom which many modern day inventions would have taken a much longer to route to discover.

Tracing the history of scuba diving before man's habit of recording historic documentation for future reference is harder than popping into the nearest cave for a pictogram. Sea Monsters and sharks, along with then-inexplicable forces of nature could only have kept man's curiosity at bay for so long. According to logs, we held out for quite a while, focusing on basic survival needs like fishing until early into the first century.

Proof of pre-historic fisherman emerged during a recent archeological discovery of ivory mammoth tusks fashioned into harpoon-like spear points found off the coast of Florida, proving the native Indians began to acquire a taste for sushi long before its 'modern' trend. The advanced Assyrians predictably led the pack with a strange container used for their underwater diving excursions as early as 900BC as shown in their early drawings. Logic dictates that the Egyptians, who were intelligent enough to build the pyramids, discovered the uses of hollow reeds for relatively shallow submersion. Reports of the Greeks and Romans doing the same have been logged.

The Persians, on the other hand, entered into a different arena tending toward fashion more than practicality, using appropriate covers such as shells and small tortoises for eye goggles.

Aside the Assyrians, official records trace us back to Aristotle who is said to have toyed with diving bells as early as the 4th century. His work Problemata refers to the siege of Tyre in 332 BC when Alexander the Great explored the depths in a diving bell reported by more than one academic source to be made entirely of glass. An article on the history of the diving bell by Arthur J. Bachrach, Ph.D. states: "Yet another story regarding Alexander's underwater adventures was published in 1886 in France. This book on Alexander reported that, at the age of 11, Alexander entered a glass case, reinforced by metal bands and had himself lowered into the sea by a chain over 600 feet long."

After Aristotle, a gap much like the one 'unaccounted for' in human evolution seems to have occurred in the diving world. Aside from a 'hollow metal vessel" used by Sir Francis Bacon to explore the depths, nothing notable happened until the middle of the last century.