Diving In The Middle Ages

In the 1500’s Leonardo Da Vinci toyed with many ideas that were way ahead of their time but he refused to go too deeply into them, proposing that humans would use them to the disadvantage of the planet - and one another. Humans harming each other and the planet, what could he have been referring to?

His Codex Atlanticus sketches show full kits with air tanks and scuba diving snorkels as well as air containers and, leaving no stone unturned, a urine collector. Guglielmo de Lorena is known to have dived two of Caligula’s sunken galleys with one of da Vinci’s diving bell designs in 1531.

The first official diving bell was ‘invented’ in 1535 with de Lorena’s construct that leaned on the shoulders with sling support and air for breathing. Galilei and Denis Papin later added an air pump that provided fresh air from land.

A large, bronze version of the bell created a stir in Toledo in 1583 when two men used it stay submerged in the Tagus River for 20 minutes to the amusement of Charles the fifth and an audience of 10,000. It was only in the late 1619’s that Sir Edmund Halley, when not watching the skies, worked on the same idea as Galilei and Papin of taking a diving bell supplied from the surface with air to its next level. He expanded the size to accommodate more than one diver at a time and they managed to clock 90 minutes. The only downside was an inexplicable ear pain which was left unaccounted for until the physics of air pressure was later revealed.

Around the late 1700’s inventors such as British engineer John Smeaton, facilitated a ingenious device of connecting a manually-operated pump to the barrel which was used by the diver to access compressed air. A year later, in 1772, Frenchman Sieur Freminet tried a system known as re-breathing. Unfortunately due to an overdose of his own carbon dioxide, Sieur ‘crossed over to the other side’ in his own failed invention.

In 1825 a certain William James succeeded in extending a dive to seven minutes by feeding a copper wire into a cylindrical helmet. Toward the end of the 18th century his fellow countryman, Englishman Henry Fleuss improved on Freminet’s re-breather but died due to an experiential 30ft deep dive with pure oxygen - which becomes poisonous under pressure.

With most of the barriers broken it was just a matter of time before the likes of Cousteau came on the scene assisting the tipping point of SCUBA’s evolution.