SCUBA Wars

Inventor Father Da Vinci’s comments on withholding certain brilliant information that may facilitate man’s ability to explore the oceans, turned out to be the start of a rather bleak prophecy. The advent of wars, alongside the evolution of diving, was a recipe for disaster as long as each side was wanting the ‘one up’ and there was new technology involved to achieve this.

The first such attempted attack by a military submarine called the Turtle was recorded in the New York harbor in 1776. The one-man pod was propelled in its desired direction with a hand pump and a screw propeller. The Turtle was the brainchild of David Bushnell, piloted by his intrepid brother Ezra. It was originally designed to plant a fuse keg by drilling into the ships hull – in this case the HMS Eagle.

Robert Fulton’s ‘Nautilus’, commissioned by Napoleon in 1800, emerged as the ‘first submarine’. Precisely a century later however, it was reported that Irish John P. Holland (Top Left Image) built ‘the first successful submarine’: Holland or A-1. The Holland was in actual fact the first US commissioned submarine, hence a likely source of confusion. Interestingly enough, the US army named their first nuclear powered sub the USS Nautilus in 1954. The sub completed the first trip to the North Pole and back four years later, followed by the twin reactor USS Triton’s underwater global circumnavigation in 1960.

In the Second World War the renaissance inventor’s fears continued to manifest as divers plant explosives under the enemy’s ships with a great deal more success than Ezra had with the Turtle in its time. With the advent of rebreathers it became popular for the warring nations to deploy frogmen as human torpedos.

The Le Priuer breathing set was adopted by the French Navy in 1935 and Italian spear fishers adopted rebreathers and the Italian Navy were quick to use them conjunction with manned torpedoes in their Decima Flottiglia MAS during World War II.

In 1937 Georges Commeinhes had just begun to have a grand time developing a demand regulator situated between two cylinders when the War interrupted him. Refusing to give up, he offered it to the French Navy two years later but they were still too distracted by the proceedings to follow up on where his development process had left off. Several years later however, Commeinhes succeeded in diving as deep as 53 meters of the coast of Marseille, his untimely death a year later, eclipsed by Cousteau’s aqualung invention.

In 1951, after American Christian J. Lambertsen designed the first rebreathing equipment to be called SCUBA 'Self-Contained Underwater Oxygen Breathing Apparatus', for the US army, the Navy began to develop wetsuits in secret, publishing dive tables and making their wetsuits available to the public only five years later. When the Cold War ended and the world turned to peace for a period around 1953, supplies for sport diving took to the market once again and rebreathers continued their evolution in the history of scuba diving.