Greetings all!  To kick off our diving history lessons, we are going to touch on pre-modern diving practices.

The earliest diving didn’t have much to do with SCUBA, in terms of an actual apparatus.  In fact, ancient history reveals that Greeks and Romans used breath holds while diving for jewelry, food, or during combat instances.  The anxiety of these early breath-hold divers spawned centuries of
exploration and experimentation into the act of actually breathing underwater.

Long before I saw a cartoon character perform this stunt, the Greek “father of History,” Herodotus, wrote a story of using a hollow plant stem as a snorkel.  Around 500 B.C. Herodotus wrote about a fellow named Scyllis who used a reed to hide beneath a Persian fleet.  Scyllis surfaced after dark and cut the moorings to each ship.  Herodotus wrote that Scyllis proceeded “to swim nine miles to rejoin the Greeks” at their location.  I have seen this story before, and it is the earliest recollection of diving-like behavior I’ve found.

An example of a diving bell

A few hundred years later, another famous Greek, Aristotle, was the first to mention the use of diving bells.   As far as I can tell, divers relied on this idea until the 16th century.  A bell was lowered a few feet beneath the surface.  A diver hunting for sponges, pearls, or anything else of value could return to take a break in the bell.  After catching his breath, the diver would continue to explore the bottom.  The simple idea of a diving bell was improved over the next few hundred years, including advancements by the great Leonardo da Vinci.

When the Middle Ages finally ended, the people of the world got a little brighter, and diving benefited from some great thinkers.  Rebreathing technology dawned in the 1600s by Cornelius Drebbel.  Air pumps and diving suits were developed and used in England and France.  It was a very exciting time.  Drebbel created what could be described as a submarine and figured a way to fight the buildup of carbon dioxide inside.  To re-oxygenate the air he used a pan to heat potassium nitrate.  The chemical reaction in the pan would actually absorb carbon dioxide from the air in the submarine.  If all this is true, Drebbel had the idea for a “rebreather” 250 years before Saint Simon Sicard officially patented the idea in 1849.

A diving helmet, technology to be discussed later...

Another great event also took place in the 17th century.  In 1662, Robert Boyle published the first of the many gas laws that now govern the practice of breathing underwater.  Boyle’s Law describes the relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas.  This information becomes essential as diving theory progresses and technology developes during the modern era.

With all that said, the modern area is where we will continue next month.  Surface supplied air, diving helmets, compressed air, and rebreathers all lay ahead in our journey toward the technology that we know today as SCUBA!

 

If you have anything to contribute, or want to highlight something I missed, please comment below.  I am writing as I piece together the history myself, and I would be thrilled to hear more from anyone who has prior research and knowledge.

 

Resources:

Various Wikipedia articles – Scuba Diving, Timeline of Diving Technology, Rebreather, and other links along the way

http://marinebio.org/oceans/scuba/index.asp

http://dg8fz.dyndns.org/~karl/dg8fz/rebreather/gallery.htm