Jacques Cousteau and the Invention of Modern Scuba Diving

Additional Mini Stories, a Timeline, and Biography of Cousteau’s Early Life

Cousteau’s Early Life

1910: Cousteau was born in the small village of Saint-André-de-Cubzac. His father was a lawyer who became the personal assistant to two wealthy Americans.

1914: Cousteau learned to swim when he was four years old. He was small, skinny, anemic, and seemed to catch every illness.

1920: Cousteau’s family took an 8-day trip across the ocean on a steamliner to reach America. Cousteau and his brother were sent to Camp Connebuck, a summer camp on Lake Harvey, Vermont. When Cousteau was thrown from his horse, he refused to ride again. The counselor punished Cousteau by making him clean up the sticks underneath the swimming platform. Holding his breath and swimming in the cold, brown water past the tendrils of the lilies, was his favorite part of the day. It was the beginning of his fascination with swimming underwater.

1923: When he was 13 years old, Cousteau bought his first camera, a Pathé Baby camera. One of the first things he did was take apart the camera to see how it worked. He learned to develop the film himself using chemicals from his grandfather’s pharmacy. The camera gave him confidence and helped him make friends.

1926: He didn’t pay much attention in school and made poor grades. After throwing rocks and breaking 17 windows at school, he was sent to a strict boarding school.

1929: Cousteau graduated from boarding school with honors and was a champion swimmer.

1930: Cousteau enrolled in the prestigious French Naval Academy. He wanted to become a pilot and travel the world. He studied with a flashlight in bed and graduated second in his class.

1932: Cousteau went on his first training tour and encountered the pearl divers of the Philippines. He took videos everywhere of everything.

1933 – 1935: On his second tour of duty he toured China and southeast Asia. When he was in Vietnam in 1933 he was on a boat in the Bay of Cam Rahn. His guide rowing the boat stopped in the middle of the bay, stripped naked, and slipped below the surface of the water without a splash. The guide surfaced a minute later with a fish in each hand and gleefully informed Cousteau that this fish usually takes a nap at noon. This moment stuck with Cousteau for the rest of his life.

1936: He entered flight school and passed all of his courses. On the way to a friend’s wedding, he crashed his dad’s Salmson S4-C roadster.

Cousteau Dives Underwater

1936: Cousteau was assigned to Toulon as an artillery instructor. He met Philippe Tailliez, Frederic Dumas (Didi) and they became the three musketeers. Tailliez encouraged Cousteau to swim for physical therapy. Cousteau borrowed Tailliez’s goggles and was able to see underwater for the first time.

1937: Cousteau married Simone Melchior. She was fluent in Japanese, loved to travel, and her father was a Navy admiral. When he retired from the Navy, he became director of Air Liquide, a company that specialized in making industrial gases. Cousteau put his 8mm camera in a gallon-sized, glass fruit jar and made his first underwater recordings, and developed the film in his bathroom.

1938: Cousteau and Léon Vêche invented a rebreathing system using compressed oxygen that almost killed Cousteau… twice.

1939: The German army invaded Poland, starting WWII.

1940: Italy joined Germany and bombed Toulon.

1941: The three musketeers reunited in Sanary-sur-Mer, and they began testing diving equipment. Cousteau’s brother worked for a pro-German newspaper and helped Cousteau get credentials, an “order”, as a marine biologist. The order and living in Vichy-controlled Southern France gave Cousteau more freedom than most people in other areas of occupied Europe.

1942 (Spring): Cousteau bought a Kinamo movie camera from a thrift store. Vêche built lenses and a custom underwater housing for the camera. Cousteau placed underwater bombs on all the French ships that the French Navy eventually detonated to prevent the fleet from falling into the hands of the invading German army.

1942 (Summer): Cousteau made his first feature-length underwater film, 18 Meters Deep. It was recorded using scavenged camera film and recorded over six months. It was made entirely by freediving.

1942 (October): Cousteau premiered the movie, 18 Meters Deep, in Paris.

Cousteau’s Role in the French Resistance

1942 (November): The German Army invaded France. Instead of fleeing, Cousteau stayed behind to work for the French Resistance as a spy.

He stole a German uniform and walked into the German office, and filmed the maps of the German and Italian gun placements and ammunition dumps in Toulon.

His most elaborate clandestine mission sounds like it was straight out of a movie. These events were described in the book, The Human, The Orchid, and The Octopus. Somehow, Cousteau intercepted an important German wire communication. He needed the cipher to decode the message. Cousteau convinced a sympathetic French cleaning lady to sketch a blueprint of the Italian headquarters and the location of the safe. Then he recruited a team. His first recruit was a french gangster that spoke perfect Italian that would impersonate an Italian officer. Next, the mistress of the gangster picked the pocked of the real Italian captain and made a wax impression of the office key. Cousteau somehow found a locksmith that worked at the safe company who could make a copy of the key and also crack the safe. After weeks of planning and his team in place, he forged the plates and stickers of a black car to impersonate a military vehicle.

On the morning of the heist, the gangster said that he was too afraid to go through with the mission. There was only one option. Cousteau had to impersonate the Italian officer. The only problem was that Cousteau didn’t speak any Italian. He dressed in a fancy grey suite and hoped their confidence would be enough.

They pulled into headquarters and stepped wordlessly from the car to the door. He hesitated for a second before inserting the borrowed key from the maid into the door. It worked. They confidently walked past the guards and tried the forged key in the office door. It worked. For the next 45 terrifying minutes, the locksmith tried to crack the combination lock. Finally, everything clicked. They photographed the codebook and the cipher key in the safe. Meanwhile, the gangster and the mistress distracted the Italian captain from the office with a few drinks. When the captain got bored and wanted to leave, the gangster had to fake appendicitis and make the captain take him to a hospital to give the team more time. Mission complete.

Cousteau and Gagnan Test The Aqua Lung

1942 (December): In late December, he and Simone traveled to Paris. They met Émile Gagnan, an engineer at Air Liquide. Gagnan had designed a regulator to convert cooking gas into fuel for cars during the war. In a couple of weeks, Cousteau worked with Gagnan to reconfigure the regulator for use with his diving equipment.

1943 (January): Cousteau went on the first test dive in the Marne River near Paris.

1943 (June): First ocean test of the Aqua Lung.