5 facts about the history of scuba diving

Breathing underwater isn't a recent achievement. There is recorded use of diving bells in ancient Greece, as far back as the 4^th century BC; later on, the first dive hardsuits, dive dresses, and rebreathers appeared around 1700´s. These apparatus where crude and rather unsafe to use, and where mainly used in military and commercial diving.

In the 1930´s, an American journalist called Guy Gilpatric wrote "The Compleat goggler", considered the first sport diving manual – about snorkeling and spearfishing. It inspired and drawn Jacques Costeau into exploring the sea´s misteries.

Recreational diving was born when Jacques Costeau and Emile Gagnan ( a compressed gas engineer ) invented the scuba regulator in the 1940´s, knonwned as the aqua-lung. Sport diving was initialy restricted to a few intrempid adventurers, and it underwent a series of transformations until the 1980´s, when it became the sport as whe know it;

The development and further perfecting of dive tables was mainly driven by the military, and commercial diving ( like oil companies). With the later popularity of the sport, these tables where adopted by recreational divers. The first electronic dive computer, the Edge, appeared in 1983, by a company named Orca.

As sport diving became more popular ( thanks to the publications of Costeau, and later on through TV shows like Lloyd Bridges Sea Hunt ), it pushed on the developmend of scuba gear, and standartization of diver training through certification agencies. The sport boomed in the 1980´s, and it continued to grow and evolve, even today!

The Atlantic Diver