History of diving
The history of diving began 6500 years ago. From the beginning of history, civilization has been closely tied to the water of rivers, lakes and, above all, seas. The waters have been the food source of many people since ancient times and served as transport routes. So it is not surprising that attempts were made a long time ago to explore the areas below the surface of the water.
History of diving
Early times and antiquity - the beginnings
Archaeological finds prove that as early as 4500 BC Chr. Freedivers in East Asia, India and the Arabian Sea for pearls, mother of pearl, sponges and corals appeared. In the Japanese prefecture of Mie , the so-called ama (“sea women”) dive for valuable and tasty awabi snails without snorkels or compressed air equipment and keep a tradition that goes back thousands of years. In Europe there were first signs of professional diving from around 2500 BC. BC Greek sponge divers harvested the animals in large quantities.
2000 years later, the Greek Scyllias dived for sunken ships to retrieve valuable cargo. According to the myth, he is said to have used an upside-down boiler as an air reservoir. If so, he would be the first scuba diver in history.
Around 450 BC At the time of the Persian Wars , first reports of Greek naval combat divers appear. You should approach the enemy ships unnoticed and drill into them. Over a hundred years later, Aristotle described the principle of the diving bell . He reported about Greek sponge divers who used this diving device. It is claimed that Alexander the Great made an attempt to dive in the novel construction in his youth. Like so many other achievements of antiquity, this invention was later forgotten.
Around 250 BC Archimedes discovered the laws of buoyancy, which are important for shipbuilding and diving . He recognized that the buoyancy of a body in a medium is just as great as the weight of the medium displaced by the body. Today this law is called the Archimedes' principle , and it is one of the most important physical principles that a diver must know, understand and, above all, control.
Around 60 AD, the Roman general, politician and scholar Pliny the Elder reported about combat divers. He was prefect of the Roman fleet, leaving the diver with snorkel equip.
There are isolated reports of the use of divers. For example, in 194, during a siege in one of the Roman civil wars that were frequent at that time, Eastern Roman combat divers are said to have conquered some Western Roman galleys.
Middle Ages - 1000 years of stagnation
In the Middle Ages , large parts of the knowledge of antiquity were lost in Europe. This included knowledge of the principle of the diving bell . There was no other innovation in diving technology in Europe either.
In Japan, torn by civil wars, the ninja warrior caste developed their own swimming techniques and also engaged in diving.
Modern times - science and technology on the advance
Renaissance - reconsideration and first new ideas
The end of the European Middle Ages was heralded by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the discovery of the new sea routes by the Portuguese and Spaniards. Important inventions such as modern book printing ushered in a new age of intellectual freedom and the urge to research scientifically. The old writings of antiquity were re-studied and much knowledge of the past was rediscovered.
Leonardo da Vinci , one of the most creative thinkers of the Renaissance , designed a pigskin diving suit with a leather cap and palm-sized glass lenses as a mask around 1500. For the air supply he planned a bellows with 2 hoses. The diving device was intended for military use against the dreaded Ottoman fleet. A replica from 2003 proved the basic functionality of the construction.
In 1521 the first circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan tried to plumb the depth on the high seas. He let off a 700 m long rope and found no reason. From this he concluded that the sea was infinitely deep.
In 1538 an open diving bell without air supply was demonstrated in Toledo, reinventing the 1,800-year-old principle.
17th and 18th centuries - the origins of modern diving technology
These centuries were shaped by fundamental discoveries in many areas of science and sustained social upheavals. In particular, geography, mathematics and physics reached a level of knowledge that has not yet been surpassed in many questions. The social upheavals were no less important for the development of diving. The Glorious Revolution in England brought about the development of modern industrial society. More radical revolutions followed later in France and the United States . The rapid economic development and the new knowledge of science made it possible to build machines and led to the so-called First Industrial Revolution , which was a fundamental requirement for diving with technical aids.
Around 1650 the Magdeburg all-rounder Otto von Guericke made decisive discoveries and inventions related to air, its weight and pressure. Among other things, he invented the barometer , the piston air pump and the air rifle . His sometimes spectacular and public experiments proved, on the one hand, that air has weight at all and showed the existence and enormous effect of air pressure, a physical quantity that was previously unknown. The laws of pressure are extremely important to diving and every diver needs to know and understand them. Guericke's barometer is a device for measuring air pressure and is used for weather forecasting. Every modern diving equipment includes 2 pressure gauges. The depth gauge measures the diving depth indirectly via the water pressure . The pressure gauge shows the current cylinder pressure - i.e. the amount of remaining breathing gases.
The English physicist Robert Boyle described the relationship between pressure and volume of a gas in 1662. In 1676, independently of him, his French colleague Edme Mariotte came to the same conclusion. The Boyle-Mariotte states that the product of pressure and volume of a fixed amount of fuel gas is constant. This means that a gas bubble loses volume with increasing pressure and expands with decreasing pressure. This physical connection is perhaps the most important theoretical knowledge for the development of diving. The most important problems of diving such as pressure equalization of the organic cavities or buoyancy control can only be understood and controlled if one observes the “Law of Boyle-Mariotte”.
In 1670 Robert Boyle discovered that gases dissolve in liquids under pressure and form bubbles when the pressure drops. This behavior is fundamental to the explanation of diving illness .
In the second half of the 17th century, the French physicist Guillaume Amontons discovered the relationship between pressure and temperature of a gas at a prescribed volume. In the literature this physical principle is called Gay-Lussac's Second Law ; it says that the pressure and temperature of a gas are directly proportional at constant volume. This means that when the temperature rises, the pressure rises and vice versa. This connection is very important for modern diving technology. In conclusion, this law means that falling pressures lead to cooling. A technically problematic challenge of the air supply of a scuba diver is the reduction of the extreme high pressure of the compressed air cylinder to a breathable pressure level. The escaping gas loses pressure and cools down, which can lead to freezing of valves and failure of the air supply.
In October 1691, Edmund Halley showed the public an air-powered diving bell. In addition to the bell, barrels filled with air were drained. If you opened this below the bell, the bell could be filled with fresh air. Divers who were connected to the bell with the help of breathing hoses could breathe the compressed air. Halley, after whom the well-known Halley's comet is named, stayed with this device for 1.5 hours at a depth of 15 m. Such bells were later fitted with vent valves so that used air could be vented before refilling.
Around 1715 the Briton John Lethbridge presented his "diving barrel" (diving engine) . It was a closed armored suit. The diver was in a wooden barrel with arms and legs protruding from it. The barrel was provided with leather seals so that only the limbs were exposed to the water pressure. Air was supplied via bellows with which the barrels were filled before the dive. Since the air supply in the barrel was very limited, the bottom times were correspondingly short. Replicas have proven that diving with the "diving barrel" was a very painful procedure because of the lack of pressure compensation and that the diving depth was limited to 20 m. Nevertheless, the dipping barrel proved itself in salvage work on sunken ships.
In 1777, the Swedish researcher Carl Wilhelm Scheele observed that bees survived longer in a closed container if you put a bowl of lime water in it. The principle of the absorption of carbon dioxide by lime used in rebreather devices was discovered.
In 1787, the French physicist Jacques Alexandre César Charles described the relationship between temperature and volume changes in a gas. 15 years later in 1802, the French physicist and chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac came to the same conclusion. As so often, the school books did the original discoverer injustice. The connection discovered is commonly referred to in the literature as Gay-Lussac's First Law . The law of physics states that temperature and volume are directly proportional to a fixed amount of gas. This means that the volume increases as the temperature rises.
In the second half of the 18th century, mechanical engineering in Great Britain had developed so far that more powerful and mobile compressors could be built. The constantly generated compressed air was used to continuously supply diving bells with fresh air. In 1788 the British hydraulic engineer John Smeaton designed the first diving bell supplied with compressor air.
The compressor also allowed another form of movement underwater that is very similar to modern diving. The diving bells were made so small that they only covered the head. The helmet diving device was created . The air in the helmet always had the ambient pressure of the water with the corresponding power of the compressor. Excess air leaked from the helmet below. However, such divers could only move upright because when the helmet was lying on the side or even with the head the air escaped completely from the helmet and the helmet was full of water. Another danger was the so-called blue coming . If the air supply failed, the diver was pressed into the helmet, resulting in serious injuries.
The first working helmet diving apparatus was presented by Karl Heinrich Klingert from Wroclaw in 1797. He proved that the device can be used in principle by sawing a tree trunk in the Oder at a depth of 6 m.
19th Century - The real dangers of the deep are discovered
In this century the “First Industrial Revolution” reached previously unknown dimensions. The theoretical knowledge gained since the Renaissance was used for practical applications. There were fundamental inventions in all areas of life almost every year. Industrial mass production made it possible for the new products to spread quickly and not end up as rare individual pieces or pure designs, as Leonardo da Vinci's designs once did. Of course, the new inventions and techniques also benefited the development of diving, through cross-fertilization. On the one hand, modern technologies such as new methods of metallurgy or metalworking allowed advances in the field of immersion technology, such as compressed air cylinders , on the other hand, for example, new construction methods required diving construction workers. The professional and frequent use of divers, in turn, led to new insights into diving itself. But science also made unimagined progress. The researchers used the modern technical devices to recognize previously invisible relationships with new measurement methods. Chemistry, medicine and biology in particular benefited from this development.
At the beginning of the century, the advancement of helmet diving technology continued. The captain Peter Kreeft , who comes from the small Baltic Sea town of Barth , demonstrated a working helmet diving suit in the Baltic Sea in 1800. From 1819 the Saxon Augustus Siebe , who lived in England, developed the open helmet diving suit further and in 1838 presented the closed helmet diving suit. The helmet was now connected to the suit in a watertight manner, so that it could no longer fill with water. The design developed by Siebe was built for decades in large numbers and in different countries and was in use well into the 20th century.
The most important development was when the French Rouquayrol and Denayrouze equipped diving equipment with compressed air tanks in 1865 . These were used for safety in the event of a failure of the external air supply. With Siebe's invention, diving technology reached a new level. Scuba diving was no longer a rare individual achievement for a few pioneers. Professional divers began working underwater on a regular basis. The more and more frequent dives led to more and more practical experience, which resulted in rules that are still valid today. For example, as early as the 1830s, it was prescribed that two divers always have to work together and are responsible for each other.
From 1840 onwards, caissons (French: box ) were used frequently . This further development of the diving bell is still used today for the construction of buildings. A pressure-resistant box was brought over the bottom of the future foundation, lowered and then the water was pressed out with compressed air. After that, workers could dig the foundation in the caisson at the bottom of the water and then erect the building. This was the method used to build the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Since this technique was successful, many bridges with caissons were and are being built worldwide.
Countless workers had to work under high pressure. The physiological problems of pressure were not known due to a lack of practical experience. A great many construction workers and helmet divers fell ill after the ascent of a previously unknown disease. Thousands died. Divers and caisson workers did not have a long life expectancy. The puzzling and often fatal phenomenon was known as “Maladie de caisson”, “chest disease”, “diving disease” and later as “compressed air paralysis”.
The disease is now known as decompression sickness . At normal atmospheric pressure, nitrogen can only be dissolved to a small extent in the human body. But at higher pressures, more nitrogen from the air you breathe builds up in the diver's blood and tissues. If the pressure drops quickly, it will pearl out again like carbon dioxide from an opened soda bottle. The tiny gas bubbles cause enormous damage to the diver's body. In 1857 the German physiologist Felix Hoppe-Seyler published his theory of gas bubble embolism. In 1869, Leroy de Mericourt followed this with a medical treatise. Mericourt recognized the connection between diving depth, diving time and the speed of the ascent, but was not able to define manageable instructions in practice. This important step was only achieved in 1878, when the French physiologist Paul Bert defined the first rules for decompression. Bert's rules were the basis for diving work for 30 years. Bert also recognized another previously unknown relationship, which is referred to in the literature as the Paul Bert effect . He was the first to describe the toxic effects of pure oxygen under pressure conditions.
Another significant technical development of the 19th century was the invention of photography by Nièpce and Daguerre . As early as 1856, the Briton William Thompson exposed the first detectable underwater photographs .
In 1873, the Dutch physicist Johannes Diderik van der Waals defined a description of the relationships between pressure, temperature and volume of real gases, which is called the Van der Waals equation . This ended the phase of fundamental physical discoveries that are important for diving.
20th century - modern
The 20th century was marked by developments in all areas of science and technology. The industrial mass production revolutionized by the assembly line allowed the inexpensive manufacture of many products. New materials soon penetrated all areas of life. The plastics were the prerequisite for swimming fins , modern diving masks and modern diving suits . The falling prices and the growing knowledge about diving medicine enabled more and more people to pursue diving for pure pleasure from the second half of the century. But the century was also an age of barbaric and industrial world wars and a global arms race. New weapons such as submarines were developed, which also resulted in new developments in diving.
At the beginning of the new century, the British physiologist John Scott Haldane did research in the field of breathing. He realized that the breathing reflex depends exclusively on the partial pressure of the carbon dioxide in the air we breathe . On behalf of the Royal Navy, he scientifically researched the laws of decompression sickness and used goats as laboratory animals. He found that lean goats were less susceptible than fat goats, from which he concluded that there are different classes of tissue that absorb nitrogen to different degrees. Its decompression tables, which were valid up to a depth of 58 m, were the fundamentals of diving for the next 25 years. The Swiss physician Albert Bühlmann achieved fundamental extensions in the 1950s. Parts of the Haldane table have not lost their validity to this day.
Around 1907, the German company Dräger and the British company Siebe-Gormann developed diving rescuers for submarine crews. These constructions were based on the principle of the rebreather and saved the lives of many submarine crews during the two world wars.
In 1912, Dräger presented a cantilever tubeless diving apparatus. The greatest advantage of this rebreather was its independence from pumps and their operating teams, since the diver carried his air supply with him. The Dräger diving apparatus consisted mainly also from developed Dräger components injector , pressure reducing valve , pressure gauge and Kalipatrone absorbing carbon dioxide. The diver carried these components in a knapsack on his back. The equipment was supplemented by a diving suit, diving helmet and hoses. Instead of the usual lead weight, the diver carried a weight on his chest that consisted of steel cylinders in which compressed air or compressed oxygen was stored. The diving apparatus, which weighs a total of 98 kg, provided the diver with 60–70 liters of breathing air per minute or 3,600–4,200 liters per hour, sufficient to cope with very difficult underwater work. Bernhard Dräger developed the cantilever tubeless diving apparatus in collaboration with Drägerwerk's chief engineer Hermann Stelzner. The development was accompanied by intensive physiological investigations in diving tests. The design was continuously developed by Dräger over the next few years. The principle is still used today in modern rebreather diving devices, but for safety reasons pure oxygen is rarely used.
In 1913, Dräger further developed its diving rescuer into the "bathing diving rescue". Free dives became possible. For the first time diving equipment could be used for sports purposes.
From 1917, the German company Neufeldt and Kuhnke built the first functioning armored diving suits . An armored diving suit is comparable to a submarine and is a pressure-resistant construction. The diver is inside the suit under normal pressure. The maximum diving depth is not determined by physiological problems of the human body, but only by the pressure resistance of the suit. The first suit from 1917 was designed for diving depths of up to 170 m. With modern armored suits, depths of less than 600 m can be reached.
The new plastic neoprene was developed in 1930 by the Americans Collins and Carothers on behalf of the chemical company DuPont . Neoprene is a foamed chlorine rubber polymer and has very good thermal insulation properties due to the enclosed gas bubbles. Modern diving suits are mainly made of this material and allow a longer stay in colder water.
Until now, divers could only walk upright on the bottom with heavy shoes. In 1933 the Frenchman Louis Ce Corlieu designed swim fins. He patented the invention in France and the USA.
In the 1930s, the American Navy officer Charles Momsen researched problems of decompression and nitrogen anesthesia . He tested various breathing gas mixtures and partly replaced the nitrogen in the breathing air with the inert gas helium because of its harmful effects . Trimix , a mixture of nitrogen, helium and oxygen, is still used in deep dives to this day .
In 1937 the Austrian biologist Hans Hass began researching underwater life. He developed ventilated Plexiglas diving helmets and underwater cameras from the boat and from 1942 onwards he used a converted Dräger rebreather. His books, and especially his films, achieved great popularity worldwide.
Between 1942/43, Georges Commeinhes and Émile Gagnan developed a compact regulator at the suggestion of the well-known French marine researcher Jacques-Yves Cousteau . This invention, called Aqualung , was the first modern regulator . The regulator takes the under pressure standing breathing gas a bottle and gives the gas regulated, with near-ambient pressure to the diver from. The exhaled air is released into the water. According to an anecdote, the US sales representative Cousteaus believed the US market was saturated after 10 units were sold. The regulator was further developed by Gautier and Bronnec in 1955 into a one-hose machine, in which the high and low pressure stages of the regulator are spatially separated and connected by a hose. This allowed the low pressure regulator to lie directly on the mouthpiece, which further improved breathing comfort. This technology has hardly changed to this day.
Hans Hass coined the term safari in connection with diving when he first offered diving trips in the Red Sea in 1955 to finance his research vessel Xarifa . These early liveaboards heralded the beginning of diving tourism.
Since then, diving clubs have been founded around the world. The Association of German Sport Divers (VDST) was founded in 1954 and the Austrian Diving Association (TSVÖ) was founded in 1967.
In 1962, the Swiss Hannes Keller reached a depth of more than 300 m with a regulator and gas mixtures optimized according to the theories of Albert Bühlmann . Two backup divers were killed in the record attempt.
In the following year the "decometer" was introduced. It was a mechanical calculator that determined the decompression time from dive time and depth.
Between 1962 and 1970 France and the USA operated the first underwater stations to research the long-term effects of pressure on the human body. Also in the 1960s, the State University of New York made its first early attempts at fluid breathing. Mice were used as test animals.
From 1968 the electronically controlled rebreather, which was controversial due to several fatal accidents, was introduced. Originally they worked with pure oxygen supply. Since pure oxygen is poisonous from a depth of 7 m, such devices are now mostly operated with compressed air and are considered reliable. So-called " electric lungs " are now part of the basic equipment of combat and mine divers in the German Navy. They are often used by animal photographers because of the low breathing noise. Because of their high cost, rebreather diving devices are very rare among recreational divers.
The manufacturer Scubapro introduced the first buoyancy compensator in 1971 . Buoyancy control vests are now part of the basic equipment of every diver, and the use of this device is part of every basic training.
The first reliable dive computers were introduced at the beginning of the 1980s . The electronic computing technology allows the nitrogen saturation of the body to be calculated more precisely. In modern diving, the classic tables are only used in basic training. Almost every diver now uses dive computers.
Falling prices and the safety of modern technology led to a boom in recreational diving in the 1990s . It was estimated that 500,000 scuba divers were trained annually in the United States alone. In 2000 the world's largest diving association, PADI, certified 950,000 new divers. In 2001 there were 6,000 diving instructors in Germany . In 2002 there were an estimated 8.5 million people in the United States alone with a diving license.
Latest Research - Possible Future
Since 1990 u. A. at the Berlin Charité at the liquid ventilation research. Perfluorocarbons should serve as a replacement for breathing gas. In the meantime, the research has reached a level that patients with extreme burn injuries to the lungs and premature births can be ventilated with liquid. Because of the high risks and costs, this therapy is only used in extreme cases. This technology would mean a quantum leap for diving. Liquids are only slightly compressible. A liquid ventilated diver could theoretically dive much deeper than today's extreme records. In 1992 divers from the French diving company Compagnie maritime d'expertises (COMEX) achieved the same pressure level as at a depth of 701 meters during a simulated dive.
For several years now, COMEX has also been testing new types of breathing gas mixtures. The aim is to replace the costly helium with cheaper gases such as hydrogen .
Since the mid-1990s, research has been carried out in Israel into extracting the air dissolved in water. The water is decompressed with centrifuges. The falling pressure leads to the boiling out of the dissolved gases. The aim of the research are electric gills. However, the technology would require a water throughput of over 4000 l / min in normally enriched water in order to provide an average breathing person with sufficient air. The correspondingly powerful filter and pump technology is still far too large and heavy for a portable device. However, combinations with conventional rebreather devices have already been tested in the laboratory. The Israeli Navy and the US Navy are particularly interested in this new technology. The advantage would be that you could dispense with expensive compressors for filling bottles. All you have to do is charge the batteries . Theoretically, the fact that batteries are relatively heavy would not pose a problem, as they could replace the lead weights and heavy pressure bottles.
literature
- Norbert Gierschner: My illustrated chronology and bibliography of diving history . Tauch-Info-Büro, Berlin 2007. Volume I: Time tables and pictures, ISBN 978-3-937522-16-6 . Volume II: Alphabetically and Systematic Bibliography, ISBN 978-3-937522-17-3 .
- Michael Jung: The manual for diving history . Naglschmid, Stuttgart 1999, ISBN 3-925342-35-4 .
- Michael Kamp : Bernhard Dräger. A pioneer of diving technology , in: TauchHistorie. Journal of the historical diving society V., issue 10/2018, pp. 34-40.
- Kurt Möser: In- depth experience. On the history of diving technology . In: Technikgeschichte, Vol. 59 (1992), H. 3, pp. 193-216.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Marc van den Broek : Leonardo da Vinci's ingenuity. A search for traces , Mainz, 2018, ISBN 978-3-961760-45-9 , pp. 30–31
- ↑ Michael Jung: Diving History Compendium Volume 1: Karl Heinrich Klingert. Merzig, 1998
- ↑ Michael Jung: Seabed wanderers. The forgotten diving pioneer Peter Kreeft from Barth. Kückenshagen, 1997
- ^ Michael Kamp: Bernhard Dräger: Inventor, Entrepreneur, Citizen. 1870 to 1928. Wachholtz Verlag GmbH, 2017, ISBN 978-3-52906-369-5 , pp. 302-305.
- ^ Michael Kamp: Bernhard Dräger: Inventor, Entrepreneur, Citizen. 1870 to 1928. Wachholtz Verlag GmbH, 2017, ISBN 978-3-52906-369-5 , p. 301.
- ↑ Michael Jung: Hans Hass Biography. RoBoT-Camera-Museum, accessed on August 21, 2013 .