One morning in June, I went to the railway station at Bandol on the French Riviera and received a wooden case expressed from Paris. In it was a new and promising device, the result of years of struggle and dreams, an automatic compressed-air diving lung conceived by Émile Gagnan and myself. I rushed it to Villa Barry where my diving comrades, Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, waited. No children ever opened a Christmas present with more excitement than ours when we unpacked the first “aqualung.” If it worked, diving could be revolutionized.
We found an assembly of three moderate-sized cylinders of compressed air, linked to an air regulator the size of an alarm clock. From the regulator there extended two tubes, joining on a mouthpiece. With this equipment harnessed to the back, a watertight glass mask over the eyes and nose, and rubber foot-fins, we intended to make unencumbered flights in the depths of the sea.
We hurried to a sheltered cove that would conceal our activity from curious bathers and Italian occupation troops. I checked the air pressure. The bottles contained air condensed to 150 times atmospheric pressure. It was difficult to contain my excitement and discuss calmly the plan of the first dive. Dumas, the best goggle diver in France, would stay onshore keeping warm and rested, ready to dive to my aid, if necessary. My wife, Simone, would swim out on the surface with a snorkel breathing tube and watch me through her submerged mask. If she signaled anything had gone wrong, Dumas could dive to me in seconds. “Didi,” as he was known on the Riviera, could skin-dive to sixty feet.
My friends harnessed the three-cylinder block on my back with the regulator riding at the nape of my neck and the hoses looped over my head. I spat on the inside of my shatterproof glass mask and rinsed it in the surf, so that mist would not form inside. I molded the soft rubber flanges of the mask tightly over forehead and cheekbones. I fitted the mouthpiece under my lips and gripped the nodules between my teeth. A vent the size of a paper clip was to pass my inhalations and exhalations beneath the sea. Staggering under the fifty-pound apparatus, I walked with a Charlie Chaplin waddle into the sea.
The diving lung was designed to be slightly buoyant. I reclined in the chilly water to estimate my compliance with Archimedes’ principle that a solid body immersed in liquid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the liquid displaced. Dumas justified Archimedes by attaching seven pounds of lead to my belt. I sank gently to the sand. I breathed sweet effortless air. There was a faint whistle when I inhaled and a light rippling sound of bubbles when I breathed out. The regulator was adjusting pressure precisely to my needs.
I looked into the sea with the same sense of trespass that I have felt on every dive. A modest canyon opened below, full of dark-green weeds, black sea urchins, and small flowerlike white algae. Fingerlings browsed in the scene. The sand sloped down into a clear-blue infinity. The sun struck so brightly I had to squint. My arms hanging at my sides, I kicked the fins languidly and traveled down, gaining speed, watching the beach reeling past. I stopped kicking, and the momentum carried me on a fabulous glide. When I stopped, I slowly emptied my lungs and held my breath. The diminished volume of my body decreased the lifting force of water, and I sank dreamily down. I inhaled a great chestful and retained it. I rose toward the surface.
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