Vintage diving suits
How low can you go?
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1900-1934
Deep-sea diving is a highly complex and dangerous endeavor, with countless hazards — Nitrogen narcosis, hypoxia, decompression sickness, drowning.It also has great rewards — treasure and salvage from shipwrecks, military and industrial applications — so reaching for the depths has been a pursuit for inventors for centuries. Rudimentary diving bells were first described by Aristotle in the 4th century B.C., and were used by swimmers for undersea observation and quick salvage missions.In 1715, British inventor John Lethbridge designed a diving suit capable of reaching depths of 60 feet and staying for more than 30 minutes. It was little more than a six-foot wooden barrel with leather sleeves for the diver’s arms, but Lethbridge used it on several lucrative salvage dives.Standard diving dresses, waterproof cloth suits with a metal helmet connected to the surface by an air hose, became widely used in the mid-nineteenth century. However, because the diver using them was subjected to the water pressure around him, their depth was limited, and divers had to make slow, stop-and-start ascents to avoid decompression sickness, or “the bends.”
The pinnacle of personal diving suit technology is the atmospheric diving suit, or ADS. An ADS is essentially an armored submersible which maintains an internal pressure equal to that of the surface, allowing users to descend to depths of more than 2,000 feet without the punishing physiological effects of compression and decompression.The first human-shaped ADS was a leaky 830-pound behemoth built in 1882 by the Carmagnolle brothers of Marseilles, France. Various other designs were built and deployed with limited success. Creating articulable jointed arms that could withstand extreme pressure was the main challenge.British diving engineer J. S. Peress rose to this challenge in 1932, creating Tritonia, a cast-magnesium suit with oiled joints capable of operating at depths of 1,200 feet, under pressures 35 times greater than the surface.Tritonia did not see much use, but its successor, the JIM suit (named for Peress’ assistant Jim Jarret), was widely used in offshore oil drilling operations. Today, atmospheric diving suits are used for a litany of deep-sea tasks, from salvage to construction to scientific research.
There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers. - Robert Ballard
I think the age of exploration is just beginning, not ending, on our planet. - Robert Ballard
