The history of scuba diving.

This section is a history of how people learned to breathe underwater and how recreational diving became an organised sport. It is history only. Nothing in it teaches diving, and the accidents it mentions are told as published analyses by named authors, not as lessons to follow. For how diving is learned today, start with Learn.

How these pages are written

• Every date has a source. Each fact is given with the museum, archive, organisation, publication or encyclopedia it comes from.
• Disputed firsts get every version. Who invented the first open-circuit apparatus, when the Aqua-Lung was patented and in whose name, where the word SCUBA came from, which dive computer was first, and who was the first woman scuba diver are all claimed more than one way. Each version is given with who says it.
• Wikipedia is named when it stands alone. Where Wikipedia is the only source for a fact, the text says so.
• Unconfirmed claims are marked or left out. Where a page could only be seen as a search summary, or a claim rests on a single source we could not check, the page says so or leaves it out.

What is in this section

The story starts on before the Aqua-Lung, with Halley's diving bell, the Deane brothers' smoke helmet and Augustus Siebe's diving dress, the Rouquayrol-Denayrouze demand apparatus of the 1860s, Henry Fleuss's rebreather, Japan's 1918 Ohgushi respirator and Yves Le Prieur's 1926 apparatus. The Aqua-Lung covers Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan's 1943 regulator and the tangle of patent dates around it. Lambertsen and the word SCUBA follows the American doctor whose wartime rebreather, according to Wikipedia, first carried the name, and Hans and Lotte Hass covers the Vienna-born diver-filmmaker and his wife.

How the agencies began traces civilian training from the 1950s Los Angeles County course and the YMCA to BSAC, CMAS, NAUI, PADI and the later technical agencies. Two pages follow equipment: the buoyancy jacket, from Maurice Fenzy's 1961 life jacket to the stabilizer jacket and the octopus, and the first dive computers, from the analogue meters of the 1950s to the 1983 Orca EDGE and Hans Hass DecoBrain.

Nitrox comes to recreational diving tells how enriched air moved from the US Navy and NOAA to sport divers, and the public argument it caused. Cave and technical diving covers Britain's Cave Diving Group, the NSS Cave Diving Section, Sheck Exley and the naming of technical diving. Women in diving gathers the early women divers and the firsts claimed for them. The timeline puts every dated event in one table.

Related reading

The agencies as they are today are described on training agencies. Modern equipment is in the Equipment section, and terms used across the site are explained in the glossary.