REVOLUTION 178 COMPLICATION Undersea exploration and the history of the dive Watch by jack forster the leviathan’s lair Of all the various classes of wristwatches, perhaps none has traveled with man more often into a hostile environment than the dive watch. The history of the dive watch is very often the history of undersea exploration itself. Dive watches are a special breed because, remember, the deep blue isn’t just trying to kill you when you’re beneath the waves — it’s trying to kill your watch, too. Part I: take a DeeP Breath... Watches can be about all kinds of things — art, ingenuity, history, craftsmanship, and venerable old men with fingers as deft as a lacemaker’s, working by candlelight through the long Swiss winters. But dive watches are different from the rest. When you get right down to it, dive watches, no matter what variations on a theme have spawned in recent years, are first and foremost about one thing only. Dive watches are about not coming back dead. Technology allows us to get ourselves into all kinds of trouble we couldn’t have gotten into without it, and perhaps no case is more to the point than surviving underwater. All life may have started in the ocean, but for animals like us that have spent the better part of the last half billion years figuring out how to survive outside it, staying alive underwater is the ultimate proof that sometimes you really can’t go home again. Dive watches are all about keeping track of how long it is before the little bit of home you brought down with you in the tank on your back runs out. Understanding dive watches means understanding a little about diving, which is not as new a business as you might think — probably for as long as human beings have existed, they’ve gone down to the water’s edge for food (if the oyster shells in Stone Age kitchen middens are any indication). For most of the time humans have been diving, though taking air down with you meant just what you could store in your lungs, which meant a dive time measured in seconds, or minutes at the most, that also made going much deeper than a few dozen feet out of the question for all but the craziest or most stubborn. Of course, at some point, some bright spark figured out that you could suck air through a tube — the snorkel was born, and since another thing humans have been doing since time immemorial is fighting each other, the combat swimmer was probably born shortly thereafter. Herodotus reports the exploits of a Greek sailor, captured by the Persians, who escaped and, with the aid of a hollow reed, swam undetected among their ships, cutting mooring ropes and wreaking havoc with the fleet (history has not recorded that he wore a Panerai, however).
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Undersea exploration and the history of the dive Watch by jack forster
the leviathan’s lairOf all the various classes of wristwatches, perhaps none has traveled with man more often into a hostile environment than the dive watch. The history of the dive watch is very often the history of undersea exploration itself. Dive watches are a special breed because, remember, the deep blue isn’t just trying to kill you when you’re beneath the waves — it’s trying to kill your watch, too.
Part I: take a DeeP Breath...Watches can be about all kinds of things — art, ingenuity, history, craftsmanship, and venerable old men with fingers as
deft as a lacemaker’s, working by candlelight through the long Swiss winters. But dive watches are different from the rest.
When you get right down to it, dive watches, no matter what variations on a theme have spawned in recent years, are first
and foremost about one thing only.
Dive watches are about not coming back dead.
Technology allows us to get ourselves into all kinds of trouble we couldn’t have gotten into without it, and perhaps no
case is more to the point than surviving underwater. All life may have started in the ocean, but for animals like us that have
spent the better part of the last half billion years figuring out how to survive outside it, staying alive underwater is the
ultimate proof that sometimes you really can’t go home again. Dive watches are all about keeping track of how long it is
before the little bit of home you brought down with you in the tank on your back runs out.
Understanding dive watches means understanding a little about diving, which is not as new a business as you might
think — probably for as long as human beings have existed, they’ve gone down to the water’s edge for food (if the oyster
shells in Stone Age kitchen middens are any indication). For most of the time humans have been diving, though taking air
down with you meant just what you could store in your lungs, which meant a dive time measured in seconds, or minutes
at the most, that also made going much deeper than a few dozen feet out of the question for all but the craziest or most
stubborn. Of course, at some point, some bright spark figured out that you could suck air through a tube — the snorkel
was born, and since another thing humans have been doing since time immemorial is fighting each other, the combat
swimmer was probably born shortly thereafter. Herodotus reports the exploits of a Greek sailor, captured by the Persians,
who escaped and, with the aid of a hollow reed, swam undetected among their ships, cutting mooring ropes and wreaking
havoc with the fleet (history has not recorded that he wore a Panerai, however).
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Leonardo da Vinci is said to have
developed what appears to have
been a primitive underwater breathing
device. He wrote in the Atlantic Codex
that he didn’t want to describe his diving
apparatus in detail, for fear it would be
used to sink ships and commit murders
— a puzzling scruple from someone who
otherwise designed military hardware
with gleeful abandon. His hesitation,
though, reflects the sentiment that there
is something uncanny, to say nothing
of downright unfair, about prosecuting a
war underwater, and indeed, the common
sentiment for much of recent naval history
— certainly amongst surface fleet sailors —
is that snapping a torpedo into the flank of
a ship from some tin fish cowering under the
surface is not quite cricket.
Spending any significant time moving freely underwater, though, had
to wait until the 19th century. Prior to that, the only way to go down
and stay down for any length of time was to use a diving bell — its basic
principle is familiar to anyone who’s ever turned a cup upside down in
a tub of water to trap air inside it. The diving bell or its descendant, the
submarine, which by the First World War was playing merry hell with
surface shipping, is not, however, a fulfillment
of the age-old dream of moving like a fish
through the ocean. For that to happen, a way
had to be found to free undersea adventurers
from the guts of their iron fish. Air, in other
words, had to be made portable.
DIver Dan anD the harDhat era The first divers, of course, weren’t wearing air
in tanks on their backs. Instead, they were
wearing spherical metal helmets with portholes
for visibility, the design for which dates all
the way back to their invention by Augustus
Siebe, in 1837. Siebe, a former Prussian artillery
officer turned engineer, relocated to England
after the Napoleonic Wars, and was given the
task of converting a helmet originally designed
to allow breathing in smoky or polluted
atmospheres (such as in a gas contaminated mine) for underwater
use. His invention, in the form that eventually became known as the
standard diving dress, consisted of a helmet, a waterproof canvas suit,
and weighted boots designed to keep the diver’s feet below his head,
as the weight of the helmet, even when filled with compressed air, had a
tendency to make the diver perform an involuntary headstand.
The standard diving dress, also known as a “John Brown” rig in the UK
or a “Diver Dan” outfit in the United States, may
look archaic today (and remind those of us of a
certain age of the Tintin comic Red Rackham’s
Treasure, to boot), but it succeeded in doing
something that none of the previous attempts
to allow work on the ocean floor had done:
it permitted a diver to work with, at least to
some extent, the freedom of movement one
might enjoy on the surface.
This is not to say that it was safe. Countless
accidents claimed the lives of divers over
the years — the fact that air came from
compressors through air hoses from the
surface meant that air lines could be vulnerable
to fouling or damage, and the diver was unable
to surface under his own power, meaning
that he had to be hoisted to the surface.
Misinterpretation of signals to surface support
crews have led to diver deaths not just from
failure to bring up a diver in trouble, but also
from bringing a diver up too fast.
Not bringing someone up fast enough to get
air when their supply has been compromised
is something pretty much anyone who has
ever learned to swim can understand would
be a problem. Water, it turns out, is not very
much fun to breathe. But understanding how
coming up too fast could be a problem is a lot
less obvious. The reasons behind it weren’t
understood completely until the early 20th
century — as a result, a lot of people died, in
pretty horrible agony, for reasons they didn’t
quite understand.
The problem was actually first noticed on
dry land — or rather, under it. In the 1840s,
The standard diving dress, also known as the “Diver Dan” outfit
The master himself, Leonardo da Vinci
steam-powered air pumps were far
along enough that they could
be used to create higher than
normal atmospheric pressure
in mining shafts to help
prevent flooding. However,
miners sometimes suffered
from painful muscle cramps,
mental confusion, joint
pain and other mysterious
symptoms after emerging to
the surface.
Later, pressurized caissons,
submerged chambers made
of concrete that were filled with
compressed air to keep water out,
came into common use for harbor and bridge
construction and maintenance work. Workers
entered caissons through airlocks that maintained the difference in
pressure between the outside atmosphere (equal at sea level to roughly
14 pounds of pressure per square inch of body surface — which is why
if you suck the air out of a plastic soda bottle, it goes crunch in a hurry)
and pressure in the caisson. Working too deep for too long meant a
worker could suffer the same set of strange symptoms — sometimes
fatal, often permanently disabling — that the miners had, and the
disease got a name for the first time: caisson disease.
For divers, the problem was, and is, the same. Come up too fast, and
you run the risk of the same crippling agony, which nowadays is known
as decompression sickness or, colloquially, “the bends”, due to the
arched-back posture often assumed by sufferers. The reason behind the
disease has to do with that soda bottle we mentioned parenthetically
just a second ago. That the soda bottle goes crunch from atmospheric
pressure when you don’t, is due to the fact that your body is basically
full of fluids — your blood, the fluid inside every cell in your body, the
fluid in your joints and in between the membranes around your nerves
and brain. Inside, you’re wet as wet can be. And yet, every cell in your
body needs a gas — oxygen — in order for you to survive. So, in you
breathe, and with every breath you
get a lungful of atmosphere, which
here on Mother Earth means about
21 percent oxygen and 78 percent
nitrogen, with traces of this and
that thrown in (like carbon dioxide
and methane, which exist to give
politicians something to argue
about, and climatologists something
to worry about).
Because your body fluids and the
outside atmosphere are an open
system, the pressure exerted by
the gas in your body automatically
equalizes with atmospheric
pressure. So, the reason you’re
able to inflate your lungs, despite
the fact that you’ve got 14 psi
of pressure trying to crush your
rib cage, is because the pressure
outside and inside your lungs is
equalized. Those gases also end up
dissolved in your blood and body
fluids, and gases in solution exert just as much pressure as
when they’re not. Think again of a soda bottle but, this
time, imagine that the soda’s still in it. You can see
the soda in the closed bottle before you crack open
the screwtop, and there ain’t much in the way of
bubbles — the gas (carbon dioxide) is in solution. But
take off the top, and the higher pressure inside the
bottle suddenly equalizes with the lower pressure
outside, and suddenly you’ve got bubbles galore
and soda down your pants.
So far so good — what happens when you breathe
gas underwater, at higher than atmospheric pressure?
Well, underwater breathing gear is designed to deliver
air to your lungs at ambient pressure — that is, the
pressure of the water around you, which goes up the further
down you go. The deeper you go, the higher the pressure of
the gas you breathe — again, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to
inflate your lungs against the pressure of the water around you — and
the more gas dissolves into your blood and body fluids. Now, if you
come up nice and slow — if you ascend at a carefully predetermined rate,
making decompression stops — then the extra gas slowly comes out of
your body fluids, just like when you open a soda bottle slowly. You can
hear the steady hiss of gas escaping, but there’s no sudden cascade
of bubbles. In fact, if you don’t go too deep or stay down for too long,
you don’t need to make decompression stops at all. But if you do go
for long and deep, and you don’t take your time coming up, then you’re
a human soda bottle with the top taken off too fast — bubbles form in
your blood, in your joints, in your brain and around your nerves, and you
are one unhappy camper.
FreeDom oF the SeaS — the aDvent oF the aqualung anD SCuBa The real trick, then, in moving around freely underwater
— swimming like a fish, without being tethered to the surface with hoist
lines, air hoses, and (by 1916) a battery powered telephone line, which
was the cumbersome lot of the man in the standard diver’s dress — was
to develop a way of delivering a mixture of breathable gases to a diver
under a pressure that could vary with the ambient water pressure as
the diver went up or down. This proved
to be a tough nut to crack. Such a
device, called a demand regulator, wasn’t
invented until 1937, but the inventor,
Frenchman Georges Commeinhes, was
killed near the end of the Second World
War, in 1944. By this time, two of his
fellow countrymen had also produced
their own demand regulator: Émile
Gagnan, a French engineer who would
go on to create innumerable technical
breakthroughs in diving, but remain
relatively unknown outside professional
circles; and a man destined to become
a household name worldwide — the
head of the French Navy’s underwater
research group, Commander Jacques-
Yves Cousteau.
Cousteau and Gagnan’s was the
first fully functional demand regulator
to come into general use, and by the
end of the war, the Aqualung, as it is
properly known (though the term later
IF YOU DO GO FOr LONG AND DEEP, AND
YOU DON’T TAKE YOUr TIME COMING UP, THEN YOU’rE A
HUMAN SODA BOTTLE WITH THE TOP TAKEN
OFF TOO FAST
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
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became generic) was being used by
French demining and underwater
wreck-clearing teams. Yet in the years
before the war, another technology
had been invented — one that was
to revolutionize undersea exploration
as much as the Gagnan-Cousteau
Aqualung, and become one of the
sharpest tools in the undersea warrior’s
kit: the oxygen rebreather.
The rebreather (originally called
a SCUBA unit, with the acronyms
standing for Self-Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus) was like the
Aqualung in delivering pressurized
air to a diver, but it was unlike the
Aqualung in one important respect
— as the name implies, it takes the
air the diver exhales and recycles it.
This is done by means of a chemical
scrubber that removes carbon dioxide.
Just enough oxygen is added back
in to keep the breathing mixture at
the right proportion of gases. The first
rebreathers were invented in 1878 by
Siebe, Gorman and Co. (the company
founded by the same Siebe who
invented the standard diving dress),
and by 1910, had been adapted by
Siebe, Gorman and Co.’s president, Sir
Robert Davis, for escape from sunken
submarines as the DSEA — the Davis
Submerged Escape Apparatus. After
the First World War, it became popular
among Italian spear fishermen in the
Mediterranean, and was, eventually,
adopted by the Italian Navy’s
commando dive teams as well as by
British frogmen.
Rebreathers were, and are, especially
attractive to military units for two
reasons: The first is that since the
gases are recycled rather than exhaled, rebreather units tend not to
produce telltale bubbles that give away the presence of frogmen to
surface observers. The other attractive element of rebreathers is that
they allow divers to spend longer periods of time submerged than
conventional Aqualungs, again, because gases are recycled. One of
their dangers, however, is that if for some reason they fail to function
correctly, and carbon dioxide absorption or oxygen delivery fail, panic
and seizures or, even more dangerous, sudden blackouts can occur
without warning. They have their advantages, but their greater
complexity can make them more potentially risky as well.
Since the end of the Second World War, probably the single biggest
advance in diving has been the advent of saturation diving, in which
divers — typically breathing a gas mixture in which helium has been
substituted for nitrogen, which can cause disorientation when breathed
in at high pressure for prolonged periods of time — spend days or weeks
in special high pressure habitats that allow them to work for repeated
long periods underwater without losing valuable work time to lengthy
decompression cycles. Saturation divers generally spend non-diving
time in compressed atmosphere chambers on support vessels, and
are transported to and from the work depth by special pressurized
transfer chambers.
With all the advances in diving technology, just how deep can you
go? The record for the world’s deepest scuba dive is 1,083 feet (330
meters), and all sorts of problems make even going much less deeper
suicidally challenging. However, millions of people enjoy recreational
diving in relative safety every year. (A recreational dive being one that
requires no decompression stops, uses only ordinary compressed air
as a breathing gas, and doesn’t go deeper than 130 feet. Oh, and bring
a buddy.) While modern electronic dive computers have become the
mainstay of keeping track of dive time, ’twas not always thus. As we’ll
see, “how long have I got” has always been the single most important
question that a diver can ask. And so, for as long as there have been
divers, watchmakers have created watches to help keep even a shallow
dive from becoming an early grave. Besides, if it’s a good idea for you
to have a buddy, maybe bringing along a buddy for your dive computer
