Jacques Cousteau: The Explorer Who Invented SCUBA and Unveiled the Silent World

Jacques Cousteau was an ocean explorer and researcher, an inventor, an author, and a photographer and filmmaker best known for popularizing oceanography through his television specials and movies. Through his films, many people were exposed to images of the undersea world for the first time. Among oceanographers, he is renowned as the inventor of revolutionary diving and SCUBA devices, especially the aqua-lung breathing device.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born in the market town of Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac, in southwestern France, on June 11, 1910. His father, Daniel, was a lawyer. His mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of a wealthy wine merchant. Jacques later said that his love of the water began at age four, when he learned how to swim. He remembered, “I loved touching water. Physically. Sensually. Water fascinated me” (Jonas 1997). The family briefly lived in New York City (where Daniel’s employer was located) when Jacques was ten to twelve years of age, before moving back to France. Cousteau began diving at that time while attending summer camp in Vermont. Cousteau’s interest in filming as well as mechanical devices began during his teen years, when he purchased a movie camera and disassembled it to learn how it worked.

In 1930, Cousteau entered the French Naval Academy, from which he graduated as a gunnery officer. In 1933, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and he began working in the navy’s information service, recording a great deal of his experiences on film. He married Simone Melchior, a student, in 1937. The couple had two sons, who would eventually join their father in ocean explorations. (Following Simone’s death in 1990, Cousteau married Francine Triplet, with whom he had a son and daughter.) Cousteau began focusing on his underwater investigations in the mid-1930s following an automobile accident. As rehabilitation to recover from the injuries he sustained in the accident, he began swimming and diving regularly in the Mediterranean Sea.

French oceanographer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau spent much of his life aboard his floating laboratory Calypso, exploring the marine world aided by equipment he helped invent (Library of Congress)

When the Germans took over Paris and the southern part of France during World War II, Cousteau and his family fled to a small French town near the Swiss border. Cousteau participated in the French Resistance during the war, documenting movements of Italian troops. Also during the war, in 1943, he and a French engineer named Emile Gagnan developed the first aqua-lung, a diving regulator device that made it possible for divers to remain underwater for long periods. With this device, a diver’s oxygen supply could last longer than in previous devices because the oxygen is used only when the diver breathes in. In 1948, Cousteau and a group of scientists and divers performed the first underwater archaeology expedition using the aqua-lung as part of an advanced self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA), which allowed the explorers to stay underwater long enough to discover an ancient Roman shipwreck at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Cousteau also helped to develop a camera that was waterproof and capable of withstanding the high pressures of ocean depth.

Cousteau’s famous research vessel, Calypso, had its origins in 1950, when he converted a 40-year-old British minesweeper to do oceanographic research. He began his ocean expeditions on Calypso in 1951. The success in 1953 of Cousteau’s first book, The Silent World, about SCUBA diving, generated finances for additional explorations, which were usually sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the French government. He made this book into his first color documentary film in 1956 and would later write several additional successful books about the ocean and ocean life.

Cousteau retired from the French Navy in 1956 with the rank of captain. In 1961, US president John F. Kennedy awarded him the National Geographic Society’s Gold Medal. In 1963, Cousteau began experimenting with the construction of bases on the ocean floor, called Conshelf bases, in which “oceanauts” could live and work for weeks at a time. He eventually abandoned this project, though his 1964 documentary film about the bases was one of the three films for which he won Academy Awards. His series of popular television specials, titled The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, debuted in 1968. The specials, which continued to air for nine years, elevated Cousteau’s international profile to that of a pop culture celebrity. Cousteau produced other television specials in the 1980s, usually focused on the theme of protecting the ocean environment and ocean life. In 1974, Cousteau founded The Cousteau Society as a US-based nonprofit organization dedicated to education, research, and environmental protection, including the preservation of endangered whales and the prevention of pollution.

In June 1979, Cousteau’s eldest son, Philippe, was killed in the crash of a seaplane he was piloting in a test flight. The 38-year-old had been the lead cinematographer for most of his father’s films. Philippe’s son, Philippe Cousteau, Jr., was born six months after the crash. Like his father, grandfather, and uncle (Jean-Michel), Philippe Jr. has pursued a career in oceanography and filmmaking.

On Cousteau’s seventy-fifth birthday in 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In January 1996, Cousteau’s long-time research vessel, Calypso, sank in Singapore Harbor after it was rammed by a barge as it was departing for an expedition to China’s Yellow River. Less than a year later—on June 25, 1997— Cousteau died of a heart attack at his home in Paris at age 87. A. J. Smuskiewicz

FURTHER READING:Biography, A&E Television Networks. 2016. “Jacques Cousteau.” January 5. http://www.biography .com/people/jacques-cousteau-9259496#literature-cinema-tv-and-later-expeditions. Accessed October 1, 2016.

The Captain Cousteau Society. 2015. “Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau.” http://www.cousteau.org/ who/the-captain. Accessed October 1, 2016.

Cousteau, J. Y. 1983. Cousteau’s Calypso. New York City: Harry N. Abrams.
Cousteau, J. Y. and Frederic Dumas. 1953. The Silent World. New York City: Harper.

Cousteau, Jean-Michel and Daniel Paisner. 2010. My Father, the Captain: My Life With Jacques Cousteau. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society.

Jonas, Gerald. 1997. “Jacques Cousteau, Oceans’ Impresario, Dies.” New York Times, June 26. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/26/world/jacques-cousteau-oceans-impresario-dies.htmlP_r = 1. Accessed October 1, 2016.