The importance of the submarine for scientific purposes reached its peak only towards the mid-1950s, when technological progress and the use of advanced materials allowed the construction of submarines capable of reaching very great depths. The bathyscaphe Trieste had great fame, which in 1960 reached a depth of over 10,000 meters with Auguste Piccard and Donald Walsh on board. Equally famous was the French bathyscaphe FNRS-2, which for a certain period was in competition with the Trieste for the conquest of the abyss, even if it never reached depths greater than 4,000 metres.
Submarines used for scientific purposes also include some units used for military purposes. Today, however, we prefer to entrust the exploration of the sea depths to robotic vehicles or remotely guided submarines. But man has always cherished the idea of walking on the bottom of the sea, free, without being locked up in a submarine. The novel “The man who can live in water” by the French writer Jean de La Hire dates back to 1909, whose protagonist is a superman, the Hictaner, a fantastic creature between man and fish, obtained by grafting the gills of a young shark by the scientist Oxus and the monk Fulbert, who aspire to world domination. The Hictaner or the Man who can live in the water, is a human creature in shape and intelligence but amphibious.
Inspired by this is the science fiction novel “Amphibian man” by the Russian writer Alexander Beliaev, from 1928. The Argentine doctor Salvator, a non-conformist scientist and surgeon, saves the life of his son Ichthyander (from the Greek: “fish” + “man”) transplanting him with the gills of a shark. The experiment is a success, but limits the young man’s ability to interact outside the marine environment, where he is forced to spend most of his time.
How can we not think, then, of the diver? To dive, the diver uses special equipment, called a diving suit, consisting of a helmet, rubberized suit and weighted boots to walk on the seabed. The diver receives air sustenance from the surface through a rubber tube connected to an air pump; the tube is coaxial to a rope which is used to lower and/or hoist it on board as well as to communicate with the surface through conventional tugs, unless a telephone cable is used. The first designs for diving equipment date back to Leonardo da Vinci, who however did not make them known so that they would not be used for war purposes. Later, in 1892, the English brothers Charles and John Deane designed the first diver’s helmet. In 1837, based on the studies of Leonardo da Vinci, the engineer Augustus Siebe improved the helmet and built an immersion suit, a sort of first diving suit. In 1894 the Diver School was established in Genoa. Since the beginning of the 1980s, diving with a diving suit and a diving suit in a civilian context has fallen into disuse.
In 1865, Benoit Rouquayrol and Auguste Denayrouze, a mining engineer and a naval lieutenant respectively, designed a diving set (called an aérophore) equipped with an air vessel, connected with the first known regulator. The diver did not swim, but rather walked on the bottom, even if for a short time due to the limited atmospheres that the rudimentary tank could contain (only 30) and in any case always supported by the surface. Jules Verne mentions it in his novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”.
In 1879, Henry invented the first “rebreather” for breathing independent of the surrounding environment, used above all in scuba diving, but also in particular working environments, such as mines, where in emergencies it is necessary to have a source of breathable air that allows high autonomy at low weight. It is defined as a “rebreather” because it allows the use of exhaled air, rich in carbon dioxide, after appropriate treatment. This brings us to 1943, when Cousteau, who took part in the Second World War as a spy, found time during the conflict to invent , together with the engineer Émile Gagnan, the first type of equipment for Scuba diving, the Aqua-lung, i.e. the first open circuit diving equipment. It consists of a high pressure cylinder (the cylinder) and a regulator for breathing (regulator), which supplies the diver with the gas contained in the cylinder at ambient pressure via an automatic regulator valve located on the taps connected to the cylinder.
In 1969, the JIM Suit was invented, with which marine biologist Sylvia Earle walked on the seabed at a depth of almost 400 meters. Designed to maintain an internal pressure of 1 armosphere, i.e. equal to that of the Earth regardless of external pressure, it eliminates most of the physiological problems associated with deep diving, therefore there is no need for decompression because there is no danger of nitrogen narcosis . Thus we arrived at the Self-contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA), which includes a face mask, a compressed air tank, i.e. the cylinder, a regulator (regulator) and the mouthpiece, which allows the diver to be able to breathe underwater. Cylinders contain a lot of air in a relatively small volume; therefore, the air is compressed to a high pressure. The diver can tell how much air is left in the tank using a pressure gauge.
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