June 11 - Jacques Cousteau

Explorer and researcher Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born on June 11, 1910, in southwestern France. He served in the French navy and began diving in the 1930s with an early modern version of a breathing apparatus. In 1943 he co-invented and tested the Aqua-Lung, which was the original name of the first self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA) to attain commercial success. He helped pioneer the use of a demand valve that regulated use of air in cylinders, making extended underwater exploration possible. Cousteau’s book The Silent World (1953) tells of the earliest days of scuba diving off the French Riviera. It led to an Academy Award-winning documentary of the same name (1956), which was filmed aboard his diving and research vessel, the Calypso. Both works, along with his TV series “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” (1968-1975), exposed people for the first time to a vast, astonishing and sometimes frightening world of underwater life, which he called “the world of rapture.”