diving apparatus

Any equipment used to enable a person to spend time underwater. Diving bells were in regular use in the 17th century, the diver breathing air trapped in a bell-shaped chamber. This was followed by cumbersome diving suits in the early 19th century. Complete freedom of movement came with the aqualung, invented by Jacques Cousteau in the early 1940s. For work at greater depths the technique of saturation diving was developed in the 1970s in which divers live for a week or more breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen at the pressure existing on the seabed where they work (as in work on North Sea platforms and tunnel building).

The first diving suit, with a large metal helmet supplied with air through a hose, was invented in the UK by the brothers John and Charles Deane in 1828. Saturation diving was developed for working in offshore oilfields. Working divers are ferried down to the work site by a lock-out submersible. When they are not diving, they live in a compression chamber on board a support ship. They thereby avoid frequent periods of slow decompression to avoid the dangerous consequences of an attack of the bends, or decompression sickness.