Word: diver
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...lens spectacles, Cousteau is a man with an antic turn of mind, loves to improvise wacky film scenarios (a nearsighted bull gets contact lenses, routs the matador and escapes, only to starve because he cannot see the grass). But Cousteau is also a leader of men. When an inexperienced diver drowned trying to find the anchor of Calypso, Cousteau pulled on the dead man's Aqua-Lung and told his shaken crew: "I'm going down for the anchor. Those of you who want to help, follow me." The men followed. Cousteau found the anchor...
...diving has quality to match quantity. At Malta last year, the world's spearfishing championship (done with held breath alone) was won by California's rangy (6 ft. 2 in., 180 Ibs.) Terry Lentz, 22, who landed 15 fish weighing 106 Ibs. One of the finest free divers in the world is Security Analyst Peter Gimbel, 32, husky, Yale-bred scion of the department-store family. As a boy, Gimbel sat on the bottom of his parents' pool with a five-gallon can over his head, gulping air from a garden hose. He grew up to become...
Under the eyes of the indifferent Germans, Cousteau worked with a brilliant engineer named Emile Gagnon to develop a lung that would automatically feed him safe compressed air so that he could swim with both arms. To be safe, a diver must have air in his lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water. With less pressure, his lungs may be crushed; with more, they may expand until they rupture. To survive. Cousteau required a device that gave a diver air at pressures that matched the changing weight of water as he sank and rose...
Finally the two experimenters hit upon the heart of the Aqua-Lung: a valve the size of an alarm clock, which lets highly compressed air escape from a tank until it balances the water pressure, then feeds it to the diver through a mouthpiece. One day in 1943 Cousteau posted Skindiver Frederic Dumas as a lifeguard, waddled out into the Mediterranean under the 50-Ib. Aqua-Lung, and realized his dream. He was free: "I experimented with all possible maneuvers-loops, somersaults and barrel rolls. I stood upside down on one finger and burst out laughing, a shrill, distorted laugh...
...with the rank of capitaine des corvettes, now sits at the center of a bewildering web of profitmaking, nonprofit and governmental enterprises. He is director of Monaco's first-rate Museum of Oceanography, founded in 1910 by Prince Albert I of Monaco, the great-grandfather of Free Diver Prince Rainier. Cousteau is also head of France's Underwater Research Center. He is backed in part by the French government, and in part by Washington, D.C.'s National Geographic Society, takes up the slack with profits from his business firms. In addition to controlling the Aqua-Lung patents...