Word: lunging
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Records & Rapture. Cousteau maintains that he had no idea what he had started when he first stood on his finger and laughed aloud in his Aqua-Lung. Whole new fields are opening up for free divers, who, like Cousteau, soon tire of skewering fish as too easy (cracks one Frenchman: "It's like chasing elephants in a sports car"). The move is toward wreck-hounding, tracing underground springs through black and frigid waters, studying rock and reef, and taking underwater color movies. Equipped with Aqua-Lungs, divers are gradually taking over much of the work of the traditional helmeted...
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...
Fear on the Reef. Cousteau could scarcely wait for the war to end to develop his new discovery. He sold the French navy on the virtues of the Aqua-Lung, soon got leave for government-backed oceanographic work on the 360-ton Calypso, a converted minesweeper from the British Royal Navy. Aboard the Calypso, Cousteau gathered the material and shot the films that were to bring sudden fame to diving and himself. The Silent World, written originally in English, was published in the U.S. in 1953, sold more than 486,000 copies (worldwide sale: 5,000,000). His 86-minute...
...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, he runs on the side a film company, dubbed Associated Sharks as his own wry commentary on the ethics of the trade. Even so. Cousteau's wife has sold many a belonging to hold the spider web together for the sake of science...