Jacques Cousteau

Their life

A French naval officer whose flying career ended in a car crash, who swam to rehabilitate his arms and never really came back out. With the engineer Émile Gagnan he co-invented the Aqua-Lung in 1943 — the demand regulator that made self-contained diving practical and created recreational scuba. He refitted a former minesweeper as the Calypso and spent four decades filming the undersea world, winning the Palme d'Or and three Oscars and reaching a television audience that had never seen any of it. He began as a taker of specimens and a consultant to oil prospectors, and turned into one of the twentieth century's most effective conservationists — campaigning against nuclear waste dumping at sea and for an Antarctic minerals ban that was adopted in 1991.

Known for

• Co-inventing the Aqua-Lung
• Voyages of the Calypso
• The Silent World, Palme d'Or
• The Undersea World television series
• Pioneering recreational scuba diving
• Antarctic mining ban campaign

The road they walked

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910 in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, in the Gironde, the son of a lawyer whose work for wealthy expatriate clients kept the family moving between France and the United States. He was a sickly child who loved machines, and he grew into a young man who took them apart to see how they worked. He entered the French naval academy in 1930 and trained as a naval aviator, until a car crash in 1936 broke both his arms and ended his flying career. He was sent to Toulon, where he swam in the Mediterranean to rebuild his strength, and he took up goggles and the sea in earnest. He never really left it.

The war gave the hobby a purpose. Cousteau worked in French naval intelligence under the occupation and later received the Légion d'honneur for his service. With his friends Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas he spent these years chasing a simple dream: to stay underwater long enough to look around. In December 1942 he met Émile Gagnan, an engineer at the Air Liquide company, and together they adapted a demand regulator that delivered compressed air only as the diver breathed in. The Aqua-Lung was tested in 1943, and it freed divers from surface hoses for the first time. After the war Cousteau helped form the French Navy's diving research group, and in 1950 he acquired a former British minesweeper, leased to him for a nominal one franc a year. He named her Calypso.

From her decks he became the best-known undersea explorer in the world. The Silent World, made with Louis Malle, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1956 and an Academy Award the following year, and World Without Sun later won another. In 1957 he became director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. His television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, ran on American television from 1966 to 1976 and put coral reefs and whales in millions of living rooms. His early work included blasting reefs and collecting specimens, and he worked with oil prospectors in the Persian Gulf. But what he saw changed his mind. He spoke out against nuclear waste dumping in the Mediterranean, founded the Cousteau Society in 1973, and in his last years campaigned for a ban on Antarctic mining, which was agreed in the 1991 Madrid Protocol.

How their story ended

Cousteau died in Paris on 25 June 1997, at the age of 87, of a heart attack, after a period of respiratory and heart illness. His last years were hard: his son Philippe had died in a seaplane crash in 1979, his wife Simone in 1990, and the Calypso was sunk in a collision with a barge in Singapore harbour in 1996, though he remained active with the Cousteau Society and his campaigns to the end. He was buried in his birthplace, Saint-André-de-Cubzac.

In their words

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