The world of diving is a fascinating one. It offers a unique opportunity to see amazing animals in their natural environment – authentic and unfiltered. It is also a way to escape the real world, to leave behind your to-do lists and text messages, and to experience nature on an emotional scale. And it’s a social activity, one that brings you together with people who have the same passion for something as simple and enjoyable as breathing underwater. This is why so many people become scuba divers and stay dive professionals all their lives.

Diving has a rich and fascinating history, some of which is legendary (based on isolated woodcuts or the storyteller’s art) and some of which is documented and accepted by historians as fact. The following is a chronology of important events in the evolution of scuba, the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.

1876 – English merchant seaman Henry Fleuss develops first workable, self-contained diving rig. He used carbon dioxide absorbed by rope soaked in caustic potash to allow the diver to re-breathe exhaled air without bubbles entering the water. While this early rebreather allowed for limited depths (pure oxygen is toxic below 25ft of seawater), it was a significant advance from the open circuit diving equipment that was in use at the time.

1942 – Jacques Cousteau’s film of the underwater world introduces ocean life to the masses. In the same year Cousteau and engineer Emile Gagnan developed a new open-circuit scuba that combined an improved demand regulator with high-pressure air tanks. This system, which came to be known as the Aqua-Lung, greatly boosted the ease and safety of recreational diving.