by Brad Matsen
Cousteau risked using the Fernez surface feed equipment again, but quickly confirmed his suspicions that the cloud of bubbles from the waste air made filming impossible. They scared off the fish that were essential to the story, and the hunter had to be able to kill one of them at its climax. There was no choice but to free-dive, which meant painfully slow progress. For six months, when the Kinamo was not lying in pieces on the repair table and Les Mousquemers weren’t meat diving or on duty, they dove with the camera, shooting hundreds of feet of film in thirty-second takes.
Cousteau, Dumas, and Tailliez traded off as the heroes and cameramen. They filmed each other shooting and missing, shooting and hitting, corkscrewing through the water, and mugging as they swam straight at the camera. Sometimes, they shot background instead of action, scenes of coral, anemones, urchins, flatfish skittering along the bottom, and the colonies of sea life encrusting the giant boulders that had tumbled into the sea eons earlier from the coastal cliffs above the Mediterranean.
After a summer of diving, Cousteau borrowed a two-reel, hand-cranked editing console from the navy photo lab, and taught himself how to cut and splice film into scenes and sequences. In late October 1942, he finished his first underwater movie, Par dix-huit mètres de fond (Sixty Feet Down). Its public premiere was hosted by the German Internationaler Kultur Film before an audience of German officers and Vichy politicians at the Théâtre de Chaillot in occupied Paris. The showing and a reception afterward were arranged by his brother, Pierre-Antoine.
Soon after finishing Sixty Feet Down, Cousteau went to Marseille for briefing on a new assignment as a Vichy France naval attaché in Lisbon. On the night of November 27, Cousteau, Simone, and their sons were in a hotel near the waterfront when the roar of airplanes flying eastward woke them up. They went to the parlor of the hotel and tuned the radio to the free broadcast from Geneva. The announcer, fighting back sobs, said that Hitler had abrogated the treaty and was invading southern France with bombers, tanks, and five thousand German and Italian troops.
The Cousteaus returned to their beds but were shocked awake again at dawn, this time by the clatter of tanks and trucks roaring through the street below their windows. Twenty miles southeast, in Toulon, another armored column and a division of infantry were minutes from seizing control of the harbor. Admiral Richard Laborde gave the order his sailors had been preparing for but dreading for two years. In a dreadful cacophony of high explosives that seemed to last forever, the French navy scuttled its Mediterranean fleet. The battleships Strasbourg, Dunkerque, and Provence burned and sank under towers of black smoke, as did Cousteau’s ship, Dupleix, seven other cruisers, seventeen destroyers, sixteen torpedo boats, six transport ships, tankers, minesweepers, and tugs. The Germans were able to seize only one destroyer, one torpedo boat, and five tankers. Toulon harbor was a sea of fire, fed by fuel gushing from the crippled ships, and the flames and smoke were visible from Marseille to Nice through the day and into the next night.
Jacques Cousteau was a sailor without a ship. The navy canceled his assignment and ordered him to stay in Toulon to film the carnage in the harbor. Simone and their sons went back to Sanary to prepare to flee to Paris, where Cousteau’s mother, Elizabeth, his brother Pierre-Antoine, and his family had the benefits of PAC’s privileges as the editor of a pro-occupation magazine. The Germans had garrisoned Toulon and surrounding towns with Italian troops, and Cousteau knew that once the occupiers felt they were on secure footing, things should eventually settle down on the Mediterranean just as they had in northern France. Conditions would be difficult, but he and his family would survive better at home, especially with the sea to feed them. If they were forced to flee, his plan was to return from occupied Paris in a month, maybe two.
During the few weeks it took for PAC to arrange his brother’s family’s escape from the chaos that had descended on the Mediterranean coast, Cousteau accepted an undercover assignment. The French resistance alone could not overthrow an occupation army, but it could gather information about troop strength and concentration. Liberation, if it came, would depend on the arrival of the Free French army from Algiers with their American and British allies. The more they knew about what they would find when they came ashore in the south of France, the better. Cousteau’s contacts in the resistance were convinced that the Italians and the few Germans were so confused as they scrambled to gain control over the huge military and civilian populations of Toulon that they had no idea which of their own officers belonged in which offices. It presented an enormous onetime opportunity to gather vital information about their plans. Cousteau agreed. Wearing a stolen Italian uniform, carrying a Leica in a dispatch case, Cousteau simply strolled into the waterfront Italian headquarters and blended in with the bustling crowd of officers and men. During ten of the most dangerous minutes of his life, which would earn him France’s highest military decoration, the Légion d’honneur, he photographed maps showing gun emplacements, wrecks in the harbor, and ammunition dumps. Then he walked away.
In Sanary, while packing to leave for Paris and not knowing if she and her family would ever return, Simone wrote a letter to her father to tell him they were coming. Retired Admiral Henri Melchior was a director of Air Liquide, living relatively comfortably under the occupation because the factories that produced compressed gas were industrial prizes for the Germans. They needed experienced people to run them. In a postscript to her note, Simone asked her father if anyone in his company might know something about building a demand regulator for dispensing gas. JYC, she explained, had abandoned the dangerous oxygen and hose systems for breathing underwater, but had lately become convinced that breathing compressed air from a tank was the answer if he could figure out a valve to regulate it.
5
SCUBA
I was playing when we invented the Aqua-Lung. I am still playing.
Jacques Cousteau
LIKE MOST OTHER PARISIANS in the winter of 1942, Émail Gagnan was scratching out a chilly existence, hoping that the Russians, British, and Americans would somehow manage to end the German occupation. He still had his job as an Air Liquide engineer in Paris, though most of the oxygen, hoses, regulators, and the rest of the compressed air equipment flowing from the company’s plants in France were going to the Nazis. Gagnan was forty-two years old. The modest trajectory of his life had carried him from rural Burgundy, through technical school in Paris, to the Air Liquide laboratory, where the puzzles of liquefying, containing, and releasing gas under pressure had held his interest for fifteen years.
Gagnan loved the clarity of physical laws, a world that was seen by everyone but understood by only a select few. The transformations of states of matter were particularly magic to him. A boiling teakettle on a stove top offers a simple example of a liquid becoming a gas; rain, of gas becoming liquid; and melting ice in a glass of lemonade, of the transformation of a solid to a liquid. Under greater or lesser pressure, the temperatures at which those transformations occur change. That is why water in a teakettle on an ocean liner, Gagnan discovered, boils faster than water in a teakettle over the same burner high in the Alps, where the pressure of the air is lower than that at sea level.
If a gas is held in a confined space and subjected to pressure, it eventually turns into a liquid. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no containers strong enough to withstand the pressure of compression, so it was impossible to liquefy gas except in theory. In 1873, Carl von Linde, a German engineer, had developed a practical way to convert ether into a cold liquid by compressing it with a pump and using it to chill beer in Bavaria. Brewers already knew that beer stored at lower than room temperature lasted longer and tasted better, and slaughterhouses quickly caught on to the advantages of refrigeration over ice for storing meat.
French Undersea Research Group scuba divers. (Left to right) Cousteau, Georges, Tailliez, Pinard, Dumas, and Morandière(COURTESY OF WWW.PHILIPPE.TAILLIEZ.NET)
Over the next ten years, von Linde improved his refrigerators to
use ammonia instead of the more expensive ether, sold hundreds of his patented systems, and got rich. In 1894, he put his fortune to work developing a process to liquefy ordinary air instead of ammonia. At the time, that process had only limited practical applications, but it led him to a next stroke of genius, the separation of oxygen from the other gases in air while they are in their liquefied states. He removed the impurities of water vapor and carbon dioxide from the air by drying it, then pumped it up to 200 atmospheres, or 3,000 pounds per square inch, in a metal chamber. Under pressure, the molecules of air squeezed together, creating friction, which generated heat. He then passed the air through radiators to remove the heat. The oxygen reacted to the process of compression and expansion, repeated over and over, by becoming liquid at very low temperatures.
Liquid oxygen is a lustrous, pale blue. It boils at precisely–183 degrees centigrade, at which point it can be distilled away from the nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, neon, and other gases in ordinary air. Each separate liquid element turns back into a gas at a different temperature, so when liquid air is heated or cooled, each kind of gas can be drawn from the mixture and reliquefied to produce pure liquid nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, neon, or oxygen. As pressure increases, the boiling point decreases, so one of the keys to converting gas to liquid and back again was building containers that were strong enough to safely hold compressed gas at high pressure.
When pressurized liquid oxygen is released into one atmosphere, it instantly becomes a highly flammable gas with hundreds of industrial, military, and medical applications. It enables airplane pilots to breathe at high altitudes, and burners of all kinds to burn hotter. It is indispensable for removing impurities in the manufacturing of steel. One of the most important uses for high-tensile steel was in the creation of stronger and stronger pressure vessels, which in turn triggered a boom in the liquefaction of gas. By the turn of the century, companies around the world, including Air Liquide, were buying rights to the patents of von Linde, Wroblewski, Olszewski, and others. The transformation of states of matter built great fortunes on what was thought to be alchemy just a few decades earlier.
After Émile Gagnan finished technical school in 1927, he joined the ranks of thousands of other scientists and engineers who were parsing the intricacies of compressing gases, solids, and liquids and putting them to work. Air Liquide had expanded steadily since it was founded in 1902 by Georges Claude and Paul Delorme, who had licensed the patents for the processes of liquefaction and distillation of air. Claude and Delorme quickly realized that shipping a 220-pound steel cylinder containing only 6 cubic meters of compressed gas was a quick way to go bankrupt, so they designed a standard liquefaction and distillation plant to produce the gas closer to their customers. Their liquefaction plants sprouted overnight, and by the time Gagnan went to work for Air Liquide, the company dominated the market in Europe and Japan. Gagnan spent most of his time improving the hardware for producing liquid oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, and neon, and the valves, gauges, tubing, and other equipment the customers needed to use the gases safely.
In occupied France, Air Liquide was among the most priceless spoils of war upon which the Germans were relying to increase their production of steel and supply oxygen to their pilots. At the laboratory in Paris, Gagnan and most of his colleagues did as little as possible to help their ancient enemy, but they brought their full energy to bear on designing equipment to improve life for the French. In December 1942, petroleum was in short supply, so Gagnan was working the bugs out of a regulator with which a farmer or a merchant could easily adapt the engine of his tractor, truck, or car to run on more plentiful methane or cooking gas. Simone Cousteau’s father, Henri Melchior, a senior director of Air Liquide, knew about the development of the natural gas valve. When his daughter wrote to ask him to introduce her husband to an engineer familiar with demand regulators, Gagnan was the obvious choice.
A few days before the new year, after Paris had observed one of the most cheerless Christmases in its history, the navy officer and the engineer met in a workshop cluttered with valves, meters, tanks, and tubing in various stages of assembly. Gagnan, a quiet man with a distinctly formal demeanor, showed Cousteau to a separate inner office and motioned him to a plain wooden chair. He sat behind his desk, lit his pipe, and asked what he could do to help. For the better part of an hour, Cousteau took Gagnan through his experiences with re-breathers, surface-feed systems, and breath holding, pointing out the flaws in each. Finally, he asked the big question. Did Gagnan know of any way to simply carry ordinary compressed air in a tank that would flow into a diver’s mouthpiece only when the diver took a breath? Gagnan turned to a shelf behind his desk, picked up a brown, rectangular box, and handed it to Cousteau.
“Maybe something like this,” Gagnan said.
Cousteau examined the object in his hand. It was a hard, black, Bakelite casing about 7 inches by 5 inches by 3 inches, with a hollow tube about an inch and a half long and a quarter of an inch in diameter protruding from one side and a threaded metal fitting from another. Gagnan let Cousteau hold the thing for a long minute, then took it back and removed several screws to open the housing. He explained that the device was a demand regulator for reducing the pressure of compressed natural gas to feed it to an internal combustion engine in place of a gasoline carburetor. It dispensed a measured dose of gas: the rubber diaphragm over the exhaust tube closed in response to the drop in pressure inside the regulator, then opened again when the pressure on the other side equalized. One tube from the casing could be connected by a hose to the carburetor manifold, the threaded valve to the tank of natural gas. “Same kind of problems, you know,” Gagnan said. “You have to reduce the pressure of the gas to feed it to an engine.”
Cousteau and Gagnan were not the only inventors trying to find a way to safely breathe compressed air underwater. Their most threatening competitor was Georges Commeinhes, the son of the inventor of a breathing apparatus for firefighters who had a workshop in Saint-Maur on the outskirts of Paris, a dozen miles from the Air Liquide laboratory. Commeinhes built his fireman’s rig with two tanks of compressed air at 2,000 pounds of pressure, a two-stage demand regulator, a single breathing hose, and a one-way exhaust valve on the mouthpiece. The French navy had been using it since 1935 and in 1939 had asked Commeinhes to adapt it for use underwater, but the war had slowed his research to a crawl. As a naval officer, Cousteau was familiar with the firefighting apparatus. He also knew that Commeinhes was working on a compressed air system for diving. Commeinhes had heard rumors from the Riviera that Cousteau was trying everything he could get his hands on to find a way to swim free and breathe underwater for long enough to work, hunt, and make movies. Both men understood that whoever was first to solve the puzzles and file the patents would be first to market with a dazzling invention that could be worth a fortune. Cousteau also knew that finding a way to breathe underwater and swim free would instantly make him an unstoppable force as a filmmaker.
On an unseasonably warm afternoon in January 1943, a half-dozen people gathered along an isolated back eddy of the Marne River east of Paris to watch Cousteau and Gagnan test their underwater breathing system. Simone was there, along with one of Gagnan’s colleagues from Air Liquide and a storekeeper and his family from a nearby crossroads. Gagnan steadied the heavy backpack of three steel tanks as Cousteau waded from the low bank into the river. When he was knee deep, Cousteau bent from the waist and put his head underwater. Except for Gagnan’s grip on his arm, the world above disappeared. He crouched with his face in the water under the weight of the tanks, each of them wrapped with an outer layer of wire for additional strength. They had decided on three tanks because the point was eventually to give Cousteau enough time to remain submerged for an hour at 60 feet. One or two of the standard industrial cylinders would not carry enough air at the 110 atmospheres, or about 1,600 pounds of pressure, at which it would remain a gas. The three tanks weighed 50 pounds on the surface but less than nothing underwater because of the
buoyancy of the gas. They had linked them through a manifold to a slightly modified version of Gagnan’s natural gas regulator, which drew air equally from the tanks. Gagnan had designed a safety valve on the manifold that stopped the air flow when there were only 300 pounds of gas pressure left in the tanks. When a diver could not draw a breath because the reserve valve was closed, he could pull a metal rod to release the remaining air, which would give him enough time to reach the surface before running out completely.
Cousteau felt the weight of the tanks, sensed the rubber mouthpiece clamped between his teeth, and felt the single hose leading from the regulator rubbing on his shoulder. The water was murky, but he could see the mud of the bottom, and he was breathing just fine. He nodded vigorously, the signal that he was ready to submerge completely. Gagnan took his hand from Cousteau’s arm. Cousteau stretched out on his belly, pushed away from the bank, and sank beneath the shimmering surface of the Marne. The shock of the bitterly cold water banished any other sensations for the first few seconds, but then Cousteau heard the strange sound of his own breathing. He heard a rasping rush of air as he inhaled through the hose, the gurgling of a cloud of bubbles as he exhaled through the exhaust valve in his mouthpiece, and the snap of the diaphragm of the regulator as it responded to the changes in pressure as he breathed. It was working.
Cousteau glided away from the shore and let himself sink feetfirst to the bottom, where his moment of elation dissolved in a cloud of bubbles as air flowed freely whether he inhaled or not. He could breathe, but the bubbles from the exhaust valve on his mouthpiece obscured his vision, as it had with the Fernez system. Free-flowing air was also too wasteful for the system to be practical. Cousteau bounced his way into deeper water, performed a “stroke of the loins” to put his head down and his feet up, and most of the bubbles disappeared. But then he could barely draw a breath. Experimenting with several other positions, he confirmed that the system let him breathe easily and did not free-flow only when he was perfectly horizontal. Like a test pilot, Cousteau reviewed his results to order them carefully in his mind. With his work done, he noticed again that the water was freezing cold. A few seconds later, he surfaced, waved to the anxious-looking people on the bank, and dog-paddled to shore, where Gagnan helped him from the river.