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Jacques Cousteau: A Tribute to the Original Frogman
08/24/2008 - By Staff Writer From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
-Jacques-Yves Cousteau
There is no diver in the world who made more advances in his field or was better known than Jacques Cousteau. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, aka Captain Cousteau, was an explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, researcher, and photographer. But above all else he was the Father of Scuba.
Jacques Cousteau was born in 1910 in Saint-Andrew-de Cubzac, France. Despite being an apathetic student (he was once expelled for breaking seventeen windows at his school) Cousteau grew up with a desire to join the Navy and learn to fly. In 1930, he passed the highly competitive entrance exam and was allowed to enter France's Naval Academy Pilot Program.
A near-fatal car crash a few years later denied him the ability to fly, though, and he was transferred to sea duty. He began a rigorous swimming regime to strengthen his injured arms. "Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run headlong down an immutable course," he wrote later. "It happened to me ... when my eyes were opened to the sea."
Cousteau first focused on diving as a way to get to know the ocean in the early 40s, when he began making documentary films about life underwater. In 1943 he and Emile Gagnan invented the aqua-lung, which is the prototype of the modern open circuit scuba system. At the same time, he was hard at work in the Navy. Cousteau was a highly decorated war hero in World War II (his brother, unfortunately, was a Nazi sympathizer later convicted as a war criminal). Subsequent to the war, he was appointed head of the Underwater Research Group of the French Navy.
In 1948 Cousteau led an expedition of a Roman shipwreck in the Mediterranean. It was the first underwater archaeology operation with autonomous scuba divers in history. In 1950 he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns and began the first of many years of adventures upon a ship called Calypso. Cousteau and Marcel Ichac filmed their adventures and presented their movie at Cannes in 1951, for which they won the Palme D’Or.
In 1960 Cousteau became a social activist. He headed up a protest again the French government, effectively stopping them from dumping radioactive waste in the Mediterranean. He said, “A lot of people attack the sea, I make love to it. “ At his direction, women and children sat on the tracks and stopped the trains carrying the waste to the shore.
The French president at the time, Charles de Gaulle, asked Jacques Cousteau to please be nice to the atomic scientists. Cousteau replied, “No sir, it is your researchers that ought to be kind toward us. They forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.”
Among his many discoveries and accomplishments, Cousteau was the first person to theorize that porpoises had a sonar-like ability to find routes through the ocean. In 1973 he and his two sons began the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life, which has more than 300,000 members today. In 1976 Cousteau discovered the wreck of the HMHS Brittannic, sister ship of the Titanic, which sunk in 1916 after hitting a mine. He also developed a one-person, jet-propelled submarine.
In 1977, the "Cousteau Odyssey" series premiered on PBS. Seven years later, the "Cousteau Amazon" series premiered on the Turner Broadcasting System. In all, his documentaries have won 40 Emmy nominations. The team on the Calypso, incidentally, also conducted the first offshore oil survey by divers. The same year Cousteau was awarded the UN International Environment prize.
In 1985 Ronald Reagan awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1988 Cousteau was elected to L’Academie francaise. L’Academie francaise, first established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, to a great extent gets to decide “what is French”. There is no greater honor for a citizen of France.
Cousteau’s legacy includes over fifty books and 120 television documentaries. Cousteau called himself an oceanographic technician. In the eyes of the world, however, he was an ambassador to the world of life that lies beneath the seas. Thanks to Cousteau, people all over Earth learned about the wonders of the sea and realized that this entire reality lay right beside them.
In some circles, Cousteau has been criticized for sensationalizing ocean sciences, or for presenting ocean life in an ‘unscientific’ way.
Cousteau’s response to this was simple: “What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on. People protect and respect what they like, and to make them like the sea, they should be filled with wonder as much as informing them. “
Before his death at the age of 87, after decades upon decades of nearly daily dips in the drink, Cousteau definitively stated that “There is not a bad dive. Never. Always something new to learn and see."
Never a bad dive, indeed. Thank you, Captain. Rest in peace.