Timeline of diving technology

• the provision of breathing gas to allow endurance beyond the limits of a single breath,
• safely decompressing from high underwater pressure to surface pressure,
• the ability to see clearly enough to effectively perform the task,
• and sufficient mobility to get to and from the workplace.

  Pre-industrial

• Ancient Roman and Greek era: There have been many instances of men swimming or diving for combat, but they always had to hold their breath, and had no diving equipment, except sometimes a hollow plant stem used as a snorkel.
• About 500 BC: : During a naval campaign the Greek Scyllis was taken aboard ship as prisoner by the Persian King Xerxes I. When Scyllis learned that Xerxes was to attack a Greek flotilla, he seized a knife and jumped overboard. The Persians could not find him in the water and presumed he had drowned. Scyllis made his way among all the ships in Xerxes's fleet, cutting each ship loose from its moorings; he used a hollow reed as snorkel to remain unobserved. Then he swam nine miles to rejoin the Greeks off Cape Artemisium.
• The use of diving bells was recorded by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC: "...they enable the divers to respire equally well by letting down a cauldron, for this does not fill with water, but retains the air, for it is forced straight down into the water."
• 1300 or earlier: Persian divers were using diving goggles with windows made of the polished outer layer of tortoiseshell.
• 15th century: Konrad Kyeser, illustrated his manual of military technology Bellifortis with a diving suit fitted with a hose to the surface. This diving suit drawing can also be seen in the manuscript Ms.Thott.290.2º, written by Hans Talhoffer, which reproduces sections of Bellifortis.
• 15th century: Leonardo da Vinci made the first known mention of air tanks in Italy: he wrote in his Atlantic Codex that systems were used at that time to artificially breathe under water, but he did not explain them in detail. Some drawings, however, showed different kinds of snorkels and an air tank that presumably should have no external connections. Other drawings showed a complete immersion kit, with a plunger suit which included a sort of mask with a box for air. The project was so detailed that it included a urine collector.
• 1535: Guglielmo de Lorena and Francesco de Marchi dived on a Roman vessel sunk in Lake Nemi using a one-man diving bell invented by de Lorena.
• 1602: Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont built an air-renovated diving suit that allowed a man to remain underwater in the Pisuerga river on August 2. The diver passed an hour underwater before being ordered to return by King Philip III.
• 1616: Franz Kessler built an improved diving bell.
• Around 1620: Cornelis Drebbel may have made a crude rebreather.
• 1650: Otto von Guericke built the first air pump.
• 1715:
• * the chevalier Pierre Rémy de Beauve, a French aristocrat who served as garde de la marine in Brest, built one of the oldest known diving dresses. De Beauve's dress was equipped with a metal helmet and two hoses, one of them air-supplied from the surface by a bellows and the other one for evacuation of the exhaled air.
• * the Englishman John Lethbridge, a wool merchant, invented a diving suit built like a barrel with armholes and a viewport, and successfully used it to salvage valuables from wrecks.

  Industrial era

Start of modern diving

• 1772: the first diving dress using a compressed-air reservoir was successfully designed and built in 1772 by Sieur Fréminet, a Frenchman from Paris. Fréminet conceived an autonomous breathing machine equipped with a helmet, two hoses for inhalation and exhalation, a suit and a reservoir, dragged by and behind the diver, although Fréminet later put it on his back. Fréminet called his invention machine hydrostatergatique and used it successfully for more than ten years in the harbours of Le Havre and Brest, as stated in the explanatory text of a 1784 painting.
• 1774: John Day became the first person known to have died in an underwater accident while testing a "diving chamber" in Plymouth Sound.
• 1776: David Bushnell invented the Turtle, first submarine to attack another ship. It was used in the American Revolution.
• 1797: Karl Heinrich Klingert designed a full diving dress which consisted of a large metal helmet and similarly large metal belt connected by a leather jacket and pants.
• 1798: in June, F. W. Joachim, employed by Klingert, successfully completed the first practical tests of Klingert's armor.
• 1800: Captain Peter Kreeft of Germany dived several times with his helmet diving equipment to show it to King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden.
• 1800: Robert Fulton built a submarine, the "Nautilus".
• 1825: Johan Patrik Ljungström demonstrated his diving bell built of tinned copper with space for a crew of 2-3 persons, equipped with compass and methods of communication to the surface, successfully diving down to about with Ljungström and an assistant on board, and wrote a book on the organization of private underwater diving
• c. 1831: American Charles Condert built an autonomous diving suit, using a copper pipe curved in the form of a horseshoe, displacing about of water, and worn at the waist, as an air reservoir which fed compressed air through a manually operated valve and a hose into an airtight rubberized hip length tunic with integral hood. Air escaped from a small hole in the hood. The buoyancy of the set required about of weight for ballast. Condert made several dives in the East River to about and was drowned on his last dive in 1832.
• 1837: Captain William H. Taylor demonstrated his "submarine dress" at the annual American Institute Fair at Niblo's Garden, New York City.
• 1839:
• * Canadian inventors James Eliot and Alexander McAvity of Saint John, New Brunswick patented an "oxygen reservoir for divers", a device carried on the diver's back containing "a quantity of condensed oxygen gas or common atmospheric air proportionate to the depth of water and adequate to the time he is intended to remain below".
• * W.H.Thornthwaite of Hoxton in London patented an inflatable lifting jacket for divers.
• Around 1842: The Frenchman Joseph-Martin Cabirol formed a company in Paris and started making standard diving dress.
• 1843: Based on lessons learned from the Royal George salvage, the first diving school was set up by the Royal Navy.
• 1845 James Buchanan Eads designed and built a diving bell and began salvaging cargo from the bottom of the Mississippi River, eventually working on the river bottom from the mouth of the river at the Gulf of Mexico to Iowa.
• 1856: Wilhelm Bauer started the first of 133 successful dives with his second submarine Seeteufel. The crew of 12 was trained to leave the submerged ship through a diving chamber.
• 1860: Giovanni Luppis, a retired engineer of the Austro-Hungarian navy, demonstrated a design for a self-propelled torpedo to emperor Franz Joseph.
• 1864: H.L. Hunley became the first submarine to sink a ship, the USS Housatonic, during the American Civil War.
• 1866: Minenschiff, the first self-propelled torpedo, developed by Robert Whitehead, was demonstrated for the imperial naval commission on 21 December.
• 1882: Brothers Alphonse and Théodore Carmagnolle of Marseille, France, patented the first properly anthropomorphic design of ADS. Featuring 22 rolling convolute joints that were never entirely waterproof and a helmet with 25 glass viewing ports, it weighed and was never put in service.

  Rebreathers

• 1808: on 17 June, Sieur Pierre-Marie Touboulic from Brest, a mechanic in Napoleon's Imperial Navy, patented the oldest known oxygen rebreather, but there is no evidence of any prototype having been manufactured. This early rebreather design worked with an oxygen reservoir, the oxygen being delivered progressively by the diver himself and circulating in a closed circuit through a sponge soaked in limewater. Touboulic called his invention Ichtioandre.
• 1849: Pierre-Aimable de Saint Simon Sicard made the first practical oxygen rebreather. It was demonstrated in London in 1854.
• 1853: Professor T. Schwann designed a rebreather in Belgium which he exhibited in Paris in 1878. It had a big backpack tank containing oxygen at about 13 bar, and two scrubbers containing sponges soaked in caustic soda.
• 1876: An English merchant seaman, Henry Fleuss, developed the first workable self-contained diving rig that used compressed oxygen. This prototype of closed-circuit scuba used rope soaked in caustic potash to absorb carbon dioxide so the exhaled gas could be re-breathed.

  Diving helmets improved and in common use

• 1808: Brizé-Fradin designed a small bell-like helmet connected to a low-pressure backpack air container.
• 1820: Paul Lemaire d'Augerville invented a diving apparatus with a copper backpack cylinder, a counterlung to save air, and with an inflatable life jacket connected. It was used down to 15 or 20 meters for up to an hour in salvage work. He started a successful salvage company.
• 1825: William H. James designed a self-contained diving suit with compressed air stored in an iron container worn around the waist.
• 1827: Beaudouin in France developed a diving helmet fed from an air cylinder pressurized to 80 to 100 bar. The French Navy was interested, but nothing came of this.
• 1829:
• * Charles Anthony Deane and John Deane of Whitstable in Kent in England designed the first diving helmet supplied with airpumped from the surface, for use with a diving suit. It is said that the idea started from a crude emergency rig-up of a fireman's water-pump and a knight-in-armour helmet used to try to rescue horses from a burning stable. Others say that it was based on earlier work in 1823 developing a "smoke helmet". The suit was not attached to the helmet, so a diver could not bend over or invert without risk of flooding the helmet and drowning. Nevertheless, the diving system was used in salvage work, including the successful removal of cannon from the British warship HMS Royal George in 1834–35. This 108-gun fighting ship sank in 65 feet of water at Spithead anchorage in 1783.
• * E.K.Gauzen, a Russian naval technician of the Kronshtadt naval base in Saint Petersburg, built a "diving machine". His invention was a metallic helmet strapped to a leather suit with a pumped air supply. The bottom of the helmet was open, and the helmet strapped to the suit by a metal band. Gauzen's diving suit and its further modifications were used by the Russian Navy until 1880. The modified diving suit of the Russian Navy, based on Gauzen's invention, was known as "three-bolt equipment".
• 1837: Following up Leonardo da Vinci's studies, and those of the astronomer Edmond Halley, Augustus Siebe developed surface-supplied diving apparatus which became known as standard diving dress. By sealing the Deane brothers' helmet design to a waterproof suit, Augustus Siebe developed the Siebe "Closed" Dress combination diving helmet and suit, considered the foundation of modern diving dress. This was a significant evolution from previous models of "open" dress that did not allow a diver to invert. Siebe-Gorman went on to manufacture helmets continuously until 1975.
• 1840: The Royal Navy used Siebe closed dress for salvage and blasting work on the "Royal George", and subsequently the Royal Engineers standardised on this equipment.
• 1843: The Royal Navy established the first diving school.
• 1855: Joseph-Martin Cabirol patented a new model of standard diving dress, mainly issued from Siebe's designs. The suit was made out of rubberized canvas and the helmet, for the first time, included a hand-controlled tap that the diver used to evacuate his exhaled air. The exhaust valve included a non-return valve which prevented water from entering in the helmet. Until 1855 diving helmets were equipped with only three circular windows. Cabirol's helmet introduced the later well known fourth window, situated in the upper front part of the helmet and allowing the diver to see above him. Cabirol's diving dress won the silver medal at the 1885 Exposition Universelle in Paris. This original diving dress and helmet are now preserved at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.