Vintage Double Hose

Hi Sam,

I recently rediscovered a book on my shelf I bought at a used book shop in Marthas Vineyard, Mass. back in 1996 for $1. It is called "Underwater Sport". It is a First Edition (maybe the only edition?) published in 1955. Any background info in your infinite arsenal of diving lore? Mark

I don't have any additional info but I do have the book. Same as yours so I'm interested in what Dr Sam can add.

I particularly like this genre of book (50's-early60's) as diving was still quite new, inventive and the info was a mix of skin and compressed air diving. A very simple methodology. It has shaped the way I do many of my dives and resparked my interest in skin/free diving (though my breath holding is lousy these days). I just did a week of snorkeling in the Okanagan and saw Trout, Salmon, Grass Carp, Large scale Suckers, Squaw fish, Sculpin and did a 7km river drift(which was awesome).

A couple of other books from the same era/genre I have and enjoy are:

"Dive - the complete book of skin diving" by Rick & Barbara Carrier
Wilfred Funk Inc. 1955

"The Skin Diver" by Elgin Ciampi
The Ronald Press Co. 1960

"A Manual for Free-Divers using Compressed Air" by D.M. Owen
Pergamon Press Ltd. 1955

"The Science of Skin and SCUBA Diving" by the Conference for National Co-operation in Aquatics
Association Press. 1957

I haven't much to add to what has already been said about this title, but I can confirm that my own copy is also a first edition dated 1955. The book is also listed in the NAUI International Bibliography of Diving and Related Sciences, again with the date of publication 1955. I believe I purchased my copy in one of San Francisco's used book stores on my first visit States-side in December 1980. Tne price back then was $2.85! The book seems very spearfishing oriented and I'm pleased to see breathhold diving given its fair share of attention. The illustrations are mostly black and white drawings, with two sets of monochrome photographs.

I think I bought the book at the same time as I purchased Schenk and Kendall's "Shallow water diving and spearfishing". I prefer the latter because it has much more information about equipment, with clear photographs of items such as suits rather than the brief descriptions of kit found in Vanderkogel's tome. The 1955 edition of the Carriers' "Dive" caps them all, however, in my humble opinion, not least because of the classified equipment lists in its first appendix. Perfect when researching gear from the mid-1950s. The second, 1963, edition of the Carriers' volume lacks such an equipment list.