Captain Cousteau Visits!

[dhaas]

Captain Cousteau visited me yesterday via this life sized placard!

Scuba gear circa 1950s I assume with a double hose single stage regulator, no weights / BC / SPG, etc.
Sporting a one piece rubber drysuit plus looks like a Squale mask with Churchill swim fins this was the essence of simplicity at the dawn of scuba !

Pretty cool find!

http://www.haasimages.com

[Bryan]

Any background on it? Nice find for sure.

[ovalis]

That's a great piece! I have one as well. It was an advertising piece that US Divers made up for the 50th Anniversary of the Aqualung which they sent out to the dive shops. There's a little sign that snaps into those 3 slots at his mid-body.

[Britmarine]

This may be the original photograph:

http://blog.francedc.org/jacques-cousteau-sea-crusader/

To add to what has been said about the gear the captain is wearing, I can just make out the word "TARZAN" on the front of his suit. The name "Tarzan" reminds us of Edgar Rice Burroughs' famous fictional character

but it was also adopted as the brand name of the French diving equipment company led by Georges Beuchat, who developed foam-rubber diving suits in the Mediterranean port of Marseilles around the same time in the early 1950s when Hugh Bradner and others were experimenting with neoprene wetsuits in California. This may be the prototype of Cousteau's suit, dated 1953:


For further pictures, go to http://daniel-cousteau.blogspot.co.uk/p ... tipos.html
There's also a Squale mask similar to the one worn by Cousteau in "Le Monde du Silence" (The Silent World):



It's interesting that Cousteau is wearing other companies' gear in a cut-out designed to advertise US Divers equipment.

David

[Bryan]

Id be interested in more information on the original style wetsuits they were using. I'm sure the information is out there but I have not seen or read much about them.