Working Underwater: The Story of the Commercial Diving Industry

e used in 1972 was referred to as a JIM suit
in honor of diver Jim Jarrett. The term “JIM
suit” became a generic term in the industry.
Even though Peress used magnesium, the suit
still weighed 1,100 pounds. Four years later,
it set a record for the longest working dive,
one minute less than six hours at 905 feet.
Atmospheric diving suits are still being
used. Despite ongoing improvements, they
still do not offer the mobility that other gear
affords, but for deep work, in keeping a diver
at atmospheric pressure, they do prevent the
majority of physiological issues that make
deep diving dangerous.
MEDICAL
BREAKTHROUGHS
Commercial diving would not exist if it
had not been for the physiological discoveries
and medical breakthroughs that made it
relatively safe for those who venture deep
underwater.
Diving had evolved over the centuries, but
not until the early twentieth century did
significant advances occur in understanding
the causes and treatment for the lifethreatening
body reactions related to matters
of physics and physiology—the crushing
pressure of deep water and the issues related
to oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
Well understood much earlier was that
diving was a dangerous way to make a living.
The first significant finding in regard to the
effect pressure had on divers came thanks to a
poisonous snake. In 1667, Sir Robert Boyle,
an English physicist, observed a gas bubble in
the eye of a viper he had compressed and
decompressed with a pump. He wrote: “I have
seen a very apparent bubble moving from side
to side in the aqueous humor of the eye of a
viper at the time when this animal seemed
violently distressed in the receiver from which
the air had been exhausted.”
Five years before, in 1662, Boyle had
posited what came to be called Boyle’s Law,
the modern expression of which is: “The
absolute pressure exerted by a given mass of
an ideal gas is inversely proportional to the
volume it occupies if the temperature and
amount of gas remain unchanged within a
closed system.”
Based on Boyle’s research, in 1681 Abbe
Jean de Hautefeuille wrote a treatise called
“The Art of Breathing Underwater.” The
scientifically minded French priest correctly
declared: “It is not possible for man to breathe
air at normal atmospheric pressure when he is
himself underwater at depth.”
In the turn of the twenty-first-century
movie Men of Honor, in which Robert De Niro
A diver in a Tritonia ADS and a diver in
traditional gear preparing to dive on the
wreckage of the RMS Lusitania, 1935.
THE HISTORY OF COMMERCIAL DIVING
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