Stars Beneath the Sea: The Pioneers of Diving

by Trevor Norton

Book Overview

In a series of brilliantly detailed portraits, this history of the daring art of deep-sea diving recounts the eccentric exploits and sense-defying feats of the men who turned underwater adventure into a modern science. Illustrated throughout.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078670750X
• ISBN13: 9780786707508
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Publishers
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 1.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Laugh-out-loud funny!

I can't remember the last time I laughed so long and loud over a book. This is very, very amusing, laugh-out-loud funny, yet highly informative and interesting, e.g. the first recorded Dive Club had the singularly unimaginative name of 'The Bottom-Scratchers'!The book is peppered with excerpts from many other books, but loses nothing by that, rather it shows how much research reading has been done.We are taken on a biographical tour through the stars of underwater invention, in no particular order, but there are some early pioneers who are not mentioned, possibly because there is little information available to make interesting (and humorous) reading. Our tour-guide extracts the minutest details for our delectation, again sprinkled with that undercurrent of wit. And our guide is no armchair chronicler either, he was there in the '50s, doing field work in the cold waters of Lough Ine.Incidentally we find that some of our Stars worked in other fields as well; mining, surgery, explosives, writing, biology, photography, cinema, genetics - with the usual humourous anecdote, in case we were inclined to fall asleep (unlikely!).A wonderful, refreshing read - guaranteed to liven up your lungs and your life!

Witt, adventurous and engaging

This unique book tells the story of a bunch of intrepid and inspired men who pioneered the exploration of the last great unknown: the deeps of the sea. How would you fancy wading out under water with nothing more than an inverted coal bucket over your head? Would you agree to a fight a shark, equipped with nothing more than a knife, all so that some movie company could film the gory encounter? Inventive, adventurous, foolhardy to the point of recklessness, many of the diving pioneers were also world-famous in their own right, like the great biologist JBS Haldane, who worked out how to survive at dangerous depths. Others evolved from treasure seekers to become the first underwater archaeologists, exploring ancient shipwrecks in exotic waters, or, most interesting of all, opening our eyes to the beauty of marine habits and wildlife, including the seriously threatened coral reefs. The author, himself a marine biologist and diver, blends all this into a magical weave of fact and wonder enlivened by a mordant wit and a delightful eye for quirky detail. I would recommend it to any reader.

Splendid story of divers and diving

Trevor Norton presents us with a series of vivid portraits of the strange assortment of characters who pioneered diving. Henri Milne Edwards conducted the first expedition by a submarine biologist in 1844 off Sicily. As early as 1865, the mining engineer Benoit Rouqayrol designed a diving suit with a compressed air cylinder at the back, and a demand valve that supplied oxygen only when the diver sucked on the mouthpiece; but the idea somehow lay forgotten for eighty years.The engineer Otis Barton designed, built and tested the first bathysphere in 1932, reaching a depth of 3000 feet. Jack Kitching was the first marine ecologist. In the 1930s, Guy Gilpatric, who held a world altitude record when he was only sixteen, invented the very idea of diving for pleasure. John Scott Haldane worked on improving miners' safety and studied the effects of high pressure on deep-sea divers and of altitude sickness in climbers. His son, the communist and geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, was the first to map the genes on a human chromosome. He also worked on solving the problems of pressure experienced by divers and submariners. In 1942, Jacques Cousteau's colleague Emile Gagnan re-invented the demand valve, the key to developing the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus (SCUBA). Louis Boutan and Ernest Williamson started underwater photography, popularised by those most photogenic photographers, Hans and Lotte Haas, in their 26 BBC television programmes.Frederic Dumas, Peter Throckmorton and George Bass initiated underwater archaeology. Throckmorton found lost ships all over the world, most famously a 3,200-year-old wreck at Bodrum on the Aegean coast. He was the first to realise that "it was possible to do scientific archaeology under water." He acutely observed, "What historians had missed, the sea remembered."Trevor Norton's fascinating book is full of humorous stories and conveys masses of information in a charming and easy style.

Brave Oddballs Who Opened Underneath the Sea to Us

This is a very rare book. It looks at brave pioneers in an honest and humorous way. You will get a sense of daredevils challenging fate from these stories about the development of undersea exploration by divers. I called them "oddballs" in my title because most were quite unusual in their personal characteristics, as you will learn from reading the book. Families, personal possessions, and social lives were unusual in almost all cases. They remind me a lot of the barnstorming aviators who pioneered air services. The book is a series of vignettes about those who first developed diving gear, did underwater biological research, collected samples for museums, learned how to balance gases and pressures to avoid death and injury from diving, hunted underwater with spears, farmed underwater with oysters, took photographs underwater, made movies underwater, and performed archeology on ship wrecks.The stories are remarkable for three characteristics. First, it took a lot of guts to try these things. The gear wasn't so good, and the dangers were very great. A lot of injury and death did follow. Second, in doing research, these men usually employed themselves as guinea pigs at great personal risk. Many had their lives shortened or their health damaged as a result. Third, almost all of the pioneers ravaged and despoiled whatever area they initially studied. For example, vast reefs were dynamited to bring back samples that museums later discarded. More rare pottery was destroyed in early undersea archeology than was collected. Some of these men thought better of it later, and argued for changed methods.Some of the people were genuises, uncovering major areas of new knowledge (like the Haldanes, father and son). Others were simply gifted tinkerers. Some were just in the right place at the right time with a yen to scratch. But they all had magnificent passions and harnessed those passions to invent methods that have important applications today. The stories are enlivened by many drawings and photographs of the people and their work. The newer pioneers were personally known by the author, Professor Norton, and his recollections add much to the reader's enjoyment. If you have ever marveled at sites under water that you have seen on television, in movies, or in books, you will be riveted by this book. The bulk of the developments that make these accomplishments possible are quite new, and were hard-wrought in most cases. Professor Norton tells his tales like an old salt holding a pint of grog in a smoky tavern near a fire in a fishing harbor on the Irish Sea. You'll love them!After you have finished enjoying this book, I encourage you to think about where else you do not know the background of some wonderful modern capability that inspires you. What about cave exploration? Many of the great beauties in caves were unknown until the last few hundred years. Then go learn more about whatever inspiring subject it is that you do not yet know t