Historical diving equipment

**AptaMer** · 03-30-2016, 08:05 AM

This article will make you glad for having been born after Jacques Cousteau and his friends invented SCUBA gear.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-strange-a...rom-1262529336

and this little short from 1939 shows what diving was like, pre-SCUBA

**Echidna** · 03-30-2016, 09:22 AM

I don't do scuba, but I shudder at the sight of those medieval torture devices all the same xD

Worse, that things like eqalization and decompression sickness were unknown back then.
The italian diver who located a sunken treasure had no eardrums left; and many workers who built the GoldenGate Bridge I think it was- died from decompression sickness.

No wonder the ancient freedivers, who accessed the ocen so freely and uninhibited, were mermaids in the eyes of ordinary people.