THE IMPENETRABLE SEA 



tion, he and his two friends were diving into the waters 

 of the Mediterranean repeatedly. They and their famihes 

 hved in a house near Marseilles. They carried out more 

 than five hundred experiments with the Aqualung, and 

 their underwater adventures then and since, recorded in 

 a number of books and magazine articles, make fas- 

 cinating reading. The day came when Dumas, testing 

 his Aqualung, went deeper than any skin diver before 

 him. Cousteau, from his "observation post" a hundred 

 feet beneath the waves, watched him disappear. Dumas 

 went down to two hundred and ten feet, and returned to 

 the surface safe and happy — in his own words, ''as merry 

 as a bubble". Representing the greatest advance to date 

 in diving equipment, the Aqualung has been used for 

 years, safely and comfortably, as standard equipment of 

 the British, French and U.S. Navies; also by shipping 

 companies, life-guards, harbour commissions and cinema 

 organizations. It is also used by the Universities of Wash- 

 ington, California, and Wisconsin, and many Fishery 

 Investigations. 



Salvage companies use them continually for heavy 

 underwater work, and French submarine crews have 

 used them successfully to escape from their vessels. 

 Thousands of yachtsmen and sporting fishermen use 

 them. Doing field work in a scarcely explored realm, 

 marine biologists, archaeologists, hydrologists and other 

 scientists find them invaluable. The police have used the 

 services of local Aqualung owners on a number of 

 occasions to recover bodies. 



The ultimate depth to which divers will descend wear- 

 ing Aqualungs is still a matter for conjecture. The count- 

 less investigations and experiments which have been 

 made to date have revealed some sensational facts. Man- 

 kind lives and learns, and the barriers of yesterday are 

 the easily-cleared hurdles of today. Dr. Halley, who 

 sincerely believed (a little over two hundred years ago) 

 that the absolute time hmit of a diver's endurance under 



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