Incredibly, a terrible fire on a farm near Whitstable, England, led to the eventual development of modern day diving systems. That was in the year 1820 - almost 200 years ago. The story goes like this: Heavy smoke resulting from a barn fire was preventing rescuers from releasing a valuable team of horses trapped inside. The local fire brigade was trying, to no avail, to use a small water pump to put out the blaze, when a bystander had an idea. The burly man borrowed a helmet from a suit of armor on display in the home nearby, and he asked the firemen to pump air, not water, into the helmet. John Deane's quick thinking allowed him to save the horses that day, and with his ingenuity, the modern diving system was born.
Deane's Patented Diving Dress
At first, John and his brother Charles patented a fire-fighting apparatus in 1823, based on his first hasty invention. By 1828 though, the two men had modified the fire helmet design; they added larger windows and weighted shoes, plus a heavy fabric suit. The helmet rested on the diver's shoulders, and was cinched around his waist with a series of straps. Divers wearing the suit had to stay upright so that air wouldn't escape from the bottom of the helmet, but the invention was still successful. The brothers produced their first dive manual in 1836, and went on to lucrative careers as salvagers. John Deane was still diving at what was then considered to be a very old age; he was salvaging Russian warships beneath the ice of the Black Sea at the ripe old age of 56.
In 1840, Augustus Siebe, a musical instrument maker from Germany, improved on the Deane's design by sealing the helmet to the suit and by improving the helmet's exhaust system. Thus, the Siebe Improved Diving Dress was born, and Siebe Forman and Company went on to become one of the world's most famous diving companies. The Seibe system was used during the fabled salvage of the HMS Royal George, which had been lost in 1783 with the loss of more than 250 women and children onboard to visit loved ones while the ship was being repaired in Portsmouth Harbor. The salvage went on from 1839 to 1842, with Royal Engineers even using underwater explosives for the first time.
Modern Standards Steeped in History
During the salvage of the Royal George, the master of operations instituted the buddy system, insisting that divers work in pairs. Sadly, one of the first medical accounts of a major diving injury occurred during the operation as well; one of the salvagers suffered an emergency and had to ascend rapidly, with high pressure air surrounding his head. His face and neck were swollen, his eyeball capillaries burst, and blood flowed from his ears and mouth. Not surprisingly, Private John Williams never returned to diving, though he survived.
If you think an ear squeeze is painful, consider stories from the era that involve negative pressure from a severed air hose sucking flesh and soft tissues up into the hose, and sucking much of the affected diver's body into his helmet. Often, so much of a diver was sucked up in this way the the helmet would end up in the victim's coffin.
On a more positive note, the Royal Navy Diving School was instituted during this era, and designers began looking at methods for freeing divers from the confines of being tethered to the surface; the Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus was on the brink of being invented, and soon, diving would become a sport.