A Brief History Of Diving
Often in the history of mankind the desire to explore, and the consequent technology that evolves from this need to discover, spawns a leisure pursuit that captures the imagination of the masses.
Back to Basics
Skiing, rock-climbing, skydiving and pot holing have all become mainstream hobbies for those of us who have a yearning for excitement.
Indeed so popular have these type of action diversions become that the phrase "adrenaline junkies" was coined to describe the section of the human population dedicated to thrill seeking and high risk leisure activities.
One such activity however has leapt ahead of the rest in terms of popularity, and this mass interest has spawned a safety culture that makes it an exciting yet relative safe way of walking on the wild side.
This activity is of course scuba diving and with nearly a million new divers qualifying every year it looks like a hobby that is here to stay.
Diving has been around for thousands of years and there is indirect historical evidence - mother-of-pearl ornaments and artwork depicting divers - that man was exploring the depths as far back as 500BC.
Without the benefit of modern equipment, a "breath holding" type of diving was practiced in ancient times in order to hunt, gather treasures, repair ships and more probably than not, to sink them.
This unassisted method dictated that the time spent underwater was short lived and frantic. The need for equipment to enable an extended and more relaxed submersion led man through a long and dangerous journey that led to the type of sophisticated apparatus that scuba divers enjoy today.
This journey most probably began with the use of a hollow reed through which the intrepid aquanaut could draw breath. This would have allowed divers to remain submerged indefinitely and to avoid detection from the surface.
Indeed, Lawrence Martin evokes the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus, who chronicles an episode that bears testimony to this basic sub-aqua technique:
During a naval campaign the Greek Scyllis was taken aboard ship as prisoner by the Persian King Xerxes I. When Scyllis learned that Xerxes was to attack a Greek flotilla, he seized a knife and jumped overboard. The Persians could not find him in the water and presumed he had drowned. Scyllis surfaced at night and made his way among all the ships in Xerxes's fleet, cutting each ship loose from its moorings; he used a hollow reed as snorkel to remain unobserved. Then he swam nine miles (15 kilometers) to rejoin the Greeks off Cape Artemisium.
Heroic tales notwithstanding, this technique was severely limiting in that it is virtually impossible to breath through any tube over two feet long because of the restrictive affect of water pressure.
Other methods from the time utilised an air filled bag which ended in failure because of the poisonous effects of the expelled carbon dioxide and it wasn't until the sixteenth century that any significant advances in underwater technology were made.
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