A car crash ended Cousteau's flying career and sent him underwater
Jacques Cousteau trained as a French naval gunnery officer and hoped to become a pilot, until an automobile accident broke both his arms. He turned instead to the sea, co-created the Aqua-Lung, and made a documentary that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, one of very few non-fiction films ever to do so.
A native of Saint-André-de-Cubzac in the Gironde, where he arrived on 11 June 1910, Cousteau entered the French naval academy in 1930. Serving in Toulon, he made his first underwater experiments in 1936 after his friend Philippe Tailliez lent him a pair of Fernez goggles, forerunners of modern swim goggles. He married Simone Melchior in 1937, and their sons later joined the adventures aboard Calypso.
Existing breathing gear frustrated him. In 1939 he tried the self-contained apparatus Yves le Prieur had invented in 1926 but wanted longer dives, so he added a demand regulator that engineer Émile Gagnan had designed in 1942. Air Liquide built early prototypes to their instructions, and in 1943 Cousteau used two of them to film Épaves, about shipwrecks. That film persuaded the navy to set up an underwater research group in Toulon. In 1948 his team explored the Roman wreck at Mahdia in Tunisia, the first archaeological dive using autonomous breathing gear.
In 1950 he leased Calypso from Thomas Loel Guinness for a symbolic single franc a year and refitted her as a floating laboratory and film platform. His 1953 book described watching porpoises steer the best course through the Strait of Gibraltar even when his ship veered off it, from which he correctly guessed they had something like sonar. The film version, co-directed with Louis Malle, took the Palme d'Or in 1956 and remained the only documentary to win until 2004.
He ran Monaco's Oceanographic Museum from 1957, and in the early 1960s built the Conshelf seafloor habitats, each pushing deeper the level at which divers lived for long periods. In 1960 he helped rally opposition to a planned dump of radioactive waste in the Mediterranean between Nice and Corsica. His television series ran from 1966 to 1976, with a sequel until 1982. He died on 25 June 1997.
Source: Jacques Cousteau
