The French gas company that built the first modern scuba regulator
Air Liquide sells oxygen, nitrogen and argon to hospitals, chip makers and steelworks around the world. Yet one of its most famous products had nothing to do with factories: in 1943 an Air Liquide engineer and Jacques-Yves Cousteau built the breathing regulator that launched modern recreational diving.
The company rests on a single invention. In May 1902, after two years of work, Georges Claude found a way to liquefy air so its component gases could be separated. That November, Paul Delorme rounded up two dozen backers, mostly engineers, and became first president of a firm set up to exploit Claude's methods, starting with capital of 100,000 francs. It spread quickly to Belgium, Italy, Canada, Japan and Hong Kong and joined the Paris stock exchange in 1913.
Growth came with notably little borrowing; by 1930 debt made up only 15 percent of its resources. During the Second World War, engineer Émile Gagnan worked with Cousteau on prototype diving sets, which Cousteau and Frédéric Dumas used to film the underwater documentary Épaves. In 1946 a new subsidiary, La Spirotechnique, put the CG45 on sale, the first modern regulator available to buy, and scuba diving began to reach ordinary people.
After the war the business turned to heavy industry, laying pipeline networks through major industrial zones from 1957 and entering the space sector in 1962. A research centre at Les Loges-en-Josas opened in 1970. Big purchases followed: Big Three in the United States for 1.05 billion dollars in 1986, Lurgi and Linde's British gas business in 2007, and in 2016 the American distributor Airgas for 13.4 billion including debt.
Today Air Liquide ranks second among industrial gas suppliers by revenue, behind Linde, and works in more than 70 countries from headquarters in Paris. Its projects include the world's largest oxygen production unit, built for Sasol in 2018, biomethane for Norwegian vehicles, and a research campus on the Saclay plateau with a start-up accelerator.
Source: Air Liquide
