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Chapter 1: Who was Jacques Cousteau and what were his contributions to ocean exploration?
I'm Clark Peters, and this is Founding Fathers, An American Dream. In a sweltering room in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence. In an open valley, George Washington leads a ragtag army against the mighty British Empire. And in New York City, a furious crowd tears down a statue of the king. 250 years ago, the United States of America was born.
But how did the people overthrow British rule? How did they invent a radical new nation? And who lost out along the way? From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Founding Fathers, An American Dream. The real story of how the U.S. was created and why its legacies still matter. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode is dedicated to the late Doug Allen, our expert guest on Jacques Cousteau, who sadly died while trekking in Nepal in the weeks after our interview was recorded. One of the great wildlife cameramen of his generation, Doug devoted his life to filming the natural world with skill, bravery, and deep humanity.
We were honored by his contribution to this episode and we dedicate it to his memory. It is a summer morning in June 1943. Outside the railway station in the seaside village of Bandol on the French Riviera, a car pulls up. Its driver, a tall, lean naval officer by the name of Jacques Cousteau, jumps out and strides towards the station.
In the railway's freight yard, a wooden crate waits for him, sent by express from Paris. Cousteau signs for it and takes it to his car. Back at the villa, where he is staying with friends and family, there is an air of anticipation.
He unpacks the parcel with his two closest friends, Philippe Talier and Frédéric Dumas, whose weather-beaten faces and sinewy bodies betray a love of diving as deep as Cousteau's own. The parcel contains a new kind of equipment, which he has co-invented with an engineer in Paris, something that might change the way humans explore the sea.
Excitedly, he lifts out three moderately-sized cylinders of compressed air, linked to a small regulator about the size of an alarm clock. From the regulator, two hoses extend, joining at a mouthpiece through which, it is hoped, a diver might be able to breathe underwater. It's been months in development, but finally it's time to test it out.
Early the next day, the group of friends with Cousteau's wife, Simone, head out to a nearby beach. The men help Cousteau strap on the harness, securing the three-cylinder block to his back, and perform their final safety checks. He rinses his mask, then slides it into place and positions the mouthpiece between his lips. Staggering under the weight of the 50-pound apparatus, he wades into the sea.
Wearing her snorkel and mask, Simone slips into the water so she can keep an eye on him. Frederic Dumas, the group's best diver, remains on the shore, keeping warm and rested so he can move quickly if Jacques needs help. Just six months ago, the last trial of this compressed-air diving lung failed thanks to issues with the exhaust mechanism.
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Chapter 2: How did Jacques Cousteau invent the Aqua-Lung and change underwater exploration?
And what were the tragedies and controversies that marked the life of this charismatic adventurer? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Jacques Cousteau. On June 11, 1910, in a small French market town not far from Bordeaux, Daniel Cousteau and Elisabeth Duranton welcome their second son.
The younger brother to Pierre Antoine, Jacques is born into an affluent family. Doug Allen was an underwater cameraman for series such as Blue Planet, Planet Earth, and Frozen Planet. He was also a lecturer on conservation and climate change. This interview was recorded shortly before he passed away, in April 2026.
His father was an international lawyer, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy local wine merchant and landowner, so he wouldn't bother to straighten circumstances, let's say.
After Jacques' birth in the village his parents come from, his mother and father returned to their home in Paris. Often ill as a child, Jacques shows his determination from an early age. During a family holiday at a Normandy seaside resort when he is four years old, he learns to swim. The same summer, in 1914, the First World War breaks out across Europe.
Jacques' father, Daniel, loses the single client upon which his salary depends, and the family are forced to rely on Elizabeth's family money for the next four years. But when the war ends in 1918, Daniel is offered a new position on the condition that the family traveled to New York. And it's after crossing the Atlantic that the shy young Jacques comes out of his shell.
When he moved to New York at the age of 10 he learned to speak English fluently and he improved his swimming and he also did some snorkeling. Apparently he spent a summer camp in Vermont where he was assigned to clear debris in the lake and he spent hours swimming around getting things out of the water and moving them ashore and he called that a very formative experience.
In America, Jacques' older brother, Pierre-Antoine, who is also known as PAC, the acronym of his initials, becomes his closest companion. Both strong-willed and charismatic, the brothers share a spirit of adventure, which will take them on different paths. In 1923, the family moves back to France.
Jacques saves his allowance to buy a hand-cranked movie camera and finds that using it gives him greater confidence and allows him to make friends more easily. At 14, he completes his first full-length project, filming his cousin's wedding. At school, however, his newfound self-assurance sometimes tips into mischief.
After being expelled for breaking windows, he is sent to a boarding school 250 miles from home. It's strict, but he thrives under its discipline. And in 1929, at the age of 19, he graduates from high school and joins the French Navy. There his work will bring him closer to what will become his greatest love, the sea.
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Chapter 3: What personal challenges and tragedies did Cousteau face during his life?
With his enthusiasm for cinematography still going strong, Cousteau finds ways to protect his camera underwater, such as sealing it inside a glass jar. Encouraged by his friends, he also begins diving, reaching depths of up to 50 feet.
Having grown up on the books of Jules Verne, author of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the young adventurers push themselves further each day, aspiring to become what they call men-fish. But their dives leave them craving more time to explore the depths. By the 1930s, divers are experimenting with compressed air systems that allow them to breathe underwater for limited periods.
But the available equipment is heavy and restrictive. Cousteau and his colleagues test these early designs, but their shortcomings quickly become clear. In one experiment, Cousteau loses consciousness after breathing an unsafe level of oxygen. Another key challenge is that divers must manually regulate the flow of air from the tank, releasing it in careful bursts.
What is needed, Cousteau believes, is a mobile device capable of adjusting the airflow automatically. The possibility of moving freely beneath the surface becomes a burning ambition. But in September 1939, the wider world has more urgent plans. Germany invades Poland, and France, alongside Britain, declares war.
While his friends are reassigned to duties in other parts of the country, Cousteau remains stationed at Toulon. In May 1940, France is invaded by the Nazis, with whom the French sign an armistice the following month. With German troops occupying Paris and the north, the government retreats south.
For Cousteau and Simone, these anxious times are lightened by the happy arrival of their second son, Philippe, named after his father's good friend, Philippe Tallier. A couple of years later, Cousteau is posted to a base in Marseille. That spring, he finds a 35mm movie camera in a junk shop. With help from his friends, he begins adapting it for use in the sea.
He invented or made underwater housings for different cameras. And of course, a pair of them were quite well placed because they were both officers in the French Navy and they had access to the workshops in the dockyards that they were based in.
I often wonder how many of his early housings were done as favours by the people in the workshops who maybe weren't supposed to be working on these one-offs for Cousteau, but they just had some spare time and so they would machine them down some components.
That summer, reunited with his family and the sea musketeers, Cousteau works on a film capturing his friend's spearfishing, which he titles 18 Meters Down. But in November, Cousteau and his family are woken in the night by the roar of airplanes overhead. On the radio, they learn that Adolf Hitler has ordered the invasion of southern France. German and Italian forces are now moving in.
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Chapter 4: How did Cousteau's documentaries influence public perception of the ocean?
He has just survived, arguably, the most dangerous ten minutes of his life. After the war, Cousteau is awarded the Légion d'honneur, France's highest order of merit, in recognition of his courageous service to the resistance. But before the conflict is over, Simone has a brainwave.
She asks her father if he knows anyone at Air Liquide who might be able to help her husband in his mission to breathe underwater. So it is that Cousteau meets a quiet engineer by the name of Emile Gagnin. He shows Cousteau a small device called a demand regulator, which is designed to release compressed gas only when required.
Intrigued, Cousteau immediately sees how such a mechanism might be adapted for diving, and the pair begin adapting the regulator for underwater use. But their first attempt, in January 1943, works only when Cousteau is horizontal. As soon as he dives with his head down and his feet up, he can barely draw a breath.
Gagné makes some adjustments to the design, and six months later, in June 1943, Cousteau enters the Mediterranean to test the modified apparatus. It is a resounding success. He is able to spend around half an hour breathing freely as he explores underwater. His dream of becoming a man-fish has come true.
And he was developing all these things right under the eyes of the Nazis. It was remarkable how he managed to do it. And he has a wonderful description of when he had the working aqualung in his hands, he and Tellier were able to dive under the water. And while the rest of France was
struggling for food, they would come back with armfuls of lobsters that they had caught underneath the Mediterranean using their new equipment. And they themselves were able to pass these lobsters around their friends and live at a much better standard in a way than a lot of France was doing at the time.
Cousteau sends word back to Gagné in Paris to apply for a patent and asks for two similar prototypes for Tellier and Dumas. The pair called their invention the Aqualung. It is a device that will open up the underwater world to ordinary people.
Effectively democratized diving. It meant that diving went out to anyone who could swim virtually, could learn to dive. And so the invention of the Aqualung, the invention of scuba. Scuba stands for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. The invention of scuba was definitely one of Cousteau's greatest achievements.
Soon Cousteau and his friends begin to clock up hundreds of dives between them. Simone becomes the world's first female scuba diver, and even the children have the opportunity to try out their father's new equipment in shallow waters. The sea musketeers begin exploring local shipwrecks and bring treasures back to the surface. Crockery, silverware, even bottles of pre-war perfume.
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Chapter 5: What were the controversies surrounding Cousteau's filming techniques?
A diver called Maurice Farg reaches 385 feet, but loses consciousness underwater. It is the Aqualung's first fatality. Yet despite the tragedy, demand for Cousteau's invention continues to grow. Before long, the Aqualung is being sold not only across Europe, but also in the United States and Canada. With publicity building, Cousteau hires his father as a business agent. When Cousteau Sr.
helps set up a screening of his son's short films, a magazine editor makes inquiries about the Frenchman who can breathe underwater. The resulting seven-page feature in Life magazine, featuring the diver's dramatic photos of sharks, reaches more than 10 million readers. A week later, Cousteau accepts an offer from Universal Studios of $11,000 for his first four documentaries.
But for that, he needs a vessel of his own, and soon the perfect solution is found. The wooden-hulled Calypso began its life during the Second World War as a British minesweeper.
He didn't buy it himself, it was a billionaire from the Guinness family who actually leased it to him for one euro for a year. And then at the end of it he acquired it completely for himself. And he fitted it out as the perfect expedition diving vessel. He modified bits of the structure, but he made it a place where he could roam the world with his team of divers.
He went from Antarctica to Tasmania to the Mississippi River.
The Cousteaus remortgage their house to help renovate the Calypso, and Simone sells her jewelry to raise more funds. Cousteau refits the vessel for exploration, adding a bulbous bow with eight viewing windows for filming underwater. He takes three years' leave from the navy and assembles a team of divers, including Dumas.
On the evening before they depart, the crew gather around the small galley table for dinner. Their captain, Cousteau, makes a toast to their new adventure, closing with his motto, Il faut aller voir. We must go and see for ourselves. On November 24, 1951, the Calypso sets out on its first expedition to the Red Sea, a narrow stretch of water between northeastern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
Cousteau cheerfully describes it as a nice hot bathtub full of sharks. In its warm waters, the crew encounter dazzling coral reefs and identify previously unknown species. The following year, he discovers a 2,000-year-old Greek shipwreck off the coast of Marseille, from which he recovers ancient ceramics.
He also now establishes the French Office of Undersea Technology in Toulon, a center dedicated to inventing and improving diving equipment and underwater technology. With the help of Dumas, he also begins writing about his adventures. The resulting book, The Silent World, becomes a New York Times bestseller.
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Chapter 6: How did Jacques Cousteau advocate for marine conservation?
And he actually envisioned people living under the sea, partly as humans, but there was also experiments into, for example, they flooded the lungs of mice with super-oxygenated water and found that these mice could live underwater no problem. So I think of this idea of let's look at a different form of humans, a different way of human beings actually living underwater.
The first step in this ambitious journey is a project called Corn Shelf One. It is a watertight capsule the size of a large bedroom which sits at around 33 feet below the surface of the coast of Marseille. The aquanauts, as they are known, are under daily medical supervision, and with air pumped in, they enter and exit through a hole in the floor, known as the moon pool.
The air pressure inside the chamber prevents the water from flooding in.
And it was just a very simple cylinder, which was put into the water in the Mediterranean, down to a depth of 10 meters, and two people lived in it for a week. So he decided to take that to the next stage, and he designed Khonshav II, which was a much bigger thing. That was really like a village underneath the sea.
In the Red Sea of the coast of Sudan, Corn Shelf 2 features two separate residences. At 100 feet, the deep cabin is home to just two aquanauts for a week. The bigger habitat, close to the surface at 33 feet, is called Starfish House. Taking its name from its shape, it is a two-story structure with everything from air conditioning to sun lamps to a garage for the diving saucer.
There, five aquanauts live and work for a month. Air is pumped from the Italian cargo ship Risaldo, though the smaller Calypso ferries supplies from the shore. And visitors from the Risaldo can pop to the underwater village for a visit. It is July 1963, a swelteringly hot day. Off the coast of Sudan, Simone Cousteau stands on the deck of Rosaldo, preparing to dive.
She shifts her weight under the cylinder on her back. After getting a final once-over from a crew member, with her fins in one hand, she begins to descend the ladder on the side of the ship. When the water reaches her chest, she rinses out her mask, pulls it on and fits her mouthpiece, taking a testing breath. Then, slipping on her fins, she surrenders to the cool water.
Immediately the noises of the world above disappear, replaced by just the steady rhythm of her own breathing through the aqualung. Kicking away, she begins her descent. The Red Sea opens in astonishing clarity. The reef below rises to meet her, a garden in motion, with coral growing in multiple shapes and forms. Every inch is vivid with life.
Antheas flicker past in clouds of orange, and a pair of brilliant butterflyfish glide by. Below her, the continental shelf dips away into deeper blue. She exhales and lets herself sink a little more, the pressure tightening briefly around her ears before releasing as she equalizes. She swims on, glancing at her compass. Not far now.
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Chapter 7: What impact did Cousteau's inventions have on diving and exploration?
I remember one of the episodes of the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau where he took two young fur seal pups from I think a rookery in South Africa and took them on board the Calypso with this idea of seeing how they would adapt to being with humans. which is a mad idea. It never worked. They just kept biting people and they had to be kept in cages all the time.
And I think eventually they were let loose in another part of the world where, to be honest, their chances of survival were tiny. Now, that's the sort of thing that, you know, even at the time, there must have been people who thought, this is a mad idea, Jacques, you know, it'll make... a storyline through one of your programs, but let's not go there.
On the other hand, it was transmitted at the time, and it's more an indication of the sort of ethics of filmmaking at the time, which have moved on since then. So it's that whole question of judging someone by the historical standards of the day, let's say.
The popular television show runs for eight years, ending in 1976, by which time the tall, thin Frenchman in his trademark knitted red hat, together with his plucky crew, is known all over the world. In the late 60s and early 70s, Cousteau and his divers begin to notice a deterioration in the world's oceans.
I think it's easy to forget just how pristine the Mediterranean was when Cousteau was born and between the wars, before it all began to get industrialised around the edge and things. So Cousteau was very aware of the riches in the Mediterranean and then he was one of the first people to go and explore places like the Red Sea and further abroad. So he saw the oceans as a lovely period in history.
And if you can draw a parallel between Cousteau and David Attenborough, for example, anyone who has seen the world the way that they have since the mid-50s to today, you cannot help but become aware of the human influence on the oceans.
In 1973, Cousteau founds a non-profit organization, the Cousteau Society, to protect the oceans and restore marine habitats. With offices in New York and Los Angeles and the French branch L'Equipe Cousteau in Paris, it offers membership to the general public. Jacques serves as chairman, with his son Philippe as vice president.
Philippe from early on was definitely going to be Cousteau's heir and successor. And the pair of them were very, very close. Although they did have some heated arguments, Philippe became more involved with the making of the films. The undersea world of Jacques Cousteau became more of a character in them.
It is in part Philippe's influence that helps Cousteau develop a stronger focus on the environment. Together he and his father speak to governments and the general public about the urgent need to reduce pollution and protect the planet. Cousteau's life is now one of a busy international star.
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Chapter 8: How did Jacques Cousteau's legacy continue after his passing?
Through his pioneering films, inventions, and expeditions, he brought the hidden world of the oceans into public view. As a leading voice for marine conservation, he helped to protect the fragile environment he'd spent his life exploring.
Though his early work was marked by some controversial decisions and his later years by his complicated personal life, Cousteau's enduring achievement was to make the oceans not just a place of discovery, but a cause worth defending.
He embodies adventure under the sea, and he is still the name that comes to mind when so many people talk about where they got their inspiration from the sea. Jacques Cousteau will come up, and it's because his films are still out there on the internet, his books are still out there and available, and because his principles are stronger than ever about the need to look after the oceans.
Next time on Short History, we'll bring you a short history of punk.
Punk plays a pretty long game, I think, in terms of the impact that, if we're talking the British context, Sex Pistols have just in terms of inspiring a whole generation of musicians to come up with really constantly evolving and interesting and exciting forms of music and musical presentation.
It opened up a space for lots of people who previously probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to do creative things and to do creative things in ways that fundamentally changed the culture of Britain and the world. That's next time.
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