JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born in St. André de Cubzac, France, in 1910, and entered the French Naval Academy in 1930. From 1933 to 1935, he served in the Far East, aboard a cruiser and ashore in Shanghai. He trained as a Navy flier until a serious automobile accident ended his aviation career. Then, he tried underwater goggles for the first time, and his future course was set. In 1943, he and Emile Gagnan developed the first regulated compressed-air breathing device for sustained, unencumbered diving, called SCUBA. After World War II, he created, with Commander Philippe Tailliez and Frederic Dumas, an underwater research unit to carry out technical experiments and laboratory studies in diving.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau diving

Captain Cousteau produced more than 100 films for television, which won Emmys and numerous other awards. He also produced three full-length theatrical feature films, The Silent World (Oscar and Palme d'Or), World Without Sun (Oscar and Grand Prix du Cinema Francais pour la Jeunesse) and Voyage to the Edge of the World. Captain Cousteau wrote, in collaboration with various co-authors, more than fifty books, published in more than a dozen languages.

In 1950, Captain Cousteau acquired Calypso, a retired minesweeper, built in the US. Over the next year, she was transformed into an oceanographic vessel and the adventures of the now-famous ship began. In collaboration with engineer Jean Mollard, Captain Cousteau designed the Diving Saucer in 1959, a round, maneuverable, two-person submersible capable of diving to a depth of 350 meters. In 1965, he launched twin one-man submersibles, the Sea Fleas. He also directed three experiments in saturation-diving: Conshelf I off Marseilles (1962), Conshelf II in the Red Sea (1963) and Conshelf III (1965), near Nice, in which six men breathing a helium-oxygen mixture lived and worked at 100 meters for three weeks. Captain Cousteau, Professor Lucien Malavard and Bertrand Charrier inaugurated the development of the Turbosail™ wind-propulsion system, used by Alcyone, to set an example of using clean alternative energy for transportation.
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In 1992, Captain Cousteau was an official guest at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. The following year, he was appointed to the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Sustainable Development and agreed to serve as advisor on environmentally sustainable development to the World Bank. That same year, the President of France named him Chairman of a newly-created Council on the Rights of Future Generations; Captain Cousteau resigned this post in 1995 to protest France's resumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific. Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau died June 25, 1997. The Cousteau Society, which he founded in 1973, continues his effort to protect and improve the quality of life for present and future generations.