"Of course I was inspired by Jacques Cousteau. For all of us who have turned to the sea for our vocations, as well as for those drawn to diving as a hobby and recreation, he was and always will be an icon. He fitted us with wings to bridge that millennia-old barrier between air-breathing, terrestrial man and the animals of the marine world.
The words of Shakespeare applied to Caesar could truly be directed to the passing of Jacques Cousteau:
Death makes no conquest of this conqueror For now he lives in fame, though not in life (Richard III). "
Stanton Waterman
Underwater cinematographer

Kendall McDonald

Cousteau had just graduated from the French Naval Academy at Brest in Brittany and was well on his way to becoming a naval pilot. Like most young cadets, planes and cars and girls were Cousteau's main interests, and an invitation to a friend's wedding in the Vosges mountains was a good excuse to borrow his father's Salmson sports car. The peppy car made fun of the hairpin bends and Cousteau made good time despite the darkness - until his headlights failed. He slammed on the brakes but it was too late. The car flew off the edge of the mountain.

Years later Cousteau recalled that crash: "It was about two in the morning and as I lay in the wreckage, I thought I was going to die. I was losing blood and there were 12 bones broken in my body."

Both arms were broken, his left arm in five places, and he was paralysed on one side. The surgeons wanted to amputate the arm at once, but Cousteau refused.
His dream of being a naval pilot was over. On his recovery he was gazetted as a lieutenant at the Toulon naval base, where he was assigned to gunnery. He found himself working with another lieutenant, Philippe Tailliez, who suggested that Cousteau's right arm, still slightly twisted, would benefit from plenty of swimming. The two swam every day and soon found that another man was swimming from the same beach - Frederic Dumas. "Didi" Dumas swam to spear fish, and he soon taught Tailliez and Cousteau to do the same. Cousteau was 26 when he took his first look underwater under the guidance of Didi off the beach at Le Mourillon, now a suburb of Toulon. His life was changed forever.

Not that he saw anything wonderful:"My feet were on shingle, some dark rocks nearby were covered with green and brown weed, and there were some little fish whose name I did not know. But it was enough. It was another world!" Lieutenant Jacques-Yves Cousteau became one of the South of France's most ardent spearfishermen, which is odd considering his later "war" against spearfishing. But Cousteau was hooked on the diving down as much as the spearing, and he desperately wanted to find a way to stay down longer than he could hold his breath.

BY now he was a gunnery officer aboard the cruiser Suffren. He discovered that the gunsmith of the ship could make practically anything, so he got him to build an oxygen rebreather to his own design. It was self-contained, and used a small oxygen bottle and a canister of soda-lime.

His first dive with the apparatus could have been his last. He described the experience: "Below me I saw a big blue dentex with a bitter mouth and hostile eyes. I went down and the fish backed away. "Suddenly my lips began to tremble uncontrollably. My eyelids fluttered. My spine was bent backward like a bow. With a violent jerk I tore off the weightbelt and lost consciousness." His body floated unconscious to the surface and his sailors quickly hauled him out. For weeks afterwards he had pains in his neck and other muscles, and thought it was because the soda-lime had been impure. He built a better oxygen lung, but the same thing happened.

The war had started and Cousteau was now married to Simone. It was her father who provided the key to swimming with the fishes. He was a director of Air Liquide, France's principal producer of industrial gases. At its laboratory in Paris, Air Liquide was trying to make cars that could run on something other than petrol.

Cousteau's father-in-law realised that Emile Gagnan, the engineer in charge of those experiments, was working on a valve similar to one that Cousteau now wished to develop, as a means of breathing compressed air, rather than oxygen, under water. In December 1942 he arranged for them to meet. The two found they were working along the same lines, and Cousteau managed to persuade his father-in-law to fund the valve's development in the Air Liquide laboratories.

Within three weeks the first prototype was ready. The demand valve was the size of a small alarm clock and the air came from two small cylinders. Impatient to test it, the two men found a lonely stretch of the River Marne, not far from Paris, and when they were confident that no Germans were about, Cousteau entered the water with the new gear.

He described what happened: "At first the regulator provided plenty of air, with no effort on my part. But the air rushed wastefully out of the exhaust pipe. I tried standing on my head amid the bottom weed, but the air supply almost ceased and I couldn't breathe. I tried swimming horizontally and the air flowed in a perfectly controlled rhythm. But how were we going to dive if we could not operate vertically?"

The two men went home chilled and disappointed.There was no problem with the first stage of the valve, so what could be wrong? Cousteau later explained: "When I swam horizontally, the exhaust and intake were at the same pressure level and the regulator worked perfectly. We arrived at the simple solution of placing the exhaust as close as possible to the intake so that pressure variations could not disrupt the flow." They developed a new device and it worked perfectly, so well that they filed a patent application in wartime Paris and called it the "Aqualung".

BY now the whole of France was occupied and the Resistance was growing stronger. Cousteau's Resistance group was ordered to try to get a copy of the Italian Navy's codebook. This mission was to win him the Croix de Guerre and after the war he became a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. It was a major coup, and the Italians never suspected that their codes had been stolen. The information was a vast help to the Allies' later invasion of Sicily.

The month before the Allied invasion of Italy, the first completed aqualung arrived for Cousteau from Gagnan. Cousteau was now living at Bandol, a little resort near the naval base at Toulon. One sunny morning in June, Cousteau left the house early to make his way to the railway station of Bandol. Waiting for him was a heavy wooden case, and in it was the very first aqualung. He could hardly wait to get it back to the villa where Philippe Tailliez and Frederic Dumas were waiting.
The three men were like children opening a Christmas present. In the box were three medium-sized cylinders of compressed air, linked to the regulator, still just the size of an alarm clock. From the regulator came two tubes joining a mouthpiece. This was it. They harnessed the three-cylinder block to Cousteau's back with the regulator at the nape of his neck. He buckled on a weightbelt and walked like Charlie Chaplin into the sea. He looked down. "A modest canyon opened below, full of green weeds, black sea urchins and small flower-like white algae. The sand sloped down into a clear blue infinity. The sun struck so brightly I had to squint. With my arms hanging at my sides, I kicked the fins languidly and travelled down, gaining speed, watching the beach rolling past. "I stopped kicking and the momentum carried me on a fabulous glide. When I stopped I slowly emptied my lungs and held my breath. The diminished volume of my body decreased the lifting force of water and I sank dreamily down. I inhaled a great chestful and retained it. Then I rose towards the surface..." The world's first aqualung dive had begun. He did loops, somersaults and barrel rolls. He stood upside down on one finger and burst out laughing. It worked!

Forty minutes later, Cousteau surfaced, cold but delighted. They had been goggle-diving for eight years, but now the sea was theirs.

When Cousteau dived so did his camera in its special case. The first dives produced a short film called Par Dix-Huit Metres de Fond (Sixty Feet Down).
The second was made in 1943 when they discovered the sunken British steamer, Dalton, in 20m and was called simply Epaves (Wrecks). And the third was made in 1944, Paysages du Silence (Silent Landscapes).

At the end of the war, French naval commanders saw that the new diving equipment could be used to help clear the mines and munitions blocking ports and harbours. They commissioned Cousteau and Tailliez to form the Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches Sous-Marines and to train teams of human minesweepers. One of the first recruits, of course, was Frederic Dumas.

In 1950, shortly after his 40th birthday, Cousteau was given the former Malta ferry, Calypso, by the English MP, Loel Guinness. Cousteau took special leave from active duty in the French navy to indulge his love of underwater photography in research expeditions all over the world. After two years of voyages and 1000 dives, Cousteau produced his film, The Silent World. From the moment the first bubbles burst on the soundtrack, the audience was spellbound for 87 full-colour minutes. Suddenly, French factories could not turn out aqualungs fast enough. Everyone wanted to be Captain Cousteau...

In Britain the first BSAC branches, which had been formed after the appearance of the book of the same name in 1953, were swamped with would-be divers. Around this time Cousteau turned his attention to conservation, and came out against spearfishing. He made his famous "Homo Aquaticus" speech about men with gills at the First World Congress in London, and the BSAC asked him speak at the second congress. But he refused to appear unless the BSAC could guarantee that there was not a single spearfisherman in the audience. It was an impossible assurance to give, so he did not appear. It seemed odd that his name went on appearing on advertisements for US Divers, which was marketing spearguns.

Cousteau became totally ruthless about fund-raising for his beloved Calypso and marine conservation, and he retired from the navy to cope with the organisation that grew up around him. Calypso was soon France's official oceanographic vessel, and Cousteau was everywhere. At this time, US President John F Kennedy presented him with the National Geographic Society's Gold Medal.

In 1962, he began the Conshelf experiments. The Continental Shelf Station was a yellow cylinder in which two "oceanauts" lived for a week, 12m down off Marseilles. In June, 1963, Conshelf Two was up and running, with five men living in a starfish-shaped house in the Red Sea for four weeks. This project spawned a film, World Without Sun, starring silver-suited divers. It became a box-office sensation and won an Oscar in 1964 for the best documentary.There followed 12 television episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

He was always short of money for his projects, but, in 1978, the formation of the Cousteau Society gave him a powerful base from which to launch his conservation ideas and influence governments. During these years Cousteau spent most of his time filming, although he was beginning to let son Philippe adopt a role as front-man. However, in 1979 Philippe was killed landing the latest piece of Cousteau equipment, a Catalina flying boat, on the River Tagus near Lisbon.
Cousteau turned to his other son, Jean-Michel, who thrived on administration. It was his hand that organised the biggest Cousteau expedition of all in 1982 - a team of 50 spent 15 months up and under the Amazon. Then, in 1983, they turned the spotlight on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, Cousteau was working on his idea for a "turbosail" ship, the Alcyone - a cargo ship driven entirely by wind power.

Towards the end of his life, Cousteau topped the polls for being the world's best-known and most respected diver. On his 75th birthday he was presented with America's highest civilian honour, the Medal of Freedom, by President Reagan. In 1985, he began work on another film odyssey, which was planned to last over five years, called The Rediscovery of the World. It was to be his last major project.

In 1990, Simone Cousteau died and Jean-Michel discovered that he was not the only Cousteau child. Jacques-Yves had a mistress, Francine Triplet, a former Air France stewardess 40 years his junior. By her he had a daughter, Diane, and another son, Pierre-Yves. In June, 1991, they were married.

Cousteau's relationship with Jean-Michel turned frosty. They had disagreed for some time, but things got much worse - Cousteau sued his son over the use of the Cousteau name for a holiday centre in Fiji. Francine became a director of the Cousteau Society, which moved its headquarters back to Paris from America, and Jean-Michel resigned.

In January 1996, Calypso sank after being accidentally holed in a Singapore shipyard. At the end of his life Cousteau was concentrating all the efforts of the Cousteau Society on raising the money to build the turbosail ship that was designed to take her place - Calypso II.

Whatever happens to the Cousteau Society and other projects in the pipeline, there is no doubt about the place in history that Jacques-Yves Cousteau will occupy. He was the Man Who Taught The World To Dive. No one can take that title away from him!

It was 20 years ago and I was a young producer at the Natural History Unit of the BBC. Those inimitable films, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, versioned into English by our Unit in Bristol and screened during the late 60s and early 70s as special editions of our Sunday series, The World About Us, was all that I and millions of other admirers around the world really knew about the most famous Frenchman of all time. I had come to Paris on a pilgrimage of discovery.

Following a circuitous research route by phone and telex across the Atlantic, I was at last at the open door of his apartment in central Paris, tucked away in a private courtyard just off Avenue Foch.

As I crossed the threshold, leaving behind the sounds of the city, classical music filled the elegant room. Music was really his first love, he confided. "Mainly orchestral, but some choral too. Not just French; you English have an enviable musical heritage. And I am always excited by Copeland. American music is very visual." My host prodded a long, bony finger at the buttons on a remote control, and from the room next door the soundtrack changed obediently. It was a new toy, he explained. "Do you have a CD player yet?" he asked. I admitted that I didn't. "You still can't get them in France. This came from America. A gift from the Society. I can control everything, here from my favourite chair," he said.

I produced my own small gift, brought from home in Bristol. What could one give to a legend? On reflection, 20 years later, now that the great man has passed on, my choice of a bottle of home-made elderberry wine seems totally inadequate. But at the time it was graciously if curiously received. It marked the beginning of a friendship and an unspoken kind of trust that led my hero back to the BBC studio in Bristol to make with me a very different kind of television programme - one that was less concerned with exploring beneath the surface of the oceans, but set out to look beneath the surface of the man himself.

That programme, made in 1977, was the first time that Cousteau had appeared in a British television studio. Before an invited audience of divers and marine biologists, film-makers and others who were just admiring fans, he answered searching questions from presenter Julian Pettifer and science journalist Anthony Smith. Cousteau had made it very clear to me that he had "no interest in looking back". The brief for Pettifer and Smith was to find out how Cousteau justified the seemingly contradictory goals of science and entertainment. "I am not a scientist", he repeatedly protested.

Looking back, I had allowed my hero to be put on trial. But at the time there were many sceptical voices about Cousteau's style. This was just the opportunity he needed to clarify how he saw himself, and he was relishing it!
He was essentially just "an engineer turned impresario", someone who revealed the "wonders and the fragility of the ocean world", and pointed others "to the way forward". But a real scientist would have stayed with each new discovery to find out more, pressed Anthony Smith. To my delight, and with a charming air of French arrogance, my hero retorted: "But I am an explorer, not a settler! That's the difference. My job is to reveal and then move on."
Where was he going now? asked Pettifer at the end of the show. What was he now planning? "For one third of the rest of my life, I will continue my physical exploration of the planet. That way I can remain open. I now want to concentrate on fighting the most important issues.

"It's obvious that my fight Number One is against nuclear energy, a threat to all life on the planet. Number Two is the fight against activities that reduce the richness of life on Earth. At the third level, there is damage to the planet that is reparable. That is negotiable. The others are not."

At that point, Cousteau turned confidently to the silent audience and beamed that enigmatic toothy smile. The studio erupted with applause and, as the final credits rolled, we played the famous theme music that the world associates with Jacques-Yves Cousteau - known to his friends by the simple nick-name "Jyc".

With pride I count myself among them. Over the next decade, we met now and then in London and Paris.
We made another special programme together, this time including more about his vociferous opposition to what his compatriot politicians were doing with nuclear power in France and their Pacific territories. It was an environmental theme to which he returned with unwavering commitment.

Two years ago, when France resumed its testing on Muroroa, he stood up to be counted. To his death he uncompromisingly championed the health of our planet. Perhaps it would be a better place if more presenters and makers of natural history films stood up and did the same.