Diving To Adventure, Hans & Lotte Hass, 1956

[SeaRat]

Take a look at their use of oxygen rebreathers.



John

[SeaRat]

I looked up the film, "Diving to Adverture, BBC 1956..." because I was reading about Hans and Lotti Hass in the Tim Ecott book, Neutral Buoyancy, Adventures in a Liquid World. It's one of the ways I'm adapting to not doing much diving this summer/fall. In it, Mr. Tcott went to Vienna, Austria and met with both Hans and Lotti Hass, at their appartment. He dined with them and talked extensively with them of I think two days. Here is a part of that conversation:

Once safely inside th e rooftop apartment which the Hasses have made their Viennese base for forty years, Hans continued his reminiscences of a life of adventure. It was clear that he had been irritated by modern accounts of diving wihch overloked his role in the sport's development. In his gentlemanly way, Hans Hass denied reports I had heard that he was bitter, or that he resented Cousteau's populist reputation.

...'No, why should I be bitter?' he shrugged, clearly uncomfortable with the word itself. 'The sea is so big, certainly big enough for two men to experiment in. I just think, like they said about de Gaulle, "For de Gaulle there existed only France," well, for Cousteau there existed only Cousteau. He never acknowledged others, or corrected the impression that he wans't the first in diving, or in underwater photography.'...
Ecott, Tim, Neutral Buoyancy, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2001, page 154,

John

[MCincy]

Fascinating film, I hardly recognize Hans without his goatee!

I wonder if the other 5 episodes are floating out there somewhere on the internet...

[rikdog7]

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

[DavidRitchieWilson]

Interesting to see the basic equipment displayed and demonstrated on the video...

The fins are "System Hans Hass" designed by Hass himself and originally made by Semperit of Austria:

The ones in the video were probably manufactured by Heinke of London.


The mask is probably a "Super Star" made by E. T. Skinner (Typhoon) of London:


The attached snorkel is an E. T. Skinner (Typhoon) "T3" breathing tube:

Since the breathing tube was positioned at the front rather than the side of the swimmer's head, it could not be retained by the mask strap in the same way as conventional breathing tubes were. The "attachment bracket" seen halfway along the barrel not only served to anchor the snorkel to the top screw of a mask fitted with a metal rim but also functioned as a fulcrum enabling the snorkel to tilt backwards when the mouthpiece was released:

There was a preference among certain mid-1950s British snorkellers for frontal snorkels long before such devices became a component of the competitive swimmer's kit. Here is a photograph from the 1956 publication Underwater sport on a small income by Barry J. Kimmins:

The frontal snorkel was actually invented by Dr Raymond Pulvénis in France during the 1940s:

He was a medical doctor who researched syphilis, wrote the first Francophone spearfishing book and invented the frontal snorkel he called a "tuba", which remains the standard French word for "snorkel" to this day.

DRW

[SeaRat]

DRW,

Great information. I thought it very interesting that they included an almost fatal accident involving Lotti in this film. Cousteau, to my knowledge, never did that.

Also, some divers have written elsewhere that one reason that Hans and Lotti were able to use their rebreathers is that they purposely did not purge them completely of air, and therefore were using an oxygen/air mixture to greater depths than what's now recommended (25 feet of salt water). This was in the 1940s! They apparently were mixing air into the rebreather to have what we now call "nitro" in their breathing bag. This also explains the problem Lotti had in the film when she got lost inside the wreck, and was low on oxygen.

One other observation; the front-mount snorkel is still being used in finswimming competitions, and in training by swim teams.

John