Born June 11, 1910,
Saint-André-de-Cubzac, France
Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s name is virtually synonymous with exploration of the earth’s oceans and rivers. A leading expert in oceanography, he has used documentaries, television programs, and books to educate the public on the diversity of sea life and the importance of the world’s oceans. It was in 1944, while diving off the coast of Toulon in the Mediterranean Sea, that Cousteau became mesmerized by the beauty of reefs and the sea’s underwater habitats.
Using his winning personality and celebrity status, Cousteau has also spoken out on conservation issues, suggesting that so-called industrial progress has placed civilization in jeopardy. He argued, for example, that nations that dumped radioactive waste and mustard and nerve gases underwater were endangering the planet’s safety.
Cousteau’s childhood interests in photography and inventions formed the basis for his adult successes. He was born on June 11, 1910, in his parents’ ancestral home in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, a small village in the south of France. Cousteau quickly became familiar with the culture outside village life. Because his father was a lawyer who represented American businessmen in Europe and the United States, he spent his youth in Paris and then New York City.
Cousteau’s first love was photography. At the age of 13 he purchased one of the first home movie cameras sold in France and started to make his own films. An indifferent student, he was expelled from a Paris secondary school, or lycée, for throwing rocks at the school windows.
After his parents sent him to a boarding school in Alsace, his grades improved; he was then admitted to the French Naval Academy in 1930, graduating second in his class with a degree in engineering (1932). Upon graduation, Cousteau joined a naval voyage around the world that included a stop in Los Angeles, where he filmed movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks greeting the French officers. He served with the navy for a while in Shanghai, China, before returning to Europe via the trans-Siberian railroad.
Cousteau entered the pilot training program at the French navy’s aviation school. He had made his first solo flight and was close to graduation when an accident dashed his hopes for a flying career. While he was driving at night on a deserted mountain road, his car spun out of control and crashed. Cousteau was seriously hurt; his right arm was paralyzed. Forced to drop out of aviation school, Cousteau underwent several years of physical therapy before he regained full use of his arm.
After he had sufficiently recovered, Cousteau was assigned to the cruiser Dupleix, which was stationed at Toulon, a French port on the Mediterranean. In Toulon a fellow officer suggested to Cousteau that he take up swimming to help rehabilitate his arm. This suggestion redirected Cousteau’s life in ways neither man could then see. In the summer of 1936 he began to spend all his free time at the beach. He started using goggles as a way of seeing underwater and adapted his camera so he could film fish.
Cousteau began to think about the problem of breathing underwater. Since the first deep-sea dives in the 1870s, the only way to supply oxygen was from an air line leading from the boat, which greatly restricted the diver’s underwater mobility. After much hard work, Cousteau eventually developed a breathing device he called the aqualung. The aqualung consists of an air canister of compressed air, a regulator that supplies a constant flow of oxygen (at the same pressure as the water the diver is in), and a mouthpiece that enables the diver to breathe.
Cousteau’s opportunity to develop the aqualung came after the Germans invaded France in 1940. Cousteau stayed in Toulon, where the French navy was interned, and there in 1942-43 he worked on the aqualung. He had the good fortune of having an uncle who was a director in a French company that produced compressed air and other industrial gases. The U.S. Navy later renamed Cousteau’s aqualung “scuba” for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.” His invention revolutionized underwater exploration. In 1937 Cousteau married his first wife, Simone Melchior, who later became his partner on most of his sea voyages.
At the end of World War II, Cousteau convinced the French navy that his new invention could be put to an immediate practical use. He organized diving crews to remove the mines blocking southern French ports. Cousteau remained in the French navy until 1956 and continued experimentation with underwater photography. He improved his equipment in order to make increasingly deeper dives. He developed an underwater camera that could operate up to 600 meters (1,970 feet) below the water’s surface, making some of the first photographs and films of life undersea.
In 1951 Cousteau commissioned the first of his famous exploring ships, the Calypso, and began to investigate the world’s great bodies of water, beginning with the Red Sea. Two years later Cousteau published a book that included many startling photographs. The English edition, The Silent World, sold some 500,000 copies in the first year, launching Cousteau’s career as an author. His more than two dozen books on undersea life, which have been translated into several languages, cover such topics as whales, squid, octopuses, and sharks. Among the numerous titles are the 20-volume Ocean World and The Cousteau Almanac of the Environment: An Inventory of Life on a Water Planet. Perhaps no other writer has done more to inform the public on the role of water in world ecology.
In 1955 Cousteau made a film, The World of Silence, with French director Louis Malle. It won international film awards, including the first of Cousteau’s three Oscars for best documentary. In 1957 Cousteau was appointed director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. This position allowed him to deploy the Calypso in several new scientific explorations.
Looking for ways to actually live beneath the sea, Cousteau developed a number of “Conshelf” stations, the first underwater living environments where divers lived and worked for weeks at a time. Cousteau’s underwater stations predated the U.S. Navy’s Sealab experiments. In the first Conshelf project, occurring in 1962, two men stayed for a week in a small chamber 33 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea. The next project, Conshelf 2, took place in 1963 in the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt and involved more complicated experiments. This time five men lived in a more complex underwater settlement for one month, again at a depth of 33 feet. Conshelf 3 followed in 1965, by which time Cousteau was thinking of setting up semipermanent stations, similar to a space station, where people could live indefinitely.
Beginning in 1960, when he opposed the French government’s decision to dump nuclear waste in the Mediterranean, Cousteau became a spokesman for environmental causes. He used his fame as an underwater explorer to lobby for greater awareness of the environmental dangers faced by the world’s oceans. He spoke with passion about his belief that the fate of the planet and the human species is being jeopardized by pollution and the lack of population control. According to Cousteau, whatever is dumped into the seas will remain there indefinitely, affecting the earth’s ecological balance.
Cousteau effectively used television films to educate people around the world. In 1970 he produced 12 one-hour programs in a series titled The Undersea Odyssey of the “Calypso,” followed by six more programs in 1973. Cousteau produced in 1984 a series on the underwater exploration of the Amazon River and then, starting in 1985, 22 one-hour programs on the world’s oceans. In all, Cousteau has made more than 100 documentaries and has won 10 Emmys.
Revered in France as a wise old prophet, Cousteau has been the recipient of numerous awards in that country and elsewhere. The U.S. government awarded Cousteau the Medal of Freedom in 1985, and he was elected to the prestigious Académie Française in 1988.
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