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Jacques Cousteau

by Ari from Seattle


My hero is Jacques Cousteau. I have a dream to go scuba diving because of Jacques Cousteau. If Cousteau hadn’t built the Aqualung then the ocean would still be a big mystery to all humankind, and many sports would never have been invented. To me, Jacques Cousteau is my hero because he is courageous and his inventions are still being used today for research on the ocean and things that live there. With the help of others, Jacques Cousteau had discovered a world that had barely been discovered before by people, and he did this with the invention of the Aqualung.

He was very bored during his childhood like many very smart children and often got himself into trouble. He didn’t like school until his parents sent him to a very good boarding school and apparently, he didn’t get into any more trouble. As a kid he has always loved the ocean and the animals that live there. When he was 23 he joined the Navy as a gunner officer. Three years later he got into a car accident and his arms became paralyzed. He started to swim to get his arm-strength back. By now he was a gunnery officer aboard the cruiser "Suffren." The Gunsmith was a friend of his and since the gunsmith of the ship could make basically anything, he got him to build an oxygen tank with his own design. Jacques Cousteau had always wanted to dive down into the deep sea ever since he was a kid, and that is why he wanted the gunsmith to build him a oxygen tank so that he could go to unexplored places, underwater.


It was self-contained, and used a small oxygen bottle and can of soda-lime. On Cousteau’s first dive he said "My lips began to tremble uncontrollably. My eyelids fluttered. My spine was bent backward like a bow then I lost consciousness." Weeks after the accident he still had pains and he thought it was from the soda in his original design. After he got better he built an oxygen lung out of better material than a soda can, but the same thing happened. Cousteau was now married to Simone. Simone’s father was a director of Air Liquide that made industrial gases. Cousteau's father-in-law realized that Emile Gagnan, the engineer in charge of experiments, was working on a valve similar to what Cousteau now wanted to make. What Cousteau had found out is that you have to breathe compressed air instead of oxygen. In three weeks the first Aqualung was ready. So, the two men found a lonely stretch of the River Marne, not far from Paris (where Cousteau lived) to try to test the Aqualung. This one didn’t work, either. On the third try they developed a new device and it worked perfectly, so they decided to call it the "Aqualung". It was invented in 1943.

The Aqualung is a very important invention because, without it, I would never be able to scuba dive. For all these reasons this is why he is my hero.

Page created on 6/17/2005 12:00:00 AM

Last edited 6/17/2005 12:00:00 AM

The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.