Jacques Cousteau, Inventor, Explorer of the Seas, Dies

Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the ageless old man of the seas who invented ways for men and women to live beneath the water and then took the rest of the human race there vicariously via his spectacular films and television documentaries, died Wednesday in Paris.

The French-born oceanographer had been ill for months. Cousteau’s wife, Francine, said he died at home before dawn after suffering a respiratory infection and heart problems.

Without question the most celebrated undersea explorer in history, Cousteau’s life was a tableau of adventure. If he had rivals in the public eye, they were those figures who strove toward the infinity of space above while Cousteau, the father of skin-diving, was exploring the finite world of the seas below.

Cousteau was considered a national treasure in France, and on Wednesday, President Jacques Chirac called him a legend who “represented the defense of nature, modern adventure, invention of the possible.”

In his 87 years, Cousteau had:

* Co-invented the first Aqua-Lung, freeing human beings to move under water nearly as well as they could on land.

* Taken the first color photographs of the world beneath the seas.

* Organized and headed an international consortium dedicated to oceanographic research.

* Won three Oscars for his films and entranced millions with his vividly illustrated books of “The Silent World.”

* Established the first undersea colony, photographing its denizens as they performed mundane tasks in the murky waters from which the human race may have emanated.

* Been one of the earliest and most heeded voices warning of the damage being done by modern civilization to the planet’s waters and the environment as a whole. “If Aphrodite had to be born today from the wave, coming out of the foam, she would have boils on her bottom,” he and a colleague wrote in “The Wounded Sea,” a book on the polluted Mediterranean.

Auspicious accomplishments for a former midshipman in the French navy who first took to the water because swimming was the only form of exercise his anemia would permit.

Sickly Youth Turned to Swimming

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born on June 11, 1910, in Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac, a small town near Bordeaux, France, and raised in Paris by an upper-middle-class family. His father was a lawyer employed by a wealthy American and the family was constantly on the move.

When he was 10 he lived for a year in New York City and it was about this time that his chronic enteritis (an intestinal inflammation) and anemia were diagnosed. Doctors warned his parents that the boy had to avoid any kind of strenuous physical activity. But Cousteau--as restless a boy as he proved to be as a man--found that he could tolerate swimming.

Thereafter, he spent as much time as he could at the beach--the beginning, he said later, of a lifelong romance with the sea.

He was a disinterested and mischievous student who once was expelled from a French lycee for throwing stones through 17 of the school’s windows. But he showed a marked mechanical ability and when he was 11 constructed a four-foot working model of a 200-ton marine crane. At 13 he was driving a three-foot battery-powered automobile he had created.

After his dismissal from the Alsace lycee, he became a more serious student and in 1930, having graduated from the College Stanislas in Paris, was accepted at the French naval academy--the Ecole Navale in Brest.

Three years later--after graduating second in his class--he was serving on French training ships and participating in mapping expeditions along the Indochina coast. He briefly abandoned the seas for the air--in the mid 1930s--but before he could earn his wings at the naval aviation school he broke both arms in an automobile crash.

To regain his strength, he returned to the water and his swimming. In Indochina, Cousteau had seen native fishermen dive for fish without equipment and the experience further piqued his interest in underwater life. He began to dive, using only a pair of goggles he had been given. The ocean life visible from only a few feet under the surface added to his determination to press deeper.

“Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed,” he wrote years later of that experience. “It happened to me . . . on that summer’s day when my eyes were opened to the sea.”

With a few friends who shared his interest, he began the first primitive design of diving gear unencumbered by air hoses, but the outbreak of war in 1939 limited the experiments.

Cousteau spent most of the war as a gunnery officer at a coastal fort protecting Toulon in an area of France not occupied by Germany. After his country capitulated to the Nazis, the Resistance approached Cousteau and asked him to serve, he later recalled. In Marseilles, France’s largest Mediterranean port, he took photographs of enemy activity, he said.

At war’s end, he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre. Meanwhile, his older brother, Pierre-Antoine, was arrested by the Allies--he had worked in Occupied France as a journalist and essayist.

Despite the war, Cousteau managed to continue some of his diving work and completed the first of his undersea film documentaries, “Through 18 Meters of Water,” in 1942 and “Wrecks” in 1945. He even was able to secure permission to work as he could on his undersea breathing devices (the Germans, he said, considered him an eccentric but harmless inventor).

What had been slowing his “Aqua-Lung” (the phrase was in his mind long before the product was perfected) was a valve that would let air but not water into a diver’s lungs.

In 1943, Emile Gagnan, an engineer, offered him a gas-feeder valve that, when modified, solved the problem.

Cousteau soon became the first “man-fish,” a creature who could move from earth to water with only an oxygen tank on his back, a mask on his face and flippers on his feet.

“I experimented with possible maneuvers,” he wrote excitedly after the first Aqua-Lung tests. “Loops, somersaults, barrel rolls. I stood upside down on one finger and burst out laughing. . . . Delivered from gravity . . . I flew about in space.”

In 1946, the year he first manufactured the Aqua-Lung, he also formed the French Undersea Research Group. The first assignment was to clear German mines from Mediterranean ports, but Cousteau soon expanded those duties and began to film submarines at work and to help recover treasure from a Roman ship sunk for centuries in 100 feet of water off Tunisia.

The next year, he set a world diving record of 300 feet and the name Cousteau began to be known outside French naval circles.

He strode quickly through the early 1950s, converting an old minesweeper into an oceanographic research ship he called Calypso; taking the first underwater color film at 150 feet; perfecting underwater camera equipment for television transmission; joining the National Geographic Society and the French Academy of Sciences and, in 1952, with Calypso refurbished, setting out on a four-year worldwide exploration of the oceans.

Perhaps the most famous of that trip’s exploits was the exploration of a 3rd-century B.C. wreck near Marseille.

Also in 1952 he published his first book, “The Silent World.” It was made into a film and earned Cousteau the first of his three Academy Awards. (The other two were for “The Golden Fish” in 1959 and “World Without Sun,” a filmed account of an underwater colony in the Red Sea that he produced in 1964.)

When he returned to France it was to resign his naval commission (by now he was a Captain of Corvette) to devote full time to his research.

By that same year, 1956, Cousteau was photographing the ocean bottom at depths of four miles and had begun the nucleus of the Cousteau Group, which was to evolve into 16 organizations around the world engaged in oceanographic research, marine engineering and the manufacture of diving gear.

In collaboration with Jean Mollard, an engineer, Cousteau had developed a “diving saucer,” capable of taking two passengers more than 1,100 feet beneath the water where they could not only observe and film but retrieve samples from the obscure bottom.

National Geographic Specials

By 1962, he had established his first “Conshelf” near Marseille, where man could stay under the sea for protracted periods. Conshelf II in the Red Sea followed in 1963 and Conshelf III, involving six men breathing a helium-oxygen mixture at depths of more than 400 feet, was established in the Mediterranean in 1965.

The latter venture led to “The World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau,” a National Geographic special that appeared on CBS in 1966. “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” ran on ABC from 1968-76, and Cousteau had later series on PBS and TBS. Cousteau, whose first underwater films were shown on the “Omnibus” series in 1954, had become a household word in the country where he had lived briefly as a boy.

Over the next several years, the undersea explorer averaged four documentary films a year for television, telling the New York Times in 1972 that “television is for me the greatest reward there is. Making films and writing books is good but not as thrilling. With television you know that on one evening 35 to 40 million people are going to see dolphins.”

And they also saw and heard the man in the red-knit cap who brought those dolphins into camera range and whose distinctive profile had been likened to those sea-going mammals.

He took TV watchers to the reefs of Jamaica, showed them the ferocious sharks of Yucatan, the seabirds of Isla Isabela off the Mexican coast and explored the massive mysteries of the statuary of Easter Island. He sailed the Calypso down the Amazon, the Nile and the Mississippi for some of his PBS specials.

Near the end of his life he presided over a life divided into multiples as a sea captain, business entrepreneur, scholar and environmentalist. He spent a third of his time in the United States, pursuing his film enterprises, a third in France and Monaco where he directed an oceanographic museum, and a third aboard the Calypso where, as recently as 1984, he was still diving more than 400 feet into the sea.

In 1937, Simone Melchior, who was from a prominent French naval family, wed Cousteau. They had two sons and she was his faithful companion on the voyages aboard Calypso. In 1979, their youngest son, Philippe, the heir apparent, was killed in a crash while testing a seaplane near Lisbon. She died in 1990.

The widower Cousteau then married his mistress, Francine Triplet. She was a former Air France stewardess and nearly 40 years his junior. They had two children, a daughter and a son, while he was still wed to Simone.

Praised by Cousteau as a “remarkable person” and “very good administrator,” his second wife was being groomed by Cousteau to take the helm of his commercial, scientific and environmental interests once he was gone.

Meanwhile, Cousteau and his older son by Simone, Jean-Michel, who is now based in Santa Barbara and runs his own diving and eco-tourism ventures, had a falling out, with the root cause being the world-famous name they shared. When Jean-Michel Cousteau and some California partners set up an ecology-friendly tourism complex in the South Pacific, Jacques went to court to prevent them from calling it the “Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort.”

Activist Until the End

The elder Cousteau was the best-known member (and secretary general) of the 17-nation International Commission of Scientific Exploration of the Mediterranean and a lifelong dabbler in painting and music. He was so fluent in English that he often wrote in that language rather than French. He also spoke Spanish, German and Russian.

Toward the end of his life, Cousteau was consistently named in opinion polls as one of the most respected people in France. In 1989, he was inducted as one of the 40 “immortals” of the Academie Francaise, the cream of the country’s literary elite.

Cousteau’s foundation referred to one of his noted documentaries in announcing his death. “Jacques-Yves Cousteau has rejoined the Silent World,” it said in a statement.

“His voice continues to be heard,” his widow Francine said, vowing to “continue his struggle” by finishing the Calypso II, the research ship he was building to replace the Calypso, which sank last year.

At one time, Cousteau’s interest centered on his old friend, the sea, but as he grew older, the gaze of his watery blue eyes increasingly broadened. Where he once envisioned huge underwater plantations capable of feeding the entire world and undersea power plants that would solve energy crises, toward the end of his life he became more concerned with peace than with plenty.

When France resumed nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific in the summer of 1995, Cousteau opposed them and called for a worldwide campaign to “outlaw the atom.”

“What is the use of trying to manage the planet if there is to be no planet to manage, if it is all to be vaporized?” he once asked.