TECHNICAL DIVING TIMELINE (1660–1999)

It’s fair to say that the emergence of “technical diving” in the late 1980s, that is, the introduction of mixed gas technology, and later mixed gas rebreathers to the sport diving community, represented the culmination of hundreds of years of scientific discovery and technological development.

- Michael Menduno and David Strike

The closed-circuit rebreather was first conceived by Italian scientist Giovanni Borelli in the late 1600s, but it wasn’t until the invention of the galvanic oxygen sensor in the 1960s that the development of mixed gas rebreathers was possible. Similarly, mix technology was first developed by the US Navy in the 1930s to enable divers to reach deeper depths to rescue sailors from downed submarines. The technology was later adopted by commercial offshore oilfield divers in the 1960s in response to the need to dive deeper.

Both of these technologies came together in Dr Bill Stone’s 1987 Wakulla Springs Project – the first large scale amateur mixed gas diving expedition, which arguably serves as an appropriate demarcation of the birth of tek diving, though it would be another five years before this type of diving got its name.

This timeline serves to highlight some of the key milestones and developments that led to the emergence of technical diving in the mid–1980s to late 1990s. We extended the timeline through the year 1999, when the first production mixed gas rebreathers for sport divers had become available.

The decade that followed, 2000-2009, could well be characterised as the infancy of rebreather use in the sport diving community. Unfortunately, like the initial adoption of mixed gas technology, there were a disproportionately high number of rebreather fatalities in those early days, which were the focus of Rebreather Forum 3 held in Florida in 2012. But that’s a story for another time. That being said, as you might suspect, further advancements in the art and science of diving, diving technology and safety culture have continued on through the present day.

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