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The outstanding scientist, traveler, inventor, military man,
archeologist, marine researcher, filmmaker, the King of the Ocean,
Jacques-Yves Cousteau lived a long and fascinating life. His death in 1997
at the advanced age of 87, spawned a flurry of memoirs and essays detailing
the life of this great marine researcher. They say he was a tyrant,
domineering and merciless, which is not true of course. He was a born leader,
that’s all and when he said “We are going there” everyone else simply
followed suit…
Jacques_Yves Cousteau was born in Saint Andre-de-Cubzac near
Bordeaux, France, on June 11, 1910 His father, Daniel Cousteau worked
as a personal secretary to an insurance agent and a businessman, both of
them Americans. The family kept moving from one place to another and spent
some time living in the United States. Getting back to France as
a 13-year-old boy, Jacques-Yves entered a Jesuit College in Paris and in
1930 enrolled in a Naval Academy in Brest. Graduating three years
later he joined the Navy as a gunnery officer on the cruiser Primoge that
was on her way to the Middle East. In 1936 he obtained a transfer
to naval aviation and, in the same year, falling in love with fast cars,
he took a ride on his father’s sports car only to have a terrible accident
which left him with fractured ribs, displaced vertebrae, a punctured lung
and paralyzed hands and arms. That’s how his career of a naval aviation
Lieutenant ended before it actually began... A man of an iron will and
a fighting spirit, Cousteau discharged from hospital less than a year later,
weak but still walking unaided and using his both arms…
Shortly after that he met two people who turned his life
all around. These were his wife Simone Melchior and naval officer Philippe
Tailleu who instilled in Jacques-Yves a passion for underwater swimming.
Back in those days diving gear was down to just a pair of goggles, which
was definitely not enough for getting a better picture of undersea life.
Cousteau started experimenting with snorkel hoses, portable breathing devices
and other diving equipment. Those efforts reached a pinnacle in 1943 when
Cousteau and engineer Emile Gagnan produced the Aqua-Lung – known now as
scuba, an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus that
enabled underwater swimming down to 90 meters.
Cousteau simultaneously engaged in film making – a passion
he had developed as a child when his father gave him a camera as a gift.
While perfecting equipment for underwater shooting, he eventually came
up with a camera in watertight housing, underwater lighting gear and developed
the world’s first underwater television system.
In 1950 Cousteau acquired a decommissioned American mine
sweeper which he converted to peaceful use, named it Calypso and the following
year launched his first expedition providing detailed undersea archeological
studies and deep-sea photographs.
“The Silent World” book coauthored by Frederic Dumas became
a bestseller and its screen version won an Academy award and then the French
Palme d’Or for best documentary. Appointed curator of an Oceanographic
Museum in Monaco, Cousteau followed up his initial success with a
raft of inventions and documentaries. One of them, called “World Without
Sun” won him his second Oscar and these and other his films have
since been widely shown on world television networks.
In 1979 his younger son, Philippe, tragically died during
location shooting on board the Catelina hydroplane. During touchdown, the
plane’s nose suddenly went under water. When it finally came up the crew
was all safe except for Philip whose body was never found. Then,
in December 1990 his first wife of more than 50 years, Simone, died suddenly.
Her ashes were scattered over the sea off Monaco. The following year Cousteau
married Francine, a flight attendant who had been his civil wife for nearly
15 years and the mother of his two other children. Just how this world-famous
oceanographer and celebrity managed to keep his parallel marriage away
from the media spotlight is still a mystery…
Adding to all this true and not so true talk about Cousteau’s
family life have recently been rumor about numerous financial scams he
had allegedly been involved in for profiteering and a raft of other
hearsay which is too absurd to mention here.
Jacques-Ives Cousteau is no longer around to acknowledge
or disprove all these claims, but his many studies, books and documentaries
are, and they will inspire many generations to come...
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