| John and Charles Deane |
In
the beginning of the years 1820, John and Charles Deane, 2 English inventors,
created an apparatus composed of an iron helmet fixed on a cloth jacket with a
line of rivets and destined
to intervene in fires and toxic areas.
In that apparatus,
waterproof ness was less important than the ventilation in the helmet was guaranteed
by a pipe coming from a pump. In the years 1825-1830, they set up a society to
salvage nets and anchors lost by fisher boats. The necessity to solve several
problems to convert their apparatus for diving activity, in
particular to make it totally waterproof, leaded
them towards a German immigrant inventor: Augustus
Siebe. |  |
| Augustus Siebe |
Augustus Siebe was born in Sax (Germany) in 1788. He studied boiler works in Berlin and in 1816, he emigrated in England where artisans were better payed and he settled in London. He had an inventive mind and created, among others, a rotary pump for which he received a prize of the Arts Society. Perhaps he met the Deane brothers and the diving world because of that knowledge. Siebe did't know anything about the underwater world, but, when he was a student in Berlin, he perhaps read newspaper articles about Peter Kreeft' diving experiences in 1800. On Deane brother's request, he converted their helmet for smokes into a diving helmet. He modified the drawing of the corselet and fixed it on a lether jacquet with 250 rivets. He quicly left that mean of fixing and invented in 1836 a process with little copper plates used to squeeze cloth on corselet. All heavy suit helmets in the world used that process. At the first time, the jacket stopped on the waist and to much air was discharged under the belt, a dangerous device he quickly replaced with a closed suit. | 
Siebe's helmet (1836) |
 | In
1836-37 Georges Edwars, an engineer in Lowesoft Harbour, had idea to pull the
bonnet from the corselet and created helmet in 2 parts used by all heavy suit
divers. That invention allowed removing the rounded opening set on the front of
the corselet and intended to quickly give air to the diver in cas of problem.
That opening existed on the diving suits since the XVIIth century (diving suit
of De Beauve 1715, diving apparatus of Klingert 1797, etc...). Siebe took up that
process in 1842. |