Cousteau: The Man Who Opened the Door to the Sea
A car crash shattered both his arms and ended his dream of flying — so Jacques Cousteau turned his eyes downward, into the sea, and never looked back.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910 in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, to Daniel Cousteau and Élisabeth Duranthon. He studied at the Collège Stanislas in Paris before entering the École navale in 1930, graduating as a gunnery officer bound for naval aviation. An automobile accident that broke both his arms cut that path short, forcing him to abandon flight and, almost by accident, discover the sea. Stationed on the Condorcet in Toulon, he began his first underwater experiments in 1936 after his friend Philippe Tailliez lent him a pair of Fernez underwater goggles.
On 12 July 1937, Cousteau married Simone Melchior, who became his business partner and companion in adventure. They had two sons, Jean-Michel, born in 1938, and Philippe, born in 1940, both of whom would later join him aboard his famous ship, the Calypso. During the German occupation, the family took refuge in Megève, where Cousteau befriended filmmaker Marcel Ichac. The two shared a common ambition: to reveal hidden worlds to the public — Cousteau underwater, Ichac in the high mountains. In 1943, working with Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, and using a pressure-proof camera case built by engineer Léon Vèche, they made Par dix-huit mètres de fond, the first French underwater film, winning joint first prize at the Congress of Documentary Film.
That same year, Cousteau and Émile Gagnan tested the first prototype of the Aqua-Lung, an open-circuit breathing apparatus built on earlier designs by Yves le Prieur, adding a demand regulator that let divers stay underwater far longer than before. Manufactured by Air Liquide in Boulogne-Billancourt, the device became the foundation of modern scuba diving and, through its patent, gave Cousteau lasting financial independence. He used it that year to film Épaves, or Shipwrecks, capturing the first true undersea documentary footage with functioning breathing gear.
Cousteau's wartime record went beyond diving. He helped the French Navy reconnect with the Allies and led a commando operation against Italian espionage in France, earning several military decorations. He kept his distance from his brother Pierre-Antoine, a virulently antisemitic journalist for the collaborationist paper Je suis partout, who received a death sentence in 1946 that was later commuted to a life sentence, with his release coming in 1954.
After the war, Admiral Lemonnier gave Cousteau and Tailliez the task of founding the Underwater Research Group in Toulon, which evolved into the GERS. In 1948, aboard the old tugboat Élie Monnier, Cousteau led an expedition to a Roman-era wreck near Mahdia, Tunisia — the first archaeological operation to use self-contained diving, a milestone for underwater archaeology.
More from Explorations
Humboldt: The Man Who Measured the World
A Prussian noble's son, once mocked as a sickly child, would climb a volcano to a world-record height and rewrite how humanity understood nature itself.
The Man Who Named Canada
A Breton mariner planted a wooden cross on a foreign shore and claimed a kingdom he did not understand — then spent a winter frozen into its river, praying a stranger's remedy would save his men.
Sixty Ships Into the Unknown: Hanno's Voyage Down the African Coast
A Carthaginian fleet of sixty ships and thousands of settlers vanished past the Pillars of Hercules to found cities on an unmapped coast — and came home with the skins of hairy, hostile 'gorillas' as proof of how far they had gone.
HMS Challenger: The Voyage That Charted the Deep
A stripped-down warship, its guns torn out to make room for microscopes, set sail from Portsmouth to answer a question no one had ever properly asked: what lies at the bottom of the sea?
Scott's Last Expedition: The Letters Written at the End of the World
Five men reached the bottom of the world only to find a Norwegian flag already planted there. What followed was not glory, but a slow, frozen unraveling that the world would remember for a century.
Marco Polo: In the Court of Kublai Khan
A fifteen-year-old boy meets the father he barely knew — and is soon swept toward the richest court on Earth. Twenty-four years later, he returns home with tales so vast that Venice simply calls him 'Mister Millions'.