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Men into Fish. In fact. Cousteau looks forward to the day when free diving will be so commonplace that farmers in Aqua-Lungs will harvest crops of fish and plants cultivated in special concrete shelters. Peering far into the future. Cousteau predicts that surgery will give man gills, enable him to "breathe" water, set him free as a fish for years beneath the sea. A second operation could easily return him to life in the air. "Everything that has been done on the surface will sooner or later be done under water," says Cousteau. "It will be the conquest of a whole new world."
In the meantime, with free diving still a new sport, Cousteau urges swimmers to take down an underwater lamp ("The colors that will emerge are incredible"), suggests a descent in open ocean for the more experienced ("Nothing above, nothing below, nothing on either side—it is an astonishing impression"). Beyond that, Skindiver Cousteau does not presume to pinpoint the pleasures of his sport. "What would you advise a baby to do when it is first born?" asks Cousteau. "When a person takes his first dive, he is born to another world."
* The wet suit deliberately admits water, but fits snugly enough to prevent it from circulating. After the diver's body warms this thin layer of water, the suit prevents heat loss to the surrounding depths. The "dry" suit is usually made of thin gum rubber, is in theory (but seldom in fact) watertight.
* Oxygen lungs have one great advantage: they recycle the diver's carbon dioxide through a purifier, let no bubbles escape to the surface. For this reason they are used by military frogmen, who would be betrayed by the telltale stream of bubbles from a compressed-air lung, which discharges spent breath into the water.
* In a field of conflicting claims, skindivers believe that the deepest descent with held breath was made by a Greek sponge diver named Stotti Georghios, who in 1913 swam down 200 ft. to put a line on the lost anchor of an Italian battleship. Dumas' dive to 307 ft. with an Aqua-Lung is regarded as the record fro free diving.