History
In the 1920s or 1930s Draeger of Germany made a nitrox backpack independent air supply for a standard diving suit.
In World War II or soon after, British commando frogmen and work divers started sometimes diving with oxygen rebreathers adapted for semi-closed-circuit nitrox (which they called "mixture") diving by fitting larger cylinders and carefully setting the gas flow rate using a flow meter. These developments were kept secret until independently duplicated by civilians in the 1960s.
In the 1950s the United States Navy (USN) documented enriched oxygen gas procedures for military use of what we today call nitrox, in the USN Diving Manual.
In 1970, Morgan Wells, who was the first director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Diving Center, began instituting diving procedures for oxygen-enriched air. He also developed a process for mixing oxygen and air which he called a continuous blending system. For many years Wells' invention was the only practical alternative to partial pressure blending. In 1979 NOAA published Wells' procedures for the scientific use of nitrox in the NOAA Diving Manual.
In 1985 Dick Rutkowski, a former NOAA diving safety officer, formed IAND (International Association of Nitrox Divers) and began teaching nitrox use for recreational diving. This was considered dangerous by some, and met with heavy skepticism by the diving community.
In 1991, in a watershed moment, the annual DEMA show (held in Houston, Texas that year) banned nitrox training providers from the show. This created a backlash, and when DEMA relented, a number of organizations took the opportunity to present nitrox workshops outside the show. In 1992 BSAC banned its members from using nitrox.
In 1992 IAND's name was changed to the International Association of Nitrox and Technical Divers (IANTD), the T being added when the European Association of Technical Divers (EATD) merged with IAND. In the early 1990s, these agencies were teaching nitrox, but the main scuba agencies were not. Additional new organizations, including the American Nitrox Divers International (ANDI) - which invented the term "Safe Air" for marketing purposes - and Technical Diving International (TDI) were begun.
Meanwhile, diving stores were finding a purely economic reason to offer nitrox: not only was an entire new course and certification needed to use it, but instead of cheap or free tank fills with compressed air, dive shops found they could charge premium amounts of money for custom-gas blending of nitrox to their ordinary moderately experienced divers. With the new dive computers which could be programmed to allow for the longer bottom-times and shorter residual nitrogen times which nitrox gave, the incentive for the sport diver to use the gas increased. An intersection of economics and scientific validity had occurred.
In 1993 Skin Diver magazine, the leading recreational diving publication at the time, published a three part series arguing that nitrox was unsafe for sport divers. Against this trend, in 1992 NAUI became the first existing major sport diver training agency to sanction nitrox.
In 1993 Dive Rite manufactured the first nitrox compatible dive computer, called the Bridge.
In 1994 BSAC reversed its policy on Nitrox and announced BSAC nitrox training to start in 1995
In 1996, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI) announced full educational support for nitrox. While other main line scuba organizations had announced their support of nitrox earlier, it was PADI's endorsement that put nitrox over the top as a standard sport diving "option."
Read more about this topic: Nitrox
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