Rebreather - History of Rebreathers

History of Rebreathers

• Around 1620: In England, Cornelius Drebbel made an early oar-powered submarine. To re-oxygenate the air inside it, he likely generated oxygen by heating saltpetre (potassium nitrate) in a metal pan to emit oxygen. Heating turns the saltpetre into potassium oxide or hydroxide, which absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. That may explain why Drebbel's men were not affected by carbon dioxide build-up as much as would be expected. If so, he accidentally made a crude rebreather more than two centuries before Saint Simon Sicard's patent.

• 1808: The oldest known rebreather based on carbon dioxide absorption was patented in France by Sieur Touboulic from Brest, a mechanic in Napoleon's Imperial Navy. This early rebreather design worked with an oxygen reservoir, the oxygen being delivered progressively by the diver and circulating in a closed circuit through a sponge soaked in limewater. Touboulic called his invention Ichtioandre (Greek for 'fish-man'). There is no evidence of a prototype having been manufactured.

• 1849: A patent for the oldest known rebreather for which a prototype was built, also using an oxygen reservoir, was granted to Pierre Aimable De Saint Simon Sicard.

• 1853: Professor T. Schwann designed a rebreather in Belgium; he exhibited it in Paris in 1878. It had a large back mounted oxygen tank with working pressure of about 13.3 bar, and two scrubbers containing sponges soaked in caustic soda.

• 1878: Henry Fleuss invented a rebreather using stored oxygen and absorption of carbon dioxide by rope yarn soaked in caustic potash solution, to rescue mineworkers who were trapped by water.

• About 1900: The Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus was designed in Britain for escape from sunken submarines. It was the first rebreather which was practical for use and produced in quantity. Various industrial oxygen rebreathers such as the Siebe Gorman Salvus and the Siebe Gorman Proto, both invented in the early 1900s, were derived from it.

• 1903 to 1907: Professor Georges Jaubert invented Oxylithe, which is a form of sodium peroxide (Na₂O₂) or sodium dioxide (NaO₂). As it absorbs carbon dioxide in a rebreather's scubber it emits oxygen.

• 1907: Oxylithe was used in the first filming of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

• 1907: Dräger rebreather used for mines rescue.

• 1909: Captain S.S. Hall, R.N., and Dr. O. Rees, R.N., developed a submarine escape apparatus using Oxylithe; the Royal Navy accepted it. It was used for shallow water diving but never in a submarine escape;

• 1912: The first recorded mass production of rebreathers started with the Dräger rebreathers, invented some years earlier by Hermann Stelzner, an engineer at the Dräger company. The Dräger rebreathers, especially the DM20 and DM40 model series, were those used by the German helmet divers and German frogmen during World War II.

• 1930's: Italian sport spearfishers used rebreathers systematically. This practice came to the attention of the Italian Navy, which developed its frogman unit Decima Flottiglia MAS, which was used effectively in World War II.

• World War II: Captured Italian frogmen's rebreathers influenced design of British rebreathers. Many British frogmen's breathing sets' used aircrew breathing oxygen cylinders salvaged from shot-down German Luftwaffe aircraft. The earliest of these breathing sets may have been modified Davis Submerged Escape Apparatus; their fullface masks were the type intended for the Siebe Gorman Salvus, but in later operations different designs were used, leading to a fullface mask with one big face window, at first oval and later rectangular (mostly flat, but the sides curved back to allow better vision sideways). Early British frogman's rebreathers had rectangular counterlungs on the chest like Italian frogman's rebreathers, but later British frogman's rebreathers had a square recess in the top of the counterlung so it could extend further up toward the shoulders. In front they had a rubber collar that was clamped around the absorbent canister. Some British armed forces divers used bulky thick diving suits called Sladen suits; one version of it had a flip-up single faceplate for both eyes to let the user get binoculars to his eyes when on the surface.

• Early 1940s: US Navy rebreathers were developed by Dr. Christian J. Lambertsen for underwater warfare and he is considered by the US Navy as "the father of the frogmen". Lambertsen held the first closed-circuit oxygen rebreather course in the United States for the Office of Strategic Services maritime unit at the Naval Academy on 17 May 1943.

• c.1960 to c.1990: In this period in Britain there was very little rebreather use by civilians, and no easy way for the general public to obtain rebreathers, and the BSAC prohibited rebreather use by its members. The Italian firms Pirelli and Cressi-Sub at first each sold a model of sport diving rebreather, but after a while discontinued those models. Some home made rebreather were used by cave divers to penetrate cave sumps.

• 1989: The Communist Bloc collapsed and the Cold War ended, and with it the perceived risk of attack by Communist Bloc forces, including by their combat divers. After that, the world's armed forces had less reason to requisition civilian rebreather patents, and automatic and semi-automatic recreational diving rebreathers started to appear.