Scuba diving has been evolving day-by-day since the invention of the aqualung. There have been countless incremental improvements: the ABLJ to the stabiliser jacket, Haldane to Bulhmann tables, air to NITROX. But what were the technological innovations, whether immediate or over time, that were revolutionary rather than evolutionary and fundamentally changed how we dive.
Digital Camera
I’ve only ever dived with a digital camera and am thankful for it. 36 shots – that’s all you’d get per dive with standard 35mm film. By comparison my current memory card can hold over a 1000 RAW images. However, the greatest leap the digital camera made was the ability to review your shots in-water. The ease at which underwater photographers can compose, shoot, review and then adjust a shot is truly revolutionary compared to film.
This feedback loop could take weeks with 35mm film. Imagine being on a trip and having to wait to get home to process the film and see your shots. The ability to post-process pictures in programs like Photoshop has further expanded the options for photographers. You can see the impact of digital photography by the quantity and quality of amazing photographs out there today.
GPS
Knowing where you are is pretty fundamental to finding a dive site. Today it’s probably harder to find a piece of technology that doesn’t have GPS capability: watches, phones, cars, cameras it goes on and on. The development of the Global Positioning System development began at the end of the 1970s intended to be solely used by the US military. This was relaxed over time with its full capability finally being opened up to the civilian market in 2000.
The impact of GPS (and digital chart displays) on marine navigation has been profound – allowing nearly anyone to quickly navigate to any location – reef or wreck. Before GPS, visual fixing was the primary means of safe coastal navigation and this takes significant time, training and experience to master. This challenge is amplified by the difficulty in taking accurate bearings on small boats, like a RIBs, common in diving.
Rebreather
The closed circuit rebreather (CCR) represents the most fundamental change to the mechanics of diving. With exhaled gases no longer being bubbled away and ideal gas mixes delivered; dive times are extended and decompression minimised. Rebreathers actually predate the aqualung but were initially confined to the military and some commercial divers.
The nexus for the modern consumer rebreather was the release of AP Diving’s Inspiration in 1997. There are now multiple manufacturers producing a varied selection of units. Rebreathers offer increased capabilities but require a fundamental shift in approach to many basic principles of scuba diving: risks, gas consumption, buoyancy and the increased attention needed to manage the equipment.
Dive Computer
Modern dive computers arrived in the mid-1980s with recognisable designs appearing in models like Suunto’s SME-ML and the lauded UWATEC Aladin. Earlier attempts threw out some wild designs – I recommend checking out Hans Hass’ Deco-Brain which, while functional, looked like a mix between a Sinclair computer and a gas meter. Dive computers use grew over the following years and quickly became standard equipment, with most dive centres today mandating their use.
Tables and planners are still taught to trainees but quickly discarded. Live decompression monitoring allows dive times to be extended by allowing easy multilevel diving and removing the assumption that every dive followed a rectangular profile (effectively that the whole dive happened at the deepest point). The features of dive computers have increased over time: multiple gases, colour displays, wireless tank transmitters, choice of algorithm and can now even be found on Apple Watches.
Air Travel
This change has been iterative and developed over time but the overall impact has been transformative. In the early days of diving the frontier destinations, for the UK diver at least, were the Red Sea or the Caribbean. As air travel expanded and got cheaper it opened new destinations that were previously either too expensive or too remote for the average diver. You don’t have to go far back to see how quickly things have changed. The early-2000s low cost aviation boom in Asia has made visiting distant location like Indonesia’s Raja Ampat the norm.
