On 29 August 1782, the Royal George was anchored off Portsmouth in the English Channel. The Navy’s pride and joy was a hive of activity as the crew readied the ship for departure. A few moments later it was at the bottom of the sea. Fifty years on, the wreck had become a hazard to shipping and the Admiralty wanted rid of it.
In 1834, Charles Deane clambered over the side of a boat and down a rope ladder into the depths. He was wearing a cumbersome waterproof suit and a heavy copper helmet supplied with air through a hose. This apparatus, the first practicable diving suit, allowed him to roam about the wreck. His plan was to lay explosives and blow the old ship to smithereens. But when he invented this air-fed helmet, he had something quite different in mind.
CHARLES DEANE had never intended to walk around at the bottom of the sea. He had invented a helmet to fight fires. A man wearing his helmet could stay in a smoke-filled room long enough to find the source of the fire and put it out. As an ex-sailor, Deane was all too aware that a fire at sea could be as dangerous as a hurricane or a broadside from an enemy warship.
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Deane was an unlikely inventor. He grew up in poverty in Deptford, on the south bank of the Thames. At 14 he went to sea. Ten years later he was working in a local shipyard as a caulker, sealing leaky planking with padding and pitch. Yet Deane was not your average dock labourer. In 1823 he patented “An Apparatus or Machine to be Worn by Persons Entering Rooms or other Places filled with Smoke or other Vapour, for the purpose of Extinguishing Fire or Extricating persons or Property therein”.
Deane’s breathing apparatus consisted of a lightweight copper helmet with a short breastplate, or corselet, riveted to a leather jacket. The helmet had three glass windows at the front and sides and a vent in front of the mouth that could be opened to speak and closed before plunging into the smoke. Two hoses were attached at the back. One supplied fresh air, which was pumped in from outside with a bellows. The second ran down the body to the ankle and carried away stale air.
Deane was imaginative but poor – too poor to manufacture and sell his own invention. Fortunately, he had a sympathetic employer who bought the patent and encouraged him to develop and make the helmet. Soon Deane was knocking on the Admiralty’s door. The gentlemen of the Admiralty could not fail to see how useful his invention was for fighting fire at sea. But Deane was wrong. They were not interested. He tried the fire insurance companies. They were not interested either.
Then he had a brainwave. If his helmet allowed a man to breathe fresh air in a room full of noxious fumes, it could do the same for a man underwater. At the time, submarine salvage and underwater repair work was carried out using diving bells. The bell was constantly filled with fresh air by a pump at the surface and the stale air bubbled out around the open bottom. Bells, though, were heavy and difficult to manoeuvre. Divers would be able to work more easily and effectively if they were freed from the bell.
According to John Bevan, an expert on the history of diving, the idea to convert the smoke helmet to a diving helmet might have come from Deane’s younger brother John, who had done some salvage work and seen diving bells in operation. But Charles must have been familiar with their design too. Diving bells were big news, mainly because of the exploits of the young Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who made a series of dives to the bottom of the Thames in the summer of 1827. He was trying to find out why the tunnel his father was building under the river at nearby Rotherhithe had flooded.
The Deane brothers experimented for a year. Their first helmet was simply a modified smoke hood, as shown in the photograph above. It was not a huge success. The brothers fiddled with it some more and by 1828, they had perfected their design. The helmet was now much heavier, with longer, narrower windows and the corselet was attached to a short sleeveless jacket. The helmet now had a single hose and air was supplied by pump instead of bellows. Stale air bubbled out around the bottom of the jacket. The gear was essentially a personal diving bell.
A man working underwater needed more than a constant supply of fresh air: he needed to stay warm and dry. So the Deanes designed a waterproof one-piece suit. The diver climbed in through the gaping neck, gathered up the excess material and tied it with a handkerchief. As long as the helmet was full of air, no water would seep in through the neck. Bandages around the wrists prevented water entering the sleeves. And a pair of lead weights slung over the chest prevented the diver popping back to the surface.
The Deanes had enough confidence in their creation to reinvent themselves as the first professional helmet divers. The equipment proved its worth almost immediately. In 1829, the Carn Brea Castle, an East Indiaman loaded with copper and lead, sank off the Isle of Wight. The Deane brothers recovered most of the cargo.
The diving gear was attracting a lot more attention than the smoke helmet, enough to begin manufacturing sets for sale. Charles hired the man who had made his smoke helmets – Augustus Siebe, a Prussian engineer who had set up as a precision machinist in London. Siebe began to turn out diving helmets, while John wrote instructions to go with each set. “A person equipt in this Apparatus, being enabled to descend to considerable depth, from 20 fathoms, probably to 30, and to remain down several hours…having the perfect use of his hands and legs, is freely able to traverse the bottom of the sea, and to search out the hidden treasures of the deep…”
Over the next few years, the Deanes were kept busy with salvage and inspection work. Charles lobbied the Admiralty for permission to dive on the Royal George, the country’s most famous wreck. So much sand and mud had now accumulated around the wreck that it formed a large sandbank in the middle of one of the busiest anchorages on the English coast. The Admiralty wanted it removed and the Deanes wanted the job.
With the Admiralty’s permission, the brothers began to dive on the wreck in 1834. For the next three years, they explored the hulk – discovering the wreck of another venerable old warship, the Mary Rose, in the process. According to an account published in 1840, they recovered many of the Royal George’s cannon and other valuable objects. “Their indefatigable labors were crowned with success in the recovery of 18 beautifully wrought twenty-four pounder guns, 3 eighteen pounders and 8 iron thirty-two pounders together with human bones and a variety of curious and interesting relics.”
This success was not enough to persuade the Admiralty to give the Deane brothers the job of blasting the wreck to pieces. Charles Pasley, a colonel in the Royal Engineers was more to their liking. He had an impeccable pedigree, good connections – and a better diving suit.
The Deanes’ “open” diving outfit had a serious drawback: the diver had to stay upright or water would flood into the helmet. While the Deanes were busy hauling up cannon, Siebe was experimenting with a new design. By 1837, he had perfected the first closed diving suit. He made his helmet in two parts – the top separate from the corselet. The suit was clamped to the corselet by bolts, making a watertight seal. Once the diver was comfortably inside, the top of the helmet could be screwed into place. Fresh air was pumped from the surface and stale air vented through a valve.
As Charles Deane argued his case to the Admiralty, Pasley was preparing to blow up the wreck of the Royal George. Two tonnes of explosives finally did the trick, scattering fragments of timber all over the seabed and sending a plume of water high into the air. Pasley had used both the Deane apparatus and Siebe’s gear. The advantages of Siebe’s gear were obvious. Pasley recommended it to the Admiralty and it was adopted as standard equipment for navy divers. The deep-sea diver’s outfit remained almost identical for the next 150 years.
Siebe won the contracts. John Deane became the country’s most eminent underwater engineer. Inventor Charles Deane went mad – the result, said the Morning Chronicle, of overtaxing his brain with study.
