Jacques Cousteau and Frederic Dumas · 1953 · sea

Cousteau and Frederic Dumas's account of the first ten years of the aqualung, from a demand valve tested off Bandol in 1943 to Calypso's Red Sea expeditions. It sold five million copies and the film took the Palme d'Or, and it is the reason most people have any picture of the sea floor at all.

1. 1
   Bandol

   June 1943, and a first dive on the Riviera with a demand valve Emile Gagnan had adapted from a gas generator - which meant a man could breathe underwater and swim, and everything in the book follows from that afternoon.

2. 2
   Toulon

   The naval port and the scuttled French fleet lying in it - wrecks to practise on, and the beginning of the diving group that would become the Undersea Research Group.

3. 3
   Grand Congloue

   An island off Marseille and a Roman wine ship on the bottom at fifty metres - the first underwater archaeological excavation done properly, running for years and lifting thousands of amphorae.

4. 4
   Corsica

   Working dives through the western Mediterranean - grouper that came to be fed, the first underwater films, and the slow discovery that the sea at depth is not silent at all.

5. 5
   Suez

   1951, and Calypso through the canal on her first long expedition - a converted minesweeper bought with a private loan and fitted out as the first proper oceanographic ship of her kind.

6. 6
   Abu Latt

   The Farasan Bank in the Red Sea, and reefs no diver had been on - the section that made the book, and the sharks, which Cousteau writes about with more honesty than the films later allowed.

7. 7
   Djibouti

   The southern end of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Tadjoura - and the growing realisation that what they were documenting was already being damaged faster than they could record it.

8. 8
   The Indian Ocean

   Open water, and the whales - the chapter in which a Calypso propeller kills a whale calf and the crew watch what happens next, which Cousteau said changed how he thought about all of it.

9. 9
   Toulon

   Home, and a book in 1953 that sold five million copies and a film that took the Palme d'Or - and the beginning of the second career, which was persuading people to care about what he had shown them.