M as mask

Siebe & Gorman professional diving helmet at the National School of Divers.

Definition

As its name suggests, the mask consists of a silicone or rubber skirt to seal the face and a frame with one or two panes, corrected for sight or not. The air space thus created in front of the eyes allows a more or less normal view underwater. When the strap is used to hold the mask in place and, often too tight for the beginner, results in that famous bulging gaze and these stubborn marks: “Ah! Have you been to the pool? ”

Synonymes

Diving goggles | Helmet | Spider | 

Starter

No serious diving without a mask! This accessory today banal was the result of rather chiadées developments as explained at the end of this article, in the “historical” part which is always very detailed ...

Indeed, “under water, sight is life”. Even if we have all had the experience of diving without a mask and opening our eyes underwater: we can see, certainly, but blurry! Not to mention the irritations and other conjunctivitis when the experience is prolonged.

So of course, we have already found our eyes in the water during the sadistic training of "mouthpieces - glasses" and other tearing of masks, eyes narrowed like a mole groping on the ground in search of the precious accessory. before putting it back in place and carrying out the famous “mask emptying”, the basics of the technique of diving.

A operation that seems a little magical when you start ... It's wet but dry; it is under water but with an air bubble; we couldn't see anything and here it is cinemascope !

There are countless numbers of diving masks. Little by little, the black rubber which was the rule gave way to transparent or opaque silicones of more or less good quality in terms of resistance to bad weather and especially to the sun. How many sailors, how many captains have found their melted mask in a corner of the bag, having captured in its snotty matrix a computer, compass or other expensive instrument? 

Main course

Today nobody really pays attention to this accessory, which we still hear on boats the pitiful “I forgot my mask!” before THE decisive dive on The wreck… At worst, it is the canceled dive, spent vomiting in the swell while the friends photograph THE Mola Mola giant. For my part, I have always stored the mask in the liner of the fin: good protection and it is no longer possible to forget it.

In case of breakage or loss underwater, it is the assisted ascent, in the blur but straight up. But it is not the same with speleonauts for whom the loss of a mask, which is more likely to happen underground, is a tragedy that they can pay with their lives. So they got into the habit of applying the principle of redundancy and taking two. I used to carry my second mask, of small volume, in the “first aid kit” on the belt or in the thigh pocket; but some wear another mask directly strapped to the helmet, between the lamps, looking forward or back. Troubling ubiquity in trying to predict the future ...

It was in a lost island in the Philippines that I met, during a filming of an episode of the “Carnets de Plongée”, the Tagbanuas, people of fishermen who hunted underwater with round wooden “fins” and diving goggles of the same metal. And windows recovered from plastic bottles or cut from the bottoms of glass bottles!

How the whole thing managed to be waterproof remains a mystery for me, but it is clear that they hunted deeply, for a long time and hit the mark with each shot of their archaic “crossbow”, the mere description of which would risk marring the proper functioning ...

There are other ways of seeing underwater that extend this concept of the mask: that aquarium where you are the fish! I am talking about helmets which were in fact much earlier. From bronze and copper helmets fitted with four flat portholes to the heavy helmets of today's professional divers, equipped with all modern comforts ...

A quick word on the llama helmet, an alien of the kind made up of a single methacrylate bubble allowing an unparalleled viewing angle. It turns out that I had made the acquaintance of its inventor, brilliant “professor Tournesol” who lent us several models for our expeditions.

It must be said that we used it especially for its “look” of “Tintin on the Moon”, to continue in the universe of Hergé, and that its hemispherical shape restored a “normal” underwater vision compared to the porthole shot of masks getting bigger and therefore bringing everything together. So much so that at the beginning, during the tests in the swimming pool, I systematically missed the tiled wall where I wanted to hang on, it having moved back a good meter! 

 

As for the mask, it was the “Super Compensator”, still manufactured today in Marseille!

At the beginning, when I started, or at Cousteau, the mask was a large porthole, inverted aquarium open to the sea and that was it! The nose in the middle of the face and in any case enclosed in the mask was inaccessible to the fingers of the “jack of all trades” and the balancing of the ears had to be mastered without this detestable habit of triturating the siskin… Then appeared the systems “ nose pliers". The ad of the time (to find on the site Beuchat) is delightfully retro and I can't resist the pleasure of posting an excerpt:

“Divers, save your eardrums, avoid premature deafness. To dive deeper, faster, just one mask: The Compensator. Despite the undoubted efficiency of modern diving equipment, a problem of paramount importance iswas to be solved: the earache well known to divers. In fact, depending on the physiological state of the sinuses, it is difficult if not impossible to balance the external pressure of the water by an internal counter-pressure without the perfect obturation of the nasal orifices, directing the air towards the tubes. The difficulty of occlusion of the nostrils subjecting the diver's eardrums to prolonged overpressures, caused lesions, and bursts, often resulting in partial deafness.

To compensate without difficulty, it was necessary to obtain an access facilitating the pinching of the nose, while maintaining the advantages, sealing, visibility and aesthetics of the sloped elliptical window mask. The Beuchat company, taking these principles into account, produced the Compensator panoramic mask comprising two bosses on either side of the nose, designed so as to allow easy and effective pinching. In addition, during dives in cold water, the nose is not enclosed in a refrigerating cell in contact with the walls of icy rubber, but enveloped in air as in all current elliptical portholes. In free fishing, as in scuba diving, experienced divers and beginners can, thanks to the "Compensator", quickly increase their underwater capacities by diving deeper, faster, without suffering or unnecessary fatigue of their eardrums ".

Having always been a follower of voluntary tubal open bite, I have never needed these vents to compensate for the eardrums but, I admit, in the adolescent beginnings of these first immersions, to block the nose in this way, that ' did it sound "pro"!

Dessert

So who invented the first mask? We still find mention here and there of the writings ofAristotle and Arab scholars who reported that long ago divers descended with a sponge soaked in olive oil between their teeth which improved their underwater vision and acted as a mask. Sacred urinators! The explanation would be that the oil released on the descent would form a film on the surface of a different refractive index, sufficient to see underwater. A beautiful misinterpretation or a stubborn translation error for those who have already put their heads in the water! It would take liters of oil. And a crippling-sized sponge. Apart from throwing up, I don't see ...

At all times, the first underwater hunters have tinkered with their equipment, crossbows, fins and of course masks. In wood, in air chamber, integral or binocular, provided with viewing panes fixed with more or less success… History has kept the invention of “spectacles”. Fernes”Developed by the manufacturer Maurice Fernez circa 1915. The latter will go further by manufacturing a breathing apparatus intended for sponge and coral fishermen in Mediterranean sea. Just a nose clip and a mouthpiece attached underwater to the manual surface air pumping pipe, and which leaves great mobility to the divers, since it does not have the helmet and the cumbersome suit of diving suits. Rouquayrol-Denayrouze. 

It was during the Industrial and Technical Exhibition of 1925 in Paris that the commander of the Navy Yves Paul Gaston Le Prieur discovers the machine and that he has the idea to adapt a bottle of compressed air to it. The two men team up and build a device that allows you to be both free underwater and independent from the surface. The autonomous diving suit Fernez - The Prior was patented in 1926. 

The Prior will demonstrate it himself in 1934 by diving in the aquarium of Trocadero. The bottle had to be opened “on demand” and the air came in a full mask, the excess escaping through the skirt… 

Shortly after Russian Alec kramarenko filed a patent for a mask with a breathing tube valve preventing water from entering the tube, the ancestor of the snorkel. Two pears located on the upper part of the mask allowed to avoid plating on the face in depth and gave the whole an unforgettable “look” of Mickey….

It was in 1939 that the doctor Christian James Lambertsen, in charge of the development of rebreathers for the divers of the US Navy and the Coast Guards, designed a top secret pure oxygen diving apparatus called SCUBA (for Self-Contained Underwater Oxygen Breathing Apparatus) and which included a face mask. It could only be used at shallow depth due to the toxicity of pressurized oxygen but it was sufficient for these first combat divers ... 

 

See you soon for a new definition of Scuba Bécédaire. The irreverent lexicon of diving, but not only. Because sometimes ...

Francis Le Guen

Café

And if your heart tells you, a little vintage dive with the Russian Olga Levitskaya, eyes in front of the holes ...