Timeline of underwater technology

• 1531 - Guglielmo dives on two of Caligula's sunken galleys using a diving bell from a design by Leonardo da Vinci.
• 1772 - Sieur Freminet builds the first scuba device, but dies from lack of oxygen after 20 minutes
• 1801 - Robert Fulton builds the first submarine, the Nautilus
• 1819 - Augustus Siebe develops standard diving dress a type of surface supplied diving equipment
• 1825 - William H. James designs a self contained diving suit that had compressed air in a iron container worn around the waist.
• 1856 - Wilhelm Bauer starts the first of 133 successful dives with his second submarine 'Seeteufel'. The crew of 12 is trained to leave the submerged ship through a diving chamber.
• 1860 - Ivan Lupis-Vukic , a retired engineer of the Austro-Hungarian navy, demonstrates a design for a self-propelled torpedo to emperor Franz Joseph.
• 1863 - CSS Hunley is the first known North American submarine of war (Commissioned by the Confederate States Navy during Civil War).
• 1866 - Minenschiff, the first self-propelling torpedo, developed by Robert Whitehead , demonstrated for the imperial naval commission on 21 December.
• 1876 - Henry Fleuss designs the first working rebreather
• 1934 - Charles Beebe dives to 3,028 feet using a bathysphere
• 1943 - Emile Gagnan invents the regulator and Jacques-Yves Cousteau makes the first scuba dive with a compressed-air aqualung
• 1948 - Auguste Piccard sends the first bathyscape, FNRS-2, on unmanned dives
• 1954 - USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, is launched
• 1954 - first manned dives in FNRS-2
• 1956 - first wetsuit was introduced
• 1958 - USS Nautilus completes the first ever voyage under the polar ice to the North Pole and back
• 1960 - Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh, USN, descend to Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the ocean (about 10900m or 35802feet) in the bathyscape Trieste [1] [2]
• 1960 - USS Triton completes the first ever underwater circumnavigation
• 1983 - Orca Edge dive computer was introduced.
• 1985 - The wreck of the Titanic was found.

links

• other time lines (http://scuba.about.com/library/weekly/aa100198.htm )