49 Fun Facts About Jacques Cousteau

What breathing apparatus did Jacques Cousteau co-invent, making modern scuba diving possible?

The Aqua-Lung. It fed air from a tank on the diver's back only when he breathed in, so people could at last swim free under water for long stretches instead of hanging on a hose from the surface.

Cousteau was an officer in which armed service before he became a full-time oceanographer?

The French Navy. He entered its academy in 1930, and during the occupation he spied for the Resistance, work that later earned him the Legion of Honour.

With which engineer did Cousteau develop his breathing apparatus in the winter of 1942-43?

Emile Gagnan. He had designed the valve to let car engines run on gas when the occupiers took France's petrol, and the pair adapted it to feed a diver air on demand.

What accident ended Cousteau's plans to become a pilot?

A car crash that broke both his arms. The smash nearly killed him, and the long convalescence that followed at Toulon turned the would-be flyer from the air to the sea.

In 1936 a friend lent Cousteau which piece of diving kit?

Swimming goggles. Philippe Tailliez handed him a pair made by the inventor Maurice Fernez when the two were posted together at Toulon, and within a few years they were diving and filming side by side.

Cousteau's father-in-law was a director of which French company, which backed his invention?

Air Liquide. Henri Melchior's industrial-gas firm gave his son-in-law both the money and the engineer he needed, and its workshops built the first prototypes.

How did Cousteau and his friends film 18 Metres Deep, the first French underwater film, in 1942?

Holding their breath. They had no breathing gear yet, so they dived again and again with the camera sealed in a watertight case, and the result shared first prize at a 1943 documentary congress.

Cousteau's brother Pierre-Antoine was sentenced to death in 1946 for what?

Editing a collaborationist newspaper. Pierre-Antoine ran the pro-Nazi weekly Je suis partout while his brother was spying for the Resistance; the sentence was commuted and he left prison in the 1950s.

Cousteau first tried swimming under water as a boy, while his family was living in which country?

The United States. He went to school in New York in the early 1920s, and the future explorer of the oceans first tried staying under water in a lake in landlocked Vermont.

After the war, the military diving unit that Cousteau and Tailliez set up at Toulon was put to work on which task?

Clearing mines. The Underwater Research Group swept up the war's leftovers, and between those jobs it explored wrecks and tested how deep a free swimmer could safely go.

The ancient wreck off Mahdia, Tunisia, that Cousteau's divers explored in 1948 had been carrying what?

Greek works of art. The ship was taking marble columns and bronze statues from Athens to Roman buyers when it sank, and the dive was the first archaeological dig carried out by free-swimming divers.

Whose pioneering bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, did Cousteau's team help recover in the late 1940s?

Auguste Piccard. The Swiss professor had already ridden a balloon to record heights before he turned to the deep, and the steel sphere saved from his first diving craft was reused in France's FNRS-3.

Who leased the Calypso to Cousteau for one franc a year, on condition that his identity stay secret?

Thomas Loel Guinness. The British millionaire, a former MP and Battle of Britain pilot, bought the ship himself and set a second condition: that Cousteau never ask him for money.

What was the Calypso before Cousteau converted her into a research vessel?

A Royal Navy minesweeper. She was built of wood in Seattle, lent to Britain for the war in the Mediterranean, and was working as a ferry off Malta when she was bought.

What ability of porpoises did Cousteau correctly surmise in his book The Silent World?

Echolocation. Porpoises riding with his ship kept to the best line through the Strait of Gibraltar even after he steered off it, so he guessed they had something like sonar, then new on submarines.

With which French director did Cousteau co-direct the 1956 film The Silent World?

Louis Malle. Cousteau took him on from film school as an assistant and cameraman, and after months aboard the Calypso the 23-year-old ended up sharing the director's credit.

In 1956 The Silent World became the first documentary to win the top prize at which film festival?

Cannes. The winning film shows his crew dynamiting a coral reef and killing a school of sharks, years before Cousteau turned to campaigning to protect the sea.

In The Golden Fish, the Oscar-winning 1959 short film that Cousteau produced, which animal stalks a boy's pet fish?

A black cat. The wordless 19-minute film is set in a boy's flat, not the ocean, and it brought the diver one of the three Oscars his films won.

Which institution did Cousteau take over as director in 1957?

The Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. He ran it for 31 years, and its aquarium was later blamed for letting the invasive 'killer alga' Caulerpa loose in the sea below its walls on his watch, a charge the museum denied.

The SP-350, a two-person submersible that Cousteau launched in 1959, was popularly known as the diving what?

Saucer. The flattened disc, nicknamed Denise, moved like a squid, squirting water through steerable jets in place of a propeller, so it could turn on the spot.

What did Cousteau's 1960 publicity campaign stop from being dumped in the Mediterranean?

Radioactive waste. France's atomic energy agency meant to sink thousands of drums of it between Corsica and the Riviera, and within two weeks his campaign had won enough support to have the dump put off.

What did Cousteau's Conshelf projects of the 1960s set out to prove people could do?

Live and work on the seabed. In 1963 six 'oceanauts' spent a month in a starfish-shaped house on the floor of the Red Sea, the second of the three stations he built.

What was Cousteau's trademark headgear on television?

A red bonnet. The woollen cap was a salute to the old hard-hat divers, who wore one under the helmet, and his whole crew took to it on screen until it became their emblem.

Which American network broadcast The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau from 1968 to 1976?

ABC. The network hired Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, to narrate the American version, though Cousteau's own heavily accented commentary became part of the show's character.

Which shark did Cousteau call 'the most dangerous of all sharks' in his 1970 book with son Philippe?

The oceanic whitetip. It cruises near the surface far out at sea, so bathers hardly ever meet it, but it is the shark that gathers around the survivors of a shipwreck.

Which singer's 1975 tribute song 'Calypso' reached No. 2 on the charts?

John Denver. The tribute went out as the B-side of 'I'm Sorry', but radio stations played it so much that Billboard ended up listing it as the A-side.

Which sunken sister ship of the Titanic did Cousteau's team locate off Greece in the mid-1970s?

HMHS Britannic. She was serving as a hospital ship when a mine sank her in under an hour in 1916, and Cousteau's team found her by sonar and filmed her with some of her survivors looking on.

How did Cousteau's son and chosen successor Philippe die near Lisbon in 1979?

A flying-boat crash. His Catalina seaplane was wrecked on the water of the Tagus, and his father called the elder son, an architect, in from outside to help run the Society.

Which US president awarded Cousteau the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Ronald Reagan, in 1985. Kennedy had also honoured him at the White House, a generation earlier, but the medal he handed over was the National Geographic Society's.

To which prestigious French body was Cousteau elected in 1988?

The Academie francaise. By custom a new member's first speech praises the one whose seat he takes, so the diver had to eulogise a psychiatrist he had never met, and he confessed he had dreaded the reading.

Which electronic musician titled his 1990 album Waiting for Cousteau in homage to the commander?

Jean Michel Jarre. The title is a play on Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and its long ambient title track went on to become the soundtrack of one of Cousteau's own documentaries.

Cousteau's third feature film for cinemas, Voyage to the Edge of the World, took the Calypso to which region?

Antarctica. The expedition cost the life of the ship's second-in-command, struck by a helicopter rotor on Deception Island, and Cousteau finished the film with his son Philippe.

In the mid-1990s Cousteau sued his son Jean-Michel over the family name on which kind of business in Fiji?

A holiday resort. A judge made Jean-Michel print his first name as large as the surname on the hotel, so that nobody would take it for his father's non-profit work.

What happened to the Calypso in the port of Singapore in January 1996?

A barge rammed and sank her. A floating crane lifted her about a week later, and she was patched up and towed home to France to become a museum exhibit instead of going back to sea.

Where in Paris was Cousteau's funeral Mass held in June 1997?

Notre-Dame. The Archbishop of Paris said the Mass before his family and old hands from the Calypso, and the commander was then buried in his family's vault in the town where he was born.

Cousteau's second ship, Alcyone, launched in 1985, was built to try out a new way of harnessing which energy source?

The wind. In place of cloth sails she carries two Turbosails, tall fixed columns that turn the breeze into thrust and take over part of the work from her diesel engines.

The amphibious 'Calypso' camera that Cousteau conceived for his divers was taken over in 1963 by which Japanese camera maker?

Nikon. It renamed the little waterproof camera the Nikonos, and the line that grew from it was the working tool of underwater photographers for the next three decades.

In Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic, which actor plays Steve Zissou, an oceanographer modelled on Cousteau?

Bill Murray. Anderson dedicated the film to Cousteau, and gave Zissou a film crew, a failing reputation and an ageing research ship called the Belafonte.

The unseen French narrator of which undersea cartoon series is a running homage to Cousteau?

SpongeBob SquarePants. Tom Kenny puts on the accent to introduce episodes as if they were ocean documentaries, and in later seasons the narrator turns up on screen as a diver in a heavy helmet suit.

In 2014 Cousteau's grandson Fabien spent 31 days living in which undersea laboratory off the Florida Keys?

Aquarius. From the lab his divers could stay out on the reef for hours at a stretch without surfacing to decompress, and he reckoned the month gave them as much data as years of dives from the surface.

Who faced Cousteau in an Epic Rap Battle of History episode?

Steve Irwin. The pairing had a real link: when a stingray killed Irwin on the Great Barrier Reef in 2006, he was filming Ocean's Deadliest with Cousteau's grandson Philippe.

Cousteau was the first president, from 1959, of which diving body?

World Underwater Federation, known as CMAS from its French name. National diving federations set it up and put their most famous member in the chair for 14 years; PADI was founded later, by two Americans.

Which spacecraft did astronaut Sunita Williams name Calypso after Cousteau's ship?

A Boeing Starliner capsule. Williams flew Calypso to the space station in 2024 for a planned eight days, but thruster trouble sent it home empty and she was up there for nine months.

Cousteau was born in 1910 in Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac, a town just north of which French city?

Bordeaux. The man who made the Mediterranean his workplace was born on the Atlantic side of France, and after his death he was taken back to the family vault in the same town.

Cousteau and his first two diving partners were known as the 'Mousquemers', a pun on the heroes of which novelist?

Alexandre Dumas. Philippe Tailliez coined the word to turn the Three Musketeers into men of the 'mer', and by coincidence the third of them was a Riviera spear-fisherman named Frederic Dumas.

Cousteau's Emmy-winning informational special of 1985 explored which American river?

The Mississippi. He shared the Emmy with his elder son Jean-Michel, who produced the film with him, and about ten years later father and son were facing each other in court over the use of the family name.

Cousteau's Calypso was named for the nymph who holds the hero captive in which ancient epic?

The Odyssey. Calypso keeps Odysseus on her island for seven years, and legend places that island at Gozo, so when the boat became a ferry to Gozo it was given her name.

In 1954 a British company hired Cousteau and the Calypso to search offshore for what?

Oil. He surveyed the waters off Abu Dhabi for British Petroleum, years before he took up the fight against the pollution of the sea.

Which Cousteau film won him a second Academy Award for best documentary feature, for 1964?

World Without Sun. Its rivals for the award that year included Four Days in November, a documentary on the assassination of President Kennedy, and the undersea film still won.