Jacques Cousteau Trivia
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49 free Jacques Cousteau trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Jacques Cousteau trivia quiz covers the French naval officer whose broken arms ended a flying career and sent him into the sea instead. It follows the borrowed goggles of 1936, the Aqua-Lung he developed with Emile Gagnan during the occupation, the Navy's underwater research group, the one-franc lease of a converted minesweeper called Calypso, the Palme d'Or and Oscar for The Silent World, the diving saucer, the Conshelf underwater villages, the campaign that stopped a train of nuclear waste, ten years of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, the discovery of the Britannic, and the family feuds and honours of his last decades. The easy questions are ones most people know: the ship, the invention, the hat. The medium ones ask about his films, his crew, his sons, his awards and his television career. The hard ones dig into Philippe Tailliez, the Mahdia wreck, the porpoise theory, the SP-350 Denise, the Academie francaise seat, and the John Denver song that gave its royalties to his society. It suits a marine-science class, an ocean-themed quiz night or anyone who grew up watching the red bonnet on Sunday evenings. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What breathing apparatus did Jacques Cousteau co-invent, making modern scuba diving possible?
The Aqua-Lung
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.
Q 02Cousteau was an officer in which armed service before he became a full-time oceanographer?
The French Navy
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.
Q 03With which engineer did Cousteau develop his breathing apparatus in the winter of 1942-43?
Emile Gagnan
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.
Q 04What accident ended Cousteau's plans to become a pilot?
A car crash that broke both his arms
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.
Q 05In 1936 a friend lent Cousteau which piece of diving kit?
Swimming goggles
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.
Q 06Cousteau's father-in-law was a director of which French company, which backed his invention?
Air Liquide
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.
Q 07How did Cousteau and his friends film 18 Metres Deep, the first French underwater film, in 1942?
Holding their breath
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.
Q 08Cousteau's brother Pierre-Antoine was sentenced to death in 1946 for what?
Editing a collaborationist newspaper
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.
Q 09Cousteau first tried swimming under water as a boy, while his family was living in which country?
The United States
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.
Q 10After the war, the military diving unit that Cousteau and Tailliez set up at Toulon was put to work on which task?
Clearing mines
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.
Q 11The ancient wreck off Mahdia, Tunisia, that Cousteau's divers explored in 1948 had been carrying what?
Greek works of art
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.
Q 12Whose pioneering bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, did Cousteau's team help recover in the late 1940s?
Auguste Piccard
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.
Q 13Who leased the Calypso to Cousteau for one franc a year, on condition that his identity stay secret?
Q 21What did Cousteau's 1960 publicity campaign stop from being dumped in the Mediterranean?
Radioactive waste
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.
Q 22What did Cousteau's Conshelf projects of the 1960s set out to prove people could do?
Live and work on the seabed
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.
Q 23What was Cousteau's trademark headgear on television?
Thomas Loel Guinness
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.
Q 14What was the Calypso before Cousteau converted her into a research vessel?
A Royal Navy minesweeper
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.
Q 15What ability of porpoises did Cousteau correctly surmise in his book The Silent World?
Echolocation
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.
Q 16With which French director did Cousteau co-direct the 1956 film The Silent World?
Louis Malle
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.
Q 17In 1956 The Silent World became the first documentary to win the top prize at which film festival?
Cannes
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.
Q 18In The Golden Fish, the Oscar-winning 1959 short film that Cousteau produced, which animal stalks a boy's pet fish?
A black cat
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.
Q 19Which institution did Cousteau take over as director in 1957?
The Oceanographic Museum of Monaco
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.
Q 20The SP-350, a two-person submersible that Cousteau launched in 1959, was popularly known as the diving what?
Saucer
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.
A red bonnet
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.
Q 24Which American network broadcast The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau from 1968 to 1976?
ABC
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.
Q 25Which shark did Cousteau call 'the most dangerous of all sharks' in his 1970 book with son Philippe?
The oceanic whitetip
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.
Q 26Which singer's 1975 tribute song 'Calypso' reached No. 2 on the charts?
John Denver
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.
Q 27Which sunken sister ship of the Titanic did Cousteau's team locate off Greece in the mid-1970s?
HMHS Britannic
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.
Q 28How did Cousteau's son and chosen successor Philippe die near Lisbon in 1979?
A flying-boat crash
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.
Q 29Which US president awarded Cousteau the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 30To which prestigious French body was Cousteau elected in 1988?
The Academie francaise
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.