Jacques Cousteau (9 page)

Once Cousteau was confident that his equipment was more or less reliable, and that he could fix it if it failed, his theatrical instincts took over. He was ready to make an underwater movie. The story would not be one of the man-woman-villain farces that Cousteau enjoyed filming as a teenager. It would be a never-before-seen underwater adventure with a simple plot: A skin-diving hunter descends into the sea in mask, fins, and snorkel, armed with a speargun. In a wonderworld of fish and gorgeous submarine light, he glides gracefully through the water in search of prey. He fires, he misses. He fires again, he misses. He fires a third time, hits a big fish just behind the gills, and wrestles his
catch to the surface. It was classic storytelling. Cousteau had never studied Henry James, but the great writer’s formula for captivating an audience was instinctive to him: invent a hero, put him up in a tree, throw rocks at him, and get him down again.

Cousteau risked using the Fernez surface feed equipment again, but quickly confirmed his suspicions that the cloud of bubbles from the waste air made filming impossible. They scared off the fish that were essential to the story, and the hunter had to be able to kill one of them at its climax. There was no choice but to free-dive, which meant painfully slow progress. For six months, when the Kinamo was not lying in pieces on the repair table and
Les Mousquemers
weren’t meat diving or on duty, they dove with the camera, shooting hundreds of feet of film in thirty-second takes.

Cousteau, Dumas, and Tailliez traded off as the heroes and cameramen. They filmed each other shooting and missing, shooting and hitting, corkscrewing through the water, and mugging as they swam straight at the camera. Sometimes, they shot background instead of action, scenes of coral, anemones, urchins, flatfish skittering along the bottom, and the colonies of sea life encrusting the giant boulders that had tumbled into the sea eons earlier from the coastal cliffs above the Mediterranean.

After a summer of diving, Cousteau borrowed a two-reel, hand-cranked editing console from the navy photo lab, and taught himself how to cut and splice film into scenes and sequences. In late October 1942, he finished his first underwater movie,
Par dix-huit mètres de fond (Sixty Feet Down)
. Its public premiere was hosted by the German Internationaler Kultur Film before an audience of German officers and Vichy politicians at the Théâtre de Chaillot in occupied Paris. The showing and a reception afterward were arranged by his brother, Pierre-Antoine.

Soon after finishing
Sixty Feet Down
, Cousteau went to Marseille for briefing on a new assignment as a Vichy France naval attaché in Lisbon. On the night of November 27, Cousteau, Simone, and their sons were in a hotel near the waterfront when the roar of airplanes flying eastward woke them up. They went to the parlor of the hotel and tuned the radio to the free broadcast from Geneva. The announcer, fighting
back sobs, said that Hitler had abrogated the treaty and was invading southern France with bombers, tanks, and five thousand German and Italian troops.

The Cousteaus returned to their beds but were shocked awake again at dawn, this time by the clatter of tanks and trucks roaring through the street below their windows. Twenty miles southeast, in Toulon, another armored column and a division of infantry were minutes from seizing control of the harbor. Admiral Richard Laborde gave the order his sailors had been preparing for but dreading for two years. In a dreadful cacophony of high explosives that seemed to last forever, the French navy scuttled its Mediterranean fleet. The battleships
Strasbourg, Dunkerque
, and
Provence
burned and sank under towers of black smoke, as did Cousteau’s ship,
Dupleix
, seven other cruisers, seventeen destroyers, sixteen torpedo boats, six transport ships, tankers, minesweepers, and tugs. The Germans were able to seize only one destroyer, one torpedo boat, and five tankers. Toulon harbor was a sea of fire, fed by fuel gushing from the crippled ships, and the flames and smoke were visible from Marseille to Nice through the day and into the next night.

Jacques Cousteau was a sailor without a ship. The navy canceled his assignment and ordered him to stay in Toulon to film the carnage in the harbor. Simone and their sons went back to Sanary to prepare to flee to Paris, where Cousteau’s mother, Elizabeth, his brother Pierre-Antoine, and his family had the benefits of PAC’s privileges as the editor of a pro-occupation magazine. The Germans had garrisoned Toulon and surrounding towns with Italian troops, and Cousteau knew that once the occupiers felt they were on secure footing, things should eventually settle down on the Mediterranean just as they had in northern France. Conditions would be difficult, but he and his family would survive better at home, especially with the sea to feed them. If they were forced to flee, his plan was to return from occupied Paris in a month, maybe two.

During the few weeks it took for PAC to arrange his brother’s family’s escape from the chaos that had descended on the Mediterranean coast, Cousteau accepted an undercover assignment. The French resistance alone could not overthrow an occupation army, but it could gather information about troop strength and concentration. Liberation, if it came, would depend on the arrival of the Free French army from Algiers with their American and British allies. The more they
knew about what they would find when they came ashore in the south of France, the better. Cousteau’s contacts in the resistance were convinced that the Italians and the few Germans were so confused as they scrambled to gain control over the huge military and civilian populations of Toulon that they had no idea which of their own officers belonged in which offices. It presented an enormous onetime opportunity to gather vital information about their plans. Cousteau agreed. Wearing a stolen Italian uniform, carrying a Leica in a dispatch case, Cousteau simply strolled into the waterfront Italian headquarters and blended in with the bustling crowd of officers and men. During ten of the most dangerous minutes of his life, which would earn him France’s highest military decoration, the Légion d’honneur, he photographed maps showing gun emplacements, wrecks in the harbor, and ammunition dumps. Then he walked away.

In Sanary, while packing to leave for Paris and not knowing if she and her family would ever return, Simone wrote a letter to her father to tell him they were coming. Retired Admiral Henri Melchior was a director of Air Liquide, living relatively comfortably under the occupation because the factories that produced compressed gas were industrial prizes for the Germans. They needed experienced people to run them. In a postscript to her note, Simone asked her father if anyone in his company might know something about building a demand regulator for dispensing gas. JYC, she explained, had abandoned the dangerous oxygen and hose systems for breathing underwater, but had lately become convinced that breathing compressed air from a tank was the answer if he could figure out a valve to regulate it.

LIKE MOST OTHER PARISIANS in the winter of 1942, Émail Gagnan was scratching out a chilly existence, hoping that the Russians, British, and Americans would somehow manage to end the German occupation. He still had his job as an Air Liquide engineer in Paris, though most of the oxygen, hoses, regulators, and the rest of the compressed air equipment flowing from the company’s plants in France were going to the Nazis. Gagnan was forty-two years old. The modest trajectory of his life had carried him from rural Burgundy, through technical school in Paris, to the Air Liquide laboratory, where the puzzles of liquefying, containing, and releasing gas under pressure had held his interest for fifteen years.

Gagnan loved the clarity of physical laws, a world that was seen by everyone but understood by only a select few. The transformations of states of matter were particularly magic to him. A boiling teakettle on a stove top offers a simple example of a liquid becoming a gas; rain, of gas becoming liquid; and melting ice in a glass of lemonade, of the transformation of a solid to a liquid. Under greater or lesser pressure, the temperatures at which those transformations occur change. That is why water in a teakettle on an ocean liner, Gagnan discovered, boils faster than water in a teakettle over the same burner high in the Alps, where the pressure of the air is lower than that at sea level.

If a gas is held in a confined space and subjected to pressure, it eventually turns into a liquid. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no containers strong enough to withstand the pressure of compression, so it was impossible to liquefy gas except in theory. In 1873, Carl von Linde, a German engineer, had developed a practical
way to convert ether into a cold liquid by compressing it with a pump and using it to chill beer in Bavaria. Brewers already knew that beer stored at lower than room temperature lasted longer and tasted better, and slaughterhouses quickly caught on to the advantages of refrigeration over ice for storing meat.

French Undersea Research Group scuba divers. (Left to right) Cousteau, Georges, Tailliez, Pinard, Dumas, and Morandière
(
COURTESY OF
WWW.PHILIPPE.TAILLIEZ.NET
)

Over the next ten years, von Linde improved his refrigerators to use ammonia instead of the more expensive ether, sold hundreds of his patented systems, and got rich. In 1894, he put his fortune to work developing a process to liquefy ordinary air instead of ammonia. At the time, that process had only limited practical applications, but it led him to a next stroke of genius, the separation of oxygen from the other gases in air while they are in their liquefied states. He removed the impurities of water vapor and carbon dioxide from the air by drying it, then pumped it up to 200 atmospheres, or 3,000 pounds per square inch, in a metal chamber. Under pressure, the molecules of air squeezed together, creating friction, which generated heat. He then passed the air through radiators to remove the heat. The oxygen reacted to the process of compression and expansion, repeated over and over, by becoming liquid at very low temperatures.

Liquid oxygen is a lustrous, pale blue. It boils at precisely–183 degrees centigrade, at which point it can be distilled away from the
nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, neon, and other gases in ordinary air. Each separate liquid element turns back into a gas at a different temperature, so when liquid air is heated or cooled, each kind of gas can be drawn from the mixture and reliquefied to produce pure liquid nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, neon, or oxygen. As pressure increases, the boiling point decreases, so one of the keys to converting gas to liquid and back again was building containers that were strong enough to safely hold compressed gas at high pressure.

When pressurized liquid oxygen is released into one atmosphere, it instantly becomes a highly flammable gas with hundreds of industrial, military, and medical applications. It enables airplane pilots to breathe at high altitudes, and burners of all kinds to burn hotter. It is indispensable for removing impurities in the manufacturing of steel. One of the most important uses for high-tensile steel was in the creation of stronger and stronger pressure vessels, which in turn triggered a boom in the liquefaction of gas. By the turn of the century, companies around the world, including Air Liquide, were buying rights to the patents of von Linde, Wroblewski, Olszewski, and others. The transformation of states of matter built great fortunes on what was thought to be alchemy just a few decades earlier.

After Émile Gagnan finished technical school in 1927, he joined the ranks of thousands of other scientists and engineers who were parsing the intricacies of compressing gases, solids, and liquids and putting them to work. Air Liquide had expanded steadily since it was founded in 1902 by Georges Claude and Paul Delorme, who had licensed the patents for the processes of liquefaction and distillation of air. Claude and Delorme quickly realized that shipping a 220-pound steel cylinder containing only 6 cubic meters of compressed gas was a quick way to go bankrupt, so they designed a standard liquefaction and distillation plant to produce the gas closer to their customers. Their liquefaction plants sprouted overnight, and by the time Gagnan went to work for Air Liquide, the company dominated the market in Europe and Japan. Gagnan spent most of his time improving the hardware for producing liquid oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, argon, and neon, and the valves, gauges, tubing, and other equipment the customers needed to use the gases safely.

In occupied France, Air Liquide was among the most priceless spoils of war upon which the Germans were relying to increase their production of steel and supply oxygen to their pilots. At the laboratory in Paris, Gagnan and most of his colleagues did as little as possible to help their ancient enemy, but they brought their full energy to bear on designing equipment to improve life for the French. In December 1942, petroleum was in short supply, so Gagnan was working the bugs out of a regulator with which a farmer or a merchant could easily adapt the engine of his tractor, truck, or car to run on more plentiful methane or cooking gas. Simone Cousteau’s father, Henri Melchior, a senior director of Air Liquide, knew about the development of the natural gas valve. When his daughter wrote to ask him to introduce her husband to an engineer familiar with demand regulators, Gagnan was the obvious choice.