Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) was a French naval officer, film-maker and ocean campaigner who co-invented the Aqua-Lung in 1943 and used it to make the first widely seen underwater documentaries. His television series opened in January 1968 with an episode about sharks, filmed from his research ship Calypso.
He won the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for The Silent World, directed the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco for three decades, and spent his later years campaigning against waste dumping, whaling and Antarctic mining.
- Lived1910 – 1997
- Co-inventedThe Aqua-Lung, 1943
- Research shipCalypso, about 43 m
On this page
From the Gironde to the French Navy
Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910 at Saint-André-de-Cubzac in the Gironde, in the south-west of France. He entered the naval academy in 1930 and set out to become a pilot in naval aviation. That plan ended in 1936 when a car crash left him with two badly broken arms, and the swimming he took up to rebuild them put him in the Mediterranean nearly every day.
That same year a fellow officer, Philippe Tailliez, handed him a pair of goggles designed for underwater use. Cousteau later described the moment he put his face under with them as the one that redirected his life. He already owned a movie camera and had taught himself to strip and rebuild it; within a few years he was building waterproof housings and shooting his first short films with Tailliez and the free-diver Frédéric Dumas.
He remained in the navy through the Second World War and did not resign his commission until 1957, when he took over as director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco — a post he held until 1988. The training mattered: he could handle a ship, run a crew and raise money, which is why the expeditions kept sailing when other people's did not.
The Aqua-Lung and the films it made possible
The equipment problem was simple to state and hard to solve. Divers of the 1930s were either holding their breath or tethered to a surface pump inside a heavy helmet. In 1943, working with Émile Gagnan, an engineer at Air Liquide who had been adapting gas regulators for cars running on wood gas during the fuel shortage, Cousteau produced a valve that delivered compressed air on demand at the pressure of the surrounding water. They called the result the Aqua-Lung. It is the ancestor of every open-circuit scuba set sold since.
What followed was a film career built on an engineering advantage. Le Monde du silence, made with a young Louis Malle and released in 1956, took the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year and the Academy Award for documentary feature in 1957; World Without Sun won a second Oscar in 1965. In 1950 he had acquired Calypso, a wartime minesweeper of about 43 metres, leased to him for a token sum by a British backer and refitted as a floating laboratory and camera platform. Most accounts that call her a 130-foot boat are rounding down.
What the Calypso crew did with sharks
The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau ran on American television from 1968 to 1976, and the choice of subject for the first episode, broadcast on 8 January 1968, was deliberate. It was called "Sharks", and the argument it made was that the animals are varied, that a minority are genuinely dangerous to a diver and that most are not worth the fear attached to them. That position was unusual for prime-time television in the 1960s, and it arrived seven years before Jaws pushed public opinion the other way.
The episodes also showed the work rather than only the results. The crew tested sedatives, fitted tags to follow migrations, filmed a whale shark at close range and tried out repellents and the anti-shark cage. They ran crude comparisons of which cues brought sharks in — movement, sound, blood in the water — and the modern versions of those questions are covered on how far sharks can smell blood and whether sharks are blind. The biologist Eugenie Clark was an invited guest for some of that filming.
Cousteau and his son Philippe put the same material into a book, The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970), a diary of the crew's encounters that is honest about how often the dives went wrong. Philippe died in a seaplane crash in 1979.
The campaigner he became
He did not start out as a conservationist. The early years involved spearfishing and, on one expedition, dynamite used to collect specimens — practices he later disowned. The shift came with the audience. Once tens of millions of people were watching, he found he could move governments, and he began to spend the fame rather than bank it.
In 1960 he led the public campaign that stopped France dumping radioactive waste in the Mediterranean. He founded the Cousteau Society in 1973. He lobbied the International Whaling Commission, which adopted its commercial whaling moratorium in 1982, in force from the 1985-86 season — the date of 1986 that circulates is when the ban began to bite, not when it was agreed. In 1990 he took up the campaign against mineral prospecting in Antarctica, and the Madrid Protocol signed the following year closed the continent to mining for fifty years.
Cousteau died in Paris on 25 June 1997, aged 87. The people who worked with him are reasonably consistent about what he would make of the oceans now, and none of them use the word optimistic. For the rest of the people who shaped how sharks are studied, see the shark experts; for the animals themselves, the species guide and the history of sharks.
Frequently asked questions
What did Jacques Cousteau invent?
With the engineer Émile Gagnan he developed the Aqua-Lung in 1943, a demand valve that supplies compressed air at the pressure of the surrounding water. It freed divers from surface hoses and heavy helmets, and every open-circuit scuba set in use today descends from it. He also designed underwater camera housings and diving saucers.
Was Jacques Cousteau a shark scientist?
No. He was a naval officer, engineer and film-maker rather than a trained biologist, and he worked with scientists rather than as one. His contribution to shark research was access: the ship, the breathing equipment and the cameras that let researchers observe live sharks in the open sea and show the footage to a mass audience.
Why did his television series begin with sharks?
Because sharks were the subject the audience already had opinions about. The first episode of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau aired on 8 January 1968 and set out the position the whole series took: that the ocean is more varied and less hostile than the popular picture, and that most shark species pose no threat to a diver.
How big was the Calypso?
About 43 metres, or roughly 139 feet. She was built as a wooden-hulled minesweeper during the Second World War, bought in 1950 and leased to Cousteau for a nominal sum, then rebuilt with an underwater observation chamber in the bow, a crane and space for a crew, cameras and a submersible.
When did Jacques Cousteau die?
He died in Paris on 25 June 1997 at the age of 87. His son Philippe, who had worked alongside him on the films and on the shark book, had been killed in a seaplane crash in 1979. The Cousteau Society, which he founded in 1973, continued after his death.
References
A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.
Published December 2, 2014 · Last updated September 23, 2026 · Part of the History of Sharks section.
