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eskimo3883
Master Diver
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Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2006 5:15 pm

Max Gene Nohl's 1935 MIT thesis is a Fantastic read

Sun Jul 28, 2013 4:34 pm

This is something I stumbled upon and I find it amazing.

I have been trying to find information on scuba-related designs by Max Gene Nohl. Very little luck outside the DESCO web site. During this effort I found you can down load Nohl's 1935 MIT thesis. Its free to download and read but if you wish to print it you need to pay a fee or find a 12 year old to remove the restrictions on the PDF. It has photo's and details of his diving sphere and it's comparison to Beebe's. Describes details of his diving boat. A complete review of all world-wide patents to date. He describes the Rouquayrol-DeNayrouze apparatus as designed to overcome the danger of being crushed a divers falling to greater or the danger of being over-inflated but too complicated to be used as it could fail. Lots of other the details on the dangers of hardhat diving and plans to fix these in his own dress design. It gives a great picture of the work on mixed gas diving which would lead up to his famous dive in 1938 and his 27h saturation dive. He has diving tables listed for the day. His understanding of diving gases in 1935 sounds like he was writing it 30 years later. Absolutely born before his time.

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/40991

The DESCO web page:

http://www.descocorp.com/company_history.htm

December 1st 1937 he dives to 420 feet on He. In 1938, Edgar End and Max Nohl made the first intentional saturation dive by spending 27 hours breathing air at 101 feet in the County Emergency Hospital re-compression facility.

Also a great read is Col. John D. Craig book "Danger is my business". When I first read this book I had thought it was some sort of fictional movie script. After "21" pointed out my complete ignorance I dove into learn what I could about what was going on in 1930s'.
“A skin diver is a fellow who pulls on a pair of fancy swimming trunks, some rubber fins, a diving mask and canvas gloves, then fills his lungs with air and noses down into the ocean looking for two fisted trouble.”

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