11 June: Jacques Cousteau

Born on this date in 1910 was Jacques Cousteau, underwater film maker. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. His original career plan was to become an aviator, but that was scuppered when he was injured in a car crash in 1936. His arms were so badly broken doctors recommended amputation, but Cousteau refused that. His recovery was slow and painful and he took to Swimming to help with his healing. One day, he decided to use his old flying goggles for diving underwater. That was the turning point. He was so fascinated by what he could now see under the surface that he knew that was what he wanted to do.
2. Later in the 1930s he worked for the French Resistance, reporting on the movements of Italian troops to the Allies, for which he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
3. He married twice. His first wife was Simone Melchior. He married her in 1937. She took an active part in his expeditions and even sold her jewellery to help pay for them. Calypso's crew nicknamed her La Bergere, or "The Shepherdess" because she took such good care of them. She died of cancer in 1991. After that, Cousteau revealed he'd been having an affair for years with a woman 30 years younger than him, called Francine Triplet, and had two children with her. She became his second wife.
4. His ship, Calypso, started life as a minesweeper in World War II and was then a car ferry in Malta. In 1950 Irish millionaire Thomas Loel Guinness bought the ship and leased it to Cousteau for one franc a year. It was badly damaged in 1996 and is still being renovated today.
5. Cousteau's documentary The Silent World not only won an Academy Award but was the only documentary to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. It was 2004 before any other documentary won the award – Fahrenheit 9/11. He also won Academy Awards for The Golden Fish and World Without Sun.
6. He co-invented the aqualung with Émile Gagnan in 1943, allowing divers to stay underwater for much longer. Cousteau also invented the first submersible scooter, a mini-submarine (which he nicknamed Denise), and many of the underwater lighting systems and waterproof cameras which are still used today.
7. The equipment notwithstanding, Cousteau also held a world record for free diving after descending to a depth of 300 feet in 1947.
8. He visited Cuba in 1985 to research the country's unique system for managing its lobster population. As it happened, dictator Fidel Castro was a big fan of Cousteau and managed to wangle an invitation to dinner on the ship. Castro was such a fan that he allowed Cousteau the select 80 political prisoners to be let go.
9. Cousteau believed that mankind's future lay with farming the sea, and possibly even living under it. He predicted that one day it would be possible to surgically equip men with gills so they could live underwater and then remove the gills when they wanted to move back onto land.
10. Cousteau died of a heart attack on 25 June 1997 in Paris, two weeks after his 87th birthday.

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