"Slebe's design... remained In use essentially unchanged by the Royal Navy until]989."
English Heritage
The standard diving suit, or "hard-hat" diving suit, was a major advance in diving technology. Early diving suits were crude and inflexible and imposed major restrictions on divers' movements, such as an inability to invert. A brilliant German inventor by the name of Augustus Siebe (1788-1872) changed all that with his innovative "closed" helmet suit—a design that remained essentially unchanged until fiberglass SCUBA suits arrived in the 1960s.
After learning metal craft and working as a watchmaker, and following service as an artillery officer in the Prussian army at the Battle of Waterloo, Siebe moved to England in 1815. While living in London he stumbled across the solution to creating a more practical diving suit. Previous designs—so- called "open dress" suits—were simple diving bells that trapped air for breathing, but these took in water when the diver left the vertical position.
Siebe took a large metallic helmet and bolted it to a canvas diving suit to create a perfect water-sealed suit. A length of tubing supplied air to the diver from the surface. Siebe created many prototypes of his invention before settling on the eventual design. The final version of the suit was first used to investigate the wreck of HMS Royal George, which had sunk off the coast of Spithead, Isle of Wight, England. It was later suggested that the helmet be detachable from the suit, and so the standard diving suit was born.
Siebe's suit heralded a revolution in diving enabling underwater exploration to take place with a much greater level of freedom than had previously been available. It also provided the basis upon which future suits were designed, up until the introduction of the SCUBA suit, which eventually succeeded Siebe's great invention.
