The French inventor, mathematician and religious Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle (1710-1792) coined the term scaphandre to refer to a type of flotation suit made of cork that he devised in 1775 . To give shape to said term, he resorted to the sum of two Greek lexical components, such as the following:
-The noun “skáphos”, which can be translated as “boat” and “basket”.
-The word “anér, andrós”, which is synonymous with “man”.
Hence the term diving suit had the literal meaning of “basket man.”
The idea came to our language as a diving suit , a word that refers, according to the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), to a device consisting of a waterproof suit and a closed helmet that has tubes and openings to renew the air and a glass in the area. of the eyes. The diving suit allows you to stay and move underwater.
The equipment - which combines a helmet, a suit and weighted boots - connected to the surface by a tube is called a classic diving suit or diving suit . With this type of diving suit, the diver remains attached to a boat or shore and receives a gas that can be breathed through the tube. The classic diving suit is used in explorations no more than 66 meters deep.
The aqualung , on the other hand, has a gas reservoir that frees the person from dependence on a ship or the surface. The diver can move independently as long as he has breathable gases in his diving suit.
The notion of diving suit can also be used with respect to the spacesuits used by astronauts when they leave ships. These space suits can depend on the vehicle or provide autonomy to the astronaut, depending on their characteristics.
In the same way, we cannot ignore the existence of another series of diving suit models. This would be the case, for example, of the so-called rigid diving suit, which can be autonomous or which can depend on the air supplied to the person from the surface.
It should be noted that it is used in what are great depths and that if it receives that name it is because the parts that give it shape are precisely rigid.
Likewise, it is interesting to know that there existed what was called a stratonautical diving suit, which was created in 1935 by the Granada military engineer Emilio Herrera Linares. It is considered to have been the origin of the diving suit used by astronauts and its objective was to be able to be used during a stratospheric trip in a hot air balloon.
Finally, we cannot ignore the existence of a film titled “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” It was released in 2007 and is directed by Julian Schnabel. It tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man who suffers a cerebral infarction in 1985 that makes him unable to speak or move.