Ted Eldred
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Edward ('Ted') Francis Eldred (16th December 1920 to August 2005) was a pioneer of scuba diving in Australia. He invented the Porpoise (make of scuba gear).
He was born in Melbourne in 1920. As a young man he lived by the sea near Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. He started snorkelling as soon as mask and fins and snorkel were available, and wished that he could make or get hold of some sort of free-swimming breathing set, until World War II intervened. After World War II in the late 1940's he scuba dived with a Cousteau-Gagnan type aqua-lung, but found that the effort needed to breathe from it varied with attitude, and at that time sometimes did not deliver all the air that was demanded in severe exertion (this was sometimes called "beating the lung"), so he designed a sport diving oxygen rebreather, and the world's first single-hose open-circuit scuba set, both with tradename "Porpoise": see Porpoise (make of scuba gear) for both.
In 1960 the French firm Air Liquide, which owned the patent to Aqua-Lung, bought him out, under threat of flooding his market with their products.
In later years he was famous among Australian scuba divers.
He died in August 2005.
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[edit] References
- Historical Diving Times No.36 Summer 2005
- Historical Diving Times No.38 Winter 2006
[edit] External links
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