Captain, Calypso · Co-inventor of the aqualung · Marine documentary pioneer
1910–1997 · Calypso operating 1950–1996
“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”
Cousteau, The Silent World, 1953.
R/V Calypso
Jacques-Yves Cousteau is the founding voice of modern ocean exploration. With Émile Gagnan he co-invented the Aqua-Lung in 1943, making self-contained underwater diving practical for the first time. From 1950 he operated R/V Calypso — a converted British minesweeper, leased from Sir Loel Guinness for one franc per year — as a floating research and filmmaking platform. Calypso voyaged across the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and Antarctica, generating the footage that became The Silent World (1956, Palme d'Or and Academy Award) and the long-running television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
Cousteau founded The Cousteau Society in 1973 to defend ocean life. His public campaigning against ocean dumping, against Antarctic mining, and for the 1991 Madrid Protocol that protects Antarctica as a natural reserve was decisive. His message — that the ocean is alive and worth defending — became the founding charter of the modern ocean-conservation movement. The Cousteau Society continues his work today.
R/V Calypso (43 m, former HMS J-826) — the most famous research vessel of the 20th century, operating 1950–1996, now under restoration in Brittany. R/V Alcyone — Cousteau's wind-assisted Turbosail catamaran (1985), an early experiment in cargo-vessel wind propulsion.
It is sometimes forgotten that Cousteau himself was an early experimenter with wind propulsion — Alcyone carried two rigid Turbosails in the 1980s, an idea decades ahead of its time. Wind Voyage is the descendant of that idea, brought to industrial maturity by VPLP and Norse.
If ocean voyaging is something you’d like to pursue, we have developed a way to do it using wind and solar power out of our respect for the oceans.
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