Frédéric Dumas

Frédéric Dumas (14 January 1913 – 26 July 1991) was a French writer. He was part of a team of three, with Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Tailliez. Tailliez coined for them in allusion to (The Three Musketeers). They had a passion for diving, and developed the diving regulator with the aid of the engineer Émile Gagnan.

Dumas participated with Cousteau in the discovery of deep sea reliefs and flora and fauna of deep sea life and in bringing it to the attention of the general public.

Biography Frédéric Dumas was born on 14 January 1913 in Albi, France. Plaque commemorating the filming of with the : Cousteau, Dumas and Tailliez. , , Six-Fours-les-Plages.

A pioneer of underwater fishing on the French Riviera, he met Philippe Tailliez and Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1937 and his exploits served as a subject in Cousteau's first film (Eighteen meters deep), made in 1942. He performed also in Cousteau's second film, (Wrecks) in 1943, the first featuring Aqua-Lungs developed in 1941 by Cousteau and Émile Gagnan. On October 17, 1943, he was the first to exceed a depth of with a Cousteau-Gagnan regulator to . On the same dive, he was also the first scuba diver to suffer the effects of nitrogen narcosis.

Dumas was a dive leader aboard the RV Calypso, and co-author or actor in many films and stories from the Cousteau team.

In 1953 he co-authored with Cousteau their first book The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure. hoping to explain its annual flooding. Fargues was the operation's surface commander, in charge of the guide rope which allowed Cousteau and Dumas to communicate with the surface. When Cousteau and Dumas became affected by carbon dioxide poisoning due to a faulty compressor setup, In 1947 he set a depth-record with in the Mediterranean Sea.

Dumas was one of the major players in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard's bathyscaphe, the FNRS II, during the 1949 expedition in Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy could use the bathyscaphe's sphere in creating the FNRS III.

In 1950, he invented what he called the (safety collar), the first buoyancy compensator, already fitted with a compressed-air reserve separate from the main cylinders.

He was a founding member of the Sea Research Society and served on the Society's Board of Advisors. In 1972 Dumas participated in the creation of the research/professional degree of Doctor of Marine Histories.

After he retired from the GERS, he devoted himself particularly to undersea archaeology and was chairman of the archaeology committee of the Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques (CMAS or World Underwater Activities Federation).

Frédéric Dumas died on 26 July 1991 in Toulon at the age of 78.

Museum Opened in 1994, the Frédéric Dumas Diving Museum is in a 13th-century Roman tower made available by the municipality of Sanary-sur-Mer where Cousteau had a Villa and that bills itself as an historical city of diving.

Publications

Deep-water Archaeology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1962). Épaves antiques. Introduction à l'archéologie sous marine méditerranéenne. Paris. (1964).