Jacques Cousteau was born on June 11, 1910 in France.  It was the year 1918 when Cousteau was in the 3rd grade.  When he was 20 years old, he entered the French Navy.  He took his first trip around the world in 1932 when he was with the French Navy – and he took a camera along with him and filmed everything.  Cousteau wanted to record what he saw in the ocean and share it with other people.  This became a passion of his for the rest of his life.  Captain Cousteau’s life long motto was “We must go see for ourselves.”  What does this quote mean?  Cousteau meant that you have to go look at something to understand it; you can’t just read about it or look at pictures.

Four years later, in 1936, he went on his first undersea dive.  He loved being underwater and seeing the whole undersea world, but there was a problem.  The diving gear he used had to be connected to the ship.  He could only explore so far – only as far as he could reach.  The type of diving gear that Cousteau would have used while he was with the Navy was very heavy. It would have been very hard to move around in all that big bulky equipment.  He had a tube that provided him oxygen – but that also kept him bound to the boat. 

Cousteau felt that there had to be a better way to explore the ocean.  So, in 1943, he and his friend Emile Gagnan developed the aqualung.  Think about the word ‘aqualung’.  What do you think it means?  Aqua has to do with water, and lung has to do with breathing.   The aqualung is a self-contained breathing unit.  This means that the diver carriers around their air on their back – they are not attached to the boat.  With the aqualung, Cousteau was able to explore freely underwater.  He could go into caves and other tight spaces that would have been impossible to get to with older equipment.  He could also wwim faster, swim further away, and get closer to sea animals.  Cousteau and Gagnan’s invention, the aqualung, is the same equipment that divers use today – but today, you probably hear it called scuba. 

With this wonderful new tool at his disposal, Jacques Cousteau became even more interested in exploring the world’s oceans.  He bought a big boat, called the Calypso, and took her on her first voyage in 1950.  The Calypso was the boat he used for all his traveling and filming.  He and his crew took the Calypso all over the world – she was made in the United States, and then traveled with Captain Cousteau to Antarctica, France, China, and the Bahamas.  Cousteau even took the ship down the Mississippi River! 

Using his experiences from his travels, Captain Cousteau wrote his first book, The Silent World, in 1953.  He called it this because when you are under water, you can’t hear anything.  Three years later, it was made into an award winning film. 

In 1964, his second film, World Without Sun, won an Academy Award.  This film was very exciting and interested a lot of people.  In the movie, Cousteau assembled a team of five men to live in what he called the Starfish House.  The Starfish House was a tiny underwater living space.  The five men set out to live 30 feet below the ocean’s surface for a whole month.  They succeed in living in the small capsule, filming their lives the whole time.  The films they made then became the movie.  They called the movie World Without Sun because they were underwater, and there was no sun under the ocean.  The Starfish House was relatively small.  What do you think the researchers did while they lived in this tiny space?  Perhaps they studied the fish, learned about the ocean, and swam.

Because of Cousteau’s growing fame and popularity, he was able to make his own television program, which he called The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.  He started making this show in 1966.  They were aired for four years.  These television specials made it so that everybody knew about Jacques Cousteau. 

In 1973, Jacques Cousteau decided he wanted to do something to protect the oceans he loved so much, so he started a group called the Cousteau Society.  The Cousteau Society was set up to protect, love, and educate people about the world’s oceans.  Jacques Cousteau and the Cousteau Society wanted to keep the oceans clean for people who are living today, and for future generations.  The society still does lots of good work today.  What types of things do you think the Cousteau Society has to protect our oceans from? 

Things were going pretty good for Captain Cousteau, until a tragedy struck in 1996.  The Calypso was sunk!  While the boat was docked, it was hit by a barge.  A barge is a very large cargo ship.  The damage caused by the accident caused the Calypso to sink. 
Captain Cousteau hoped to someday raise the Calypso from the body of the ocean and fix her up.  He was never able to see that happen with his own eyes, because sadly he died in 1997.  He was 87 years old. 

However, in 2005, the Cousteau Society was able to do just what Captain Cousteau had dreamed of – they rescued the Calypso!  The boat was moved to the Bahamas, where it is being repaired and fixed up to become a museum all about Jacques Cousteau, his life and his work.

One of the things Captain Cousteau did during his life was to try to enforce a special law he wrote called A Bill of Rights for Future Generations.  Have any of you ever heard of a Bill of Rights before?  America has a Bill of Rights that says all the things that people should be able to do.  The Bill of Rights for Future Generations is like our American Bill of Rights in some ways, but the “Future Generations” part makes it very special.  Who would be the “future generation?”  Children!  All the children of the world are the “future generation” – someday, you’ll all be adults and then you’ll be in charge!  What Cousteau wanted to do was to protect children, the future generation, and he wanted to protect the oceans.  He said that if people who were in charge right now didn’t try to save our oceans, nothing good would be left for their children and grandchildren.  He said that it is the responsibility of the people who are living on earth right now to take care of it, so that people in the future can enjoy it, too.