Free Jacques Cousteau by Brad Matsen Page B

1942, Cousteau found a 35 mm Kinamo camera in a Marseille junk shop, a ten-year-old relic with no lens. He boughtit for $25. Leon Veche, the gunsmith who had become the fourth member of
Les Mousquemers
, built a waterproof metal housing for the big camera, fitting rubber seals around the winder, focusing lever, and trigger, and an optical-quality pane of glass through which to aim and shoot. A Hungarian refugee living in Sanary, Papa Heinic, who had been drawn to the energetic haven among Cousteau and his friends, ground a new lens for the Kinamo. The camera and housing was an ingenious contraption, the only one of its kind in the world. With it Cousteau could shoot the largest-size film available and produce the sharpest images of the world beneath the sea that had ever been seen.
    The problem was that in Vichy France, all the 35 mm movie film was being requisitioned by the Germans for their gun cameras, airplane reconnaissance, and combat cinematographers. Cousteau scoured photography shops from Marseille to Nice with no luck, until he realized that he didn’t need movie film. Any 35 mm film would work, and there was plenty of black-and-white Leica still film around. Cousteau bought every roll he could find. At home, he and Simone huddled under blankets, laughing like children in a nursery hideout as they spliced the thirty-six-frame strips into 50-foot reels that would give him three minutes of shooting time underwater. “I don’t think anyone with common sense would do it,” Cousteau said of his film manufacturing under the covers. “It was absolutely crazy.”
    “Absolutely crazy” became Cousteau’s code for off-the-cuff inventions that worked. His enthusiasm for outcomes that only he could envision seduced everyone into helping him even when they had no idea how what they were doing fit into the grand plan. Leon Veche built the camera housing to withstand pressure down to 60 feet, about as far as a free diver can descend and still have time to focus, shoot, and surface on a single breath of air. He made the seals for the winder, focusing lever, and trigger from the design for a device known as a stuffing box, through which a boat’s propeller shaft passed. Each seal on the camera was a hollow, threaded, male-to-female fitting that could be tightened to squeeze tarred jute around the extension shafts that controlled the winder and the focusing lever. If the fittings were too tight, the shaft and lever would not turn; too loose and water would pour into the housing, fouling the camera’s clockwork machinery and possibly cracking Heinic’s fine lens. Veche tested it with the camera replaced by half a brick and dummy controls.
    After two weeks of diving with the brick, the housing was staying dry more often than not.
Les Mousquemers
, Simone, Jean-Michel, and Philippe trooped down to the sea to test it with the Kinamo inside. The camera and housing weighed 20 pounds out of the water. It was slung on a wooden shoulder brace about 3 feet long, which would also be used to line up a shot as though it were a speargun stock. Cousteau, Dumas, Tailliez, Veche, and Simone stood waist-deep in the water while Cousteau held the camera 2 feet down and squeezed the trigger. The first 35 mm underwater film ever shot captured a blurry image of the dark talus a few yards offshore and a pair of feet. When they opened the housing on the beach, the inside was dry. For the rest of the day, Cousteau dove deeper and deeper, triggering a few seconds of film at each level, working the controls to test the seals under pressure, and learning how to manage the bulk of the contraption underwater while holding his breath. Eventually, he reached about 60 feet. The housing held.
    Three days later, one of the seals leaked and Cousteau surfaced with a housing full of water and a disaster inside. Back at the house, Veche plunged the camera into freshwater, explaining that the minerals in salt water would do much more damage and the rinse would