Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.20998

    Diving suit

    Date
    1799
    Creator
    Wilson Lowry (1762 - 1824, British) , Engraver
    Object type
    Library reference
    9183
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (print): 185mm
    width (print): 210mm
    Subject
    Description
    Diving suit study showing its operation by a man wearing the full invention, and figures showing design details.

    The author stated that ‘Fig. 1 (Plate I) represents the diver covered with the harness, jacket and drawers…’. The article continues: ‘…a resolute man may be taught, in the course of a few days, to dive to a moderate depth…the author employed five whole weeks in teaching one who was unacquainted with swimming. This man, called Frederick William Joachim, a huntsman by profession, dived in the apparatus into the Oder, near Breslau, where the water was of considerable depth and the current strong, on 24th of June 1797, before a great number of spectators, and sawed through the trunk of a tree which was lying at the bottom’.

    Plate 1, illustrating the paper: ‘Description of a new Diving Machine, proper for being employed in Rivers, &c. By C.H. Klingert…’ The Philosophical Magazine…[edited] by Alexander Tilloch, v.3, (1799) pp.59-66.

    Inscribed above: ‘Philo. Mag. Pl.I. Vol. III’. Inscribed below right: ‘Lowry sculpt.’

    Karl Heinrich Klingert (1760-1828), German-Polish engineer and inventor, based in Wrocław, Poland [formerly Breslau, Germany]

    Wilson Lowry (1762-1824), British engraver and geologist, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1812.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > Germany
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > Poland
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