Basic gear from mid-twentieth-century France

[Popgun Pete]

This Hydrojet fin is like the US Divers Rocket fin which tried to emulate the French Jetfin and its licensed sibling the Scubapro Jetfin. The reason that they could do this without infringing patents is that these fins have no blade overlap, whereas the Jetfin does and the resultant tunnels with larger entrances than outlets speed the water flow up, hence their "jet" action. Basically the vents in these Hydrojet and Rocket fin blades dump water from the toe area out the rear of the fin, or in use upwards as that blade descends.

 

[Popgun Pete]

The speargun being held by the little girl is this one.
View attachment 519535

And here is the actual speargun, the "Baby Champion"..

 

[David Wilson]

Thanks, Pete!

Image courtesy of the Musée Frédéric Dumas.
On to Sporasub. This company still exists with a website at Sporasub. Sadly, the site provides no information about the origins and history of the company, whose 2019 catalogue of spearfishing supplies can be downloaded from http://www.sporasub.com/0102file/SPORASUB_2019.pdf.

We'll begin as before with the company's diving masks, whose 1980 range can be seen in the picture above. Note the firm's address too featuring the Mediterranean city of Marseilles, where Beuchat notably operated. Some older diving masks claiming to be Sporasub are labelled with just the word "Marseille", leading some commentators to believe that their actual manufacturer may have been Beuchat, which also survives to the present day and still makes old-school oval masks.

Let's start with the masks in the lower right-hand and lower left hand corners of the vintage Sporasub ad: the Standard 211 and the Junior 210. A closer look:

Sporasub Standard 211 mask

Sporasub Junior 210 mask

There's not a lot to say about these two masks except for their plainness. A plastic frame, rubber skirt, adjustable headstrap and without the wherewithal to squeeze the nostrils for ear-clearing pruposes. The Junior model just appears to be a version of the Standard for children and adults with narrow faces.

 

[David Wilson]

On to the compensator masks. Once again, a pair of models.

Sporasub Compensateur 212 mask

Sporasub Visimax 205 mask

The difference between the two models appears to lie in the shape of their lenses. Oval in the case of the Compensateur 212 and rounded rectangular in the case of the Visimax 205. The name of the latter suggests that the mask was designed to boost breadth of vision.

The Musée Dumas has what resembles a Compensateur 212 among its exhibits:

That's enough for today. I'll return soon with a review of the Cressi Pinocchio lookalikes, the twin-lens models and a couple of older Sporasub masks.

 

[David Wilson]

We'll move on today first to the Cressi Pinocchio (seen above with its designer Luigi Ferraro) lookalikes among the Sporasub diving mask offerings.

Sporasub Olympia 231 mask

Sporasub Wanted 233 mask

Sporasub Arbatax 228 mask

These three masks resemble the original Cressi Pinocchio design in the aviator goggles shaped lens and in the rubber nose pocket enabling the nostrils to be squeezed for ear-clearing purposes. While the Cressi Pinocchio relied upon a length of wire and hooks to pull the shaped lens into its retaining groove within the rubber mask body, the Sporasub Olimpia, Wanted and Arbatax use a rigid plastic frame to perform the same function.

 

[David Wilson]

The remaining two models in the 1980 Sporasub mask range above represent the next step in aviator-style mask development.

Sporasub Triton 208 mask

Sporasub Super Cyrano mask

With these models we have passed from the older world of monocular masks to the newer world of binocular masks. The original Pinocchio introduced during the 1950s by Cressi was truly innovative in that it provided both low volume and pressure equalisation at a time when no other diving mask came with either feature. It had a couple of flaws, however, in that the wire and hook arrangement tended to let water leak in around the lens, while the glass lens itself was prone to break at its narrowest point if the mask was ever dropped. The Sporasub Triton and Super Cyrano masks appear to have addressed these issues through the use of a hard plastic frame enclosing a pair of lenses.

"Super Cyrano" is a mask name we have already encountered in one of the British diving equipment history threads. Here is the Namron Super Cyrano:

and the Britmarine Super Cyrano:

The product name pays homage to seventeenth-century French novelist Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (below):

A fictionalised version of his life was celebrated in Edmond Rostand's famous play Cyrano de Bergerac, which helped to create and perpetuate the legend of the man blighted with an oversized nose but blessed with a honeyed tongue:

"Cirano" made an appropriate and probably more positive alternative name to "Pinocchio" when naming diving masks with prominent nosepieces from the 1970s onwards.

 

[David Wilson]

For my penultimate message for today, we'll go back in time to the first of a couple of older Sporasub masks, piecing together the details from images online. The following series show a plain mask, albeit with stainless-steel retaining band, purportedly of Sporasub provenance but simply labelled "Marseille", the city of both Beuchat and Sporasub.

Note the blank "plate" on the top of the mask where the brand name should have been embossed during the rubber moulding process.

 

[David Wilson]

In my last posting today, we'll have a look at another old Sporasub model, this time one with nostril-pinching bosses inside.

So the mask is embossed with the name "Sporasub", while the strap has the middle panel blank and the words "Marseille" and "Made in France" on the left and right. Diving equipment manufacturers back then did not always makes matters easy for diving equipment historians seeking provenance right now!

Well, that's it for Sporasub masks. Next time we'll cast an eye over vintage Sporasub snorkels.

 

[Popgun Pete]

The rubber molds have replaceable inserts to change the name on a product so that the same dive mask can be made for different distribution companies product lines. Similarly to molding tyres (tires) where each month the serial number plate is changed in the mold to identify month of production and batch number and year. I have a dive mask which in early production had absolutely no features, but later models had name plates and surface decoration on the rubber skirt section, so this depends on how early or late in a production run an item may be sourced from.

 

[David Wilson]

Thanks for that, Pete. The picture above shows how one Malaysian manufacturer marks the production dates of its rubber training fins. The three-dial system records the quarter of the year on the rightmost dial and the two final digits of the year on the centre and leftmost dials. The arrows on the dials indicate that this fin was made during the second quarter of 2013.

The same manufacturer used a daisywheel system (above) to record the production dates of swimming fins. While the final two digits of the year appear at the centre of the daisy, the month is calculated by counting how many daisy petals are dotted. The daisywheel in the example indicates a production date of June 2007.