Some History On Nitrox

[kensuf]

Copied or not, nice summary - Thanks.
I know that NAUI sanctioned Nitrox training for recreational divers in 1992 (I believe this was the first Traning Organisation to sanction Nitrox diving).

Umm, sort of. NAUI likes to embellish this story, it was more like 1997 when they adopted it as mainstream. Prior to that, if you were a NAUI instructor and you wanted to teach nitrox, you needed to be a nitrox instructor with another agency (IAND) and then get approval to teach it.

 

[tep]

Ah, yes, the days of "vodoo gas", "devil gas", "death gas".

"Divers breathe AIR"

"anything not REAL AIR is for military divers on death-defying dives"

"the math is too hard for anyone but physicists and doctors"

"NITROX will kill divers, which will kill the industry"

"If we don't kill NITROX, so many people will die that diving will require a government license"

Those are all pretty much real quotes that I heard in some dive shops in the 80s.

 

[Caveeagle]

1987: Members of the Woodville Karst Plain Perject (WKPP) begin to accelerate the use of mixed gasses in deep cave explorations of Tallahassee, Florida. This deep cave exploration pioneers the regular use of mixed gasses in technical diving (I do not agree with this statement at all, and I did omit this before for that reason, and so do a lot of others in the diving community, but you know that they can't do it wrong, they only know how to "Do It Right".)

This seems to skip right over the work done by Deans and Key West DIvers that either preceded this or ran in close parallel. I remember the "This is your brain on Air" T-shirts being sold at KWD ~'1990.

 

[wnissen]

Those of you interested in the history may enjoy these pictures that I recently added to Rutkowski's Wikipedia page:

NOAA Digital Collections

Featured collections , Voyage to Inner Space

www.photolib.noaa.gov

NOAA Digital Collections

Featured collections , Voyage to Inner Space

www.photolib.noaa.gov

 

[broncobowsher]

OK, this thread is old enough to qualify for Message Boards

 

[tursiops]

PADI introduced its Enriched Air (Nitrox) (called EANx) course in 1Q1996. AOW or OW+10 dives were prerequisites. It was supported by a video, a manual, an Equivalent Air Depth table, an O2 Exposure table, and RDPs for 32% and 36%. Two OW dive with EANx were required. An instructor had to be certified as a PADI EANx diver (or equivalent certification) and have 20 logged EANx dives, or have taken an EANx Specialty Instructor Training course, plus 10 logged EANx dives.
I was EANx certified in 1999, became an instructor in 2001; I've now certified over 100 EANx students, plus some via SDI that I have not tracked.
What I've learned is:

• people sort of remember how to analyze, but often forget how to set their computers
• people are typically frightened of approaching their MOD and stay well away from it
• people have no concept of O2 exposure, and do not need to for recreational diving
• people mostly shy away from the math, but they do for all math, not just EANx math

Finally, I think I've read all available studies and discussions of whether or not EANx keeps you from getting tired. It does keep ME from getting tired, so that's what I need to know. I've never said to a student that it even might keep them from getting tired. If they discover it does, fine. If it doesn't, join the majority.

 

[rjack321]

Contributions to the Board are not paid for, to my knowledge...and the knowledge of my bank account. Further, this Board is not a scholarly journal and, thus, footnotes and attribution are not required...even of UWSince79!

However, what attribution does is give folks a chance to go to the source and do in depth reading and that is appreciated by a lot of people. So it would be a service to include the info.

At any rate, UW, do not feel compelled to footnote everything, but I guess you have to be prepared to "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous ..." if what you write looks very similar to something that has been previously published...

And, I still enjoyed reading your post!

Joewr

Do you copy photographs, remove the watermarks in the corner, and repost them without attribution? Plagiarism is the theft of someone else's work and has nothing to do with whether you post here, on facebook, or make paper copies. It's still plagiarism.

Reposting copywrited work, especially without attribution, makes scubaboard potentially subject to DCMA request.

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It has nothing to do with whether you are getting paid for the content or if its part of a journal article or not - plagiarism is against the law.

 

[tursiops]

The DAN Nitrox Workshop Proceedings is attached. Held in 2000, published in 2001, The lead article is a history of nitrox in recreational diving by R.W. Bill Hamilton, who is if not the horse's mouth, at least is in the room with the horse.
Eleven years earlier, NOAA's National Undersea Research Program (NURP) held a workshop at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution; "Workshop on Enriched Air Nitrox Diving," also attached. It is a must-read if you are interested in the history of the subject.