RIASSUNTO
Diving technology
An intricate dance between developments in diving and in the offshore oil and gas industry has been under way since the industry’s beginnings. This can be traced back to 1897 when the first oil wells were drilled into the seabed from specially constructed wharves a few feet from the shore of a small California community called Summerland, 5 miles east of Santa Barbara. The number of wharves extending up to 25 ft from the shore grew, each with 6 to 20 wells. Sometime before 1911, Albert Christie was hired to conduct dives on the wharves—possibly the first time in history when a diver was involved in the search for oil and gas.
According to Christopher Swann, in The History of Oilfield Diving, “To a considerable extent, the history of oilfield diving is the history of modern diving as a whole.” He remarks that, “Today, nearly all work done under water, whether with divers or robots, is carried out using equipment and techniques developed to meet the requirements of the offshore oil [and gas] industry.”
Diving itself likely goes back eons, as humans learned to plunge into bodies of water for fish or items, such as pearls or sponges, which they came to value. As various sea-going vessels were developed, such as human-powered galleys used by the Phoenicians, which pushed human geographical limits through a maritime trading culture that spread across the Mediterranean from 1550 BCE to 300 BCE, it stands to reason that when shipwrecks occurred, people would seek to salvage treasure like precious metals or jewels from the ocean depths. A mid-second century inscription found at Ostia, the port of ancient Rome, refers to a guild of divers, corpus urinatorum, who were employed in the construction and maintenance of bridge and harbor foundations. In a paper published in 1976 in the American Journal of Philology, classical archaeologist John Oleson writes, “Salvage diving was frequent enough in the Roman world to require the definition of property rights in the Digest [of Roman law].”