SCUBA

Some posts are harder than others. You start with what seems in interesting observation -
Scuba was a really impressive invention that people take for granted any more - and end up drifting around the Web unable to tie it to anything.

While the idea of bringing compressed air with you underwater had been long considered, the regulator invented by Émile Gagnan and Jacques-Yves Cousteau was what really made it possible. ("Possible" in this case encompassing "safe" which means "doesn't necessarily cause oxygen poisoning or the bends or any of the other ways breathing compressed air can kill you.") This innovation is attributed in part to German gasoline rationing in occupied France. A more efficient carburetor worked by delivering gasoline as needed to the engine, much as the regulator delivers air as needed to the diver. And suddenly there are people swimming underwater filming documentaries like that's where movies were always intended to be made.

Then a Time magazine cover shows up with Cousteau's face at the turn of the '60s, looking like a direct influence on Disneyland's Submarine Voyage. Surely there's something here to associate the radical new possibilities in undersea exploration with the postwar High. Well,  there are reminders of the quiz show scandals,the then-recent revolution in Cuba, ongoing Cold War salvos in a still-occupied Germany. Mostly, though, it becomes clear what people mean when they talk about the bland and stagnant 1950s, and that they can't even imagine what's coming their way.

Still cool, though, to see the Diving Saucer and Sea Fleas. They should belong to the future, not half-a-century past.