In the nineteen nineties I visited a friend living on the french Cote Azur. This friend had abandoned his former passion of collecting vintage cars and had started collecting diving helmets instead. This not only because a diving helmet has much better looks and value then an old car but also because the cars kept rusting from the sea breeze around his house and the helmets did not. One day he took me to the basement of his house to show me some old stuff that he had found many years ago when he was serving in the french navy. He told me that back then an officer a few colleagues and himself were ordered to clean out a ship which had to be scuttled, all loose items were to be removed from it. The ship was the ‘Elie Monnier’ an old german tugboat which had been given by Germany to France to pay for the debts of war in 1945. The ship was also the ship Jacques Y. Cousteau had used to go diving until he got the Calypso ...
My friend told me that he was sent down into the hold of the ship to look for loose stuff which could be removed, and among the rubble down there he found an old under water camera housing from Cousteau and 2 triple tank sets from the nineteen forties. After having dragged it all up on deck he asked the officer what he should do with it and was answered that he should take it to the scrap heap just like the rest of what came off the ship. He took off with the ‘scrap’ but instead of dumping it with at the scrap-heap he dropped it carefully into the trunk of his own car to take it home. One triple tank set he had given away to a friend so what he showed me in that basement was one triple tank set and the Cousteau camera housing. He told me that the housing was probably used for making the film ‘Par 18 metres de fond’ and he asked me if I was interested in it ... which I obviously was(!) We worked out an exchange with some hard hat equipment for his collection.