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We have lost the world's most famou



Subject: We have lost the world's most famous Oceanographer 

	"ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW TO LEARN AND SEE"
				(Jacques Cousteau)

Dear ALL,

Please excuse me if this posting is disturbing. I post it to share the
feeling of loss. Today, the world lost one of his great scientist in 
the field of Oceanography. 

What you will be reading in a moment is his technical journey being 
broadcast by CNN and then in a separate posting you will read his 
spiritual journey being broadcast by another independent source.

Forwarded by NiNi
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Famed sea explorer Jacques Cousteau dead at 87, June 25, 1997
Wed posted at: 6:12 a.m. EDT (1012 GMT)

(CNN) For millions of people who saw the ocean only through the
porthole of television, the voice of the sea had a soft French accent.
On Wednesday, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the underwater pioneer who opened up
the mysterious world beneath the sea to millions of landlocked viewers, 
died after a reportedly lengthy illness. He was 87.

A press statement from the Cousteau Foundation, which in recent years has
handled all his business and personal affairs, announced his death.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau has rejoined the World of Silence, the foundation 
said, referring to one of his most famous documentaries.

Cousteau's 60-year-long odyssey with the Earth's seas much of it on his
famous boat, the Calypso was more than a great adventure. He co-invented 
the aqualung, developed a one-man, jet-propelled submarine and helped start 
the first manned undersea colonies.

But the bespectacled, wiry Cousteau, often wearing his trademark red wool
cap, became a household name primarily through his hugely popular 
television series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, and his many 
documentaries.

After he led a 1972 voyage to Antarctica, a worldwide television audience 
saw for the first time the extraordinary beauty of sculptured ice 
formations under the sea. Cousteau liked to call himself an oceanographic 
technician. But he was also a romantic who once said that for him, water 
was the ultimate symbol of love. The reason why I love the sea, I cannot 
explain, a chuckling Cousteau told The Associated Press. It's physical. ... 
When you dive, you begin to feel that you're an angel. It's a liberation of 
your weight. Inauspicious beginnings

Cousteau was born June 11, 1910, in Saint-Andre-de-Cubzac, a small town 
near Bordeaux. His father was a lawyer who traveled constantly. As a 
result, the boy was often on the move. He was a sickly child. Nonetheless, 
he learned to swim and spent hours at the beach. Formal schooling bored 
Cousteau; he was expelled from high school for breaking 17 of the school's 
windows. His first dive was in Lake Harvey, Vermont, in the summer of 1920. 
He was spending the season away from New York City, where he and his 
parents lived briefly.

In 1930, Cousteau passed the highly competitive entrance examinations to
enter France's Naval Academy. He served in the navy and entered naval
aviation school. A near-fatal car crash at age 26 denied him his wings, and
he was transferred to sea duty, where he swam rigorously to strengthen 
badly weakened arms. The therapy had unintended consequences, as Cousteau 
wrote in his 1953 book, The Silent World, which has sold 5 million copies 
in more than 20 languages. Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our 
lives have been changed, to discard the old, embrace the new, and run 
headlong down an immutable course, he wrote. It happened to me ... on that 
summer's day, when my eyes were opened to the sea. Manfish During World War 
II, Cousteau was involved in espionage activities for the French 
Resistance. After the war, he was decorated with the Legion of Honor, 
France's highest honor. He also made his first underwater films during the 
war period, and, with engineer Emile Gagnan, perfected the piece of 
equipment that he said enabled him to be a manfish the aqualung, an 
underwater breathing apparatus that supplies oxygen to divers. In 1950, a 
millionaire gave Cousteau money to buy the 400-ton former mine-sweeper 
Calypso. He converted it into a floating laboratory outfitted with the most 
modern equipment, including underwater television gear. In 1952-53 Cousteau 
took the Calypso to the Red Sea and shot the first color footage ever taken 
at a depth of 150 feet. One of his most renowned exploits was the 
unearthing of the hull of an ancient Greek wine freighter, buried deep in 
fossil mud 130 feet below the surface off the French coast near Marseilles. 
The Calypso also conducted the first offshore oil survey by divers.

He authored countless books, including The Living Sea (1963) and World 
Without Sun (1965). A 20-volume encyclopedia, The Ocean World of Jacques 
Cousteau, was blished in the United States and England. In 1977, the 
Cousteau Odyssey's series premiered on PBS. Seven years later, the Cousteau 
Amazon 94 series premiered on the Turner Broadcasting System. In all, his 
documentaries have won 40 Emmy nominations. Explorer, educator, He will be 
remembered not only as a pioneer in his time, but as a dominant figure in 
world history, said President Ronald Reagan in 1985. Cousteau's films and 
philosophy influenced people of all ages. He kept working well into his 
80s, giving up diving in cold water but not giving up educating young 
people about the past. So popular was the explorer that students at the 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology made up a song about him.
He doesn't have to come up for air. He's Jacques, Jacques, Jacques 
Cousteau. How long can you go, the singing tribute went. From sea to 
shining sea, he checks them out for you and me. It was in his later years 
that Cousteau tried to teach the world to save itself. Future generations 
would not forgive us for having deliberately spoiled their last opportunity 
and the last opportunity is today, he said at a 1992 environmental 
gathering. Age did not dim his enthusiasm. Even as the Cousteau Society and 
Turner Original Productions honored him with an 85th birthday special, he 
still approached his life's work with a sense of adventure. There is not 
bad diver. Never. Always something new to learn and see, he said. And after 
a lifetime of invention, exploration and storytelling, Cousteau said not 
long before he died that he was proudest of helping to save Alaska, the 
Antarctic, the Amazon and of helping awaken the awareness of people all 
over the world. All these things have been hard won, he said. And we did it 
and I'm proud of it.

Correspondent Mark Leff and The Associated Press contributed to this 
report.