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| Established | May 4, 2012 |
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| Location | Russia, Kronstadt, Андреевская улица, 5 |
| Coordinates | 59°59′46″N29°45′48″E / 59.99611°N 29.76333°E |
| Type | Maritime museum |
| Visitors | 10,000 (2014) |
| Founder | Fertoing Ltd. |
| Curator | Vladimir Shatrov |
The Kronstadt Naval Museum is a museum devoted to the history of underwater diving in Russia and the military history of Kronstadt in the 20th century. The museum is located on Kotlin Island in the central part of Kronstadt.
The museum was opened on May 4, 2012 by efforts of enthusiasts and financial support of an engineering company Fertoing Ltd. ahead of the anniversary – 130 years of the diving service in Russia. The name of Kronstadt is connected with establishment of the diving service in Russia as the first state military diving school was founded here on May 5, 1882 by the order of Alexander III.
The exhibition occupies two rooms: the bigger one is devoted to the diving history, the smaller – to the Great Patriotic War, Leningrad Siege, and the Kronstadt military history. The museum houses a wide collection of diving equipment of different times, noteworthy, that all equipment is still operational.
In May 2015, one exhibit returned from the Staraya Derevnya Restoration and Storage Centre of the State Hermitage Museum – the 12-bolt diving helmet that belonged to the Senior Chief Navy Diver Nikita Sergeyevich Myshlyaevskiy, who died underwater in the Gulf of Finland not far from Shepelevo Lighthouse in 1944 during a combat mission.
There is a room devoted to defense of Kronstadt and defenders’ life during the Great Patriotic War. Among witnesses of those hard times are naval distinctive insignias, weapons and bullets, service medals, badges, uniform, damaged helmets, documents, front-line letters, domestic items of peaceful life – toys and bells. Visitors will definitely remember a mortar, mounted machinegun, subgun, captured MP40 submachine gun, articles of German field clothing, pots, peak caps, knives, watches and other belongings of the Winter War soldiers.
The building that houses the Naval Museum was erected at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century and belonged to Aleksandr Mikhailovich Britnev.
The museum houses a lecture hall for meetings, conferences to promote the Russian history and Kronstadt history in particular, diving service, marine archeology, military history among school children and teenagers.
The timeline of underwater diving technology is a chronological list of notable events in the history of the development of underwater diving equipment. With the partial exception of breath-hold diving, the development of underwater diving capacity, scope, and popularity, has been closely linked to available technology, and the physiological constraints of the underwater environment.
A frogman is someone who is trained in scuba diving or swimming underwater in a tactical capacity that includes military, and in some European countries, police work. Such personnel are also known by the more formal names of combat diver, combatant diver, or combat swimmer. The word frogman first arose in the stage name the "Fearless Frogman" of Paul Boyton in the 1870s and later was claimed by John Spence, an enlisted member of the U.S. Navy and member of the OSS Maritime Unit, to have been applied to him while he was training in a green waterproof suit.
Standard diving dress, also known as hard-hat or copper hat equipment, deep sea diving suit or heavy gear, is a type of diving suit that was formerly used for all relatively deep underwater work that required more than breath-hold duration, which included marine salvage, civil engineering, pearl shell diving and other commercial diving work, and similar naval diving applications. Standard diving dress has largely been superseded by lighter and more comfortable equipment.
Professional diving is underwater diving where the divers are paid for their work. The procedures are often regulated by legislation and codes of practice as it is an inherently hazardous occupation and the diver works as a member of a team. Due to the dangerous nature of some professional diving operations, specialized equipment such as an on-site hyperbaric chamber and diver-to-surface communication system is often required by law, and the mode of diving for some applications may be regulated.
Underwater divers may be employed in any branch of an armed force, including the navy, army, marines, air force and coast guard. Scope of operations includes: search and recovery, search and rescue, hydrographic survey, explosive ordnance disposal, demolition, underwater engineering, salvage, ships husbandry, reconnaissance, infiltration, sabotage, counterifiltration, underwater combat and security.
Kronstadt is a Russian port city in Kronshtadtsky District of the federal city of Saint Petersburg, located on Kotlin Island, 30 km (19 mi) west of Saint Petersburg, near the head of the Gulf of Finland. It is linked to the former Russian capital by a combination levee-causeway-seagate, the St Petersburg Dam, part of the city's flood defences, which also acts as road access to Kotlin island from the mainland.
Siebe Gorman & Company Ltd was a British company that developed diving equipment and breathing equipment and worked on commercial diving and marine salvage projects. The company advertised itself as 'Submarine Engineers'. It was founded by Augustus Siebe, a German-born British engineer chiefly known for his contributions to diving equipment.
Vladimir Filippovich Tributs was a Soviet naval commander and admiral from 1943.
Underwater demolition is the deliberate destruction or neutralization of man-made or natural underwater obstacles, both for military and civilian purposes.
The Russian commando frogmen, informally called "commando frogmen" in civilian media, are a Russian Naval Spetsnaz unit under operational subordination to the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). It is the special forces unit of the Russian Naval Infantry and is composed of highly trained and elite marines within the Naval Infantry. By virtue of belonging to the Russian Naval Infantry, frogmen fall under the Coastal Troops of the Russian Navy service arm. The Russian Navy proper does not field any special forces or special operations units. Russian FSB special forces Alpha Group and Vympel also have frogman units in their respective naval components.
Underwater diving, as a human activity, is the practice of descending below the water's surface to interact with the environment. It is also often referred to as diving, an ambiguous term with several possible meanings, depending on context. Immersion in water and exposure to high ambient pressure have physiological effects that limit the depths and duration possible in ambient pressure diving. Humans are not physiologically and anatomically well-adapted to the environmental conditions of diving, and various equipment has been developed to extend the depth and duration of human dives, and allow different types of work to be done.
Museum of the Polish Army is a museum in Warsaw documenting the military history of Poland. Established in 1920 under the Second Polish Republic, it occupies a wing of the building of the Polish National Museum as well as several branches in Poland. It is Warsaw's second largest museum and the largest collection of military objects in Poland. The collection illustrates a thousand years of Polish military history, from the 10th century to the Second World War.
Aksay is a town and the administrative center of Aksaysky District in Rostov Oblast, Russia, located on the right bank of the Don River, 18 kilometers (11 mi) northeast of Rostov-on-Don, the administrative center of the oblast. Population: 41,969 (2010 Census); 38,012 (2002 Census); 33,389 (1989 Census). It was previously known as Ust-Aksayskaya, Aksayskaya.
Divers Institute of Technology (DIT) is a private, for-profit educational institution for the training of commercial divers and located in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1968 in Seattle, Washington, Divers Institute of Technology is located on the North end of Lake Union near Gas Works Park in the Wallingford district.
Army engineer divers are members of national armies who are trained to undertake reconnaissance, demolition, and salvage tasks underwater. These divers have similar skills and qualifications as professional divers. In the United States Army, they are members of the Corps of Engineers. In the British Army they may be Royal Engineer Divers or Commando Engineer Divers.
The San Fernando Naval Museum is a naval museum located in San Fernando in the Province of Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain. Although a naval museum was called for as early as 28 September 1792. A museum was established in 1843, but the current museum was inaugurated on 27 March 1992, with the main purpose to promote the history of the presence of the Spanish Armada in the area.
August Denayrouze (1837–1883) was an inventor of a demand valve for control of breathing air supply, and one of the inventors of a diving suit, along with Benoît Rouquayrol.
The history of underwater diving starts with freediving as a widespread means of hunting and gathering, both for food and other valuable resources such as pearls and coral. By classical Greek and Roman times commercial applications such as sponge diving and marine salvage were established. Military diving also has a long history, going back at least as far as the Peloponnesian War, with recreational and sporting applications being a recent development. Technological development in ambient pressure diving started with stone weights (skandalopetra) for fast descent. In the 16th and 17th centuries diving bells became functionally useful when a renewable supply of air could be provided to the diver at depth, and progressed to surface supplied diving helmets—in effect miniature diving bells covering the diver's head and supplied with compressed air by manually operated pumps—which were improved by attaching a waterproof suit to the helmet and in the early 19th century became the standard diving dress.
The history of scuba diving is closely linked with the history of the equipment. By the turn of the twentieth century, two basic architectures for underwater breathing apparatus had been pioneered; open-circuit surface supplied equipment where the diver's exhaled gas is vented directly into the water, and closed-circuit breathing apparatus where the diver's carbon dioxide is filtered from the exhaled breathing gas, which is then recirculated, and more gas added to replenish the oxygen content. Closed circuit equipment was more easily adapted to scuba in the absence of reliable, portable, and economical high pressure gas storage vessels. By the mid-twentieth century, high pressure cylinders were available and two systems for scuba had emerged: open-circuit scuba where the diver's exhaled breath is vented directly into the water, and closed-circuit scuba where the carbon dioxide is removed from the diver's exhaled breath which has oxygen added and is recirculated. Oxygen rebreathers are severely depth limited due to oxygen toxicity risk, which increases with depth, and the available systems for mixed gas rebreathers were fairly bulky and designed for use with diving helmets. The first commercially practical scuba rebreather was designed and built by the diving engineer Henry Fleuss in 1878, while working for Siebe Gorman in London. His self contained breathing apparatus consisted of a rubber mask connected to a breathing bag, with an estimated 50–60% oxygen supplied from a copper tank and carbon dioxide scrubbed by passing it through a bundle of rope yarn soaked in a solution of caustic potash. During the 1930s and all through World War II, the British, Italians and Germans developed and extensively used oxygen rebreathers to equip the first frogmen. In the U.S. Major Christian J. Lambertsen invented a free-swimming oxygen rebreather. In 1952 he patented a modification of his apparatus, this time named SCUBA, an acronym for "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus," which became the generic English word for autonomous breathing equipment for diving, and later for the activity using the equipment. After World War II, military frogmen continued to use rebreathers since they do not make bubbles which would give away the presence of the divers. The high percentage of oxygen used by these early rebreather systems limited the depth at which they could be used due to the risk of convulsions caused by acute oxygen toxicity.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to underwater diving: