Scuba diving is a popular activity that has recreational appeal and commercial uses.

Most people who have never gone scuba diving think it's just a matter of breathing air out of a tank when you're underwater.

However, there's a lot more to it.

In fact, solving the problem of underwater breathing wasn't solved

until after humans have discovered artificial flight and split the atom.

Learn more about scuba diving, its history, and how it works, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. And If breathing underwater was nothing more than getting air to someone who's below the surface, then some equivalent of scuba diving would have been invented centuries earlier.

There were stories from ancient Egypt of people hiding below the surface of the water who used reeds as a snorkel.

In the 18th century there were experiments where people

under water were hooked up with air hoses and air was fed down to them via hand pumps.

So yeah believe it or not the fundamental problem wasn't getting air down to someone who was in the water.

The main problem was pressure.

We don't tend to think much about pressure because we never really notice it from where we

sit on the surface of the Earth. The pressure coming from

the atmosphere is in equilibrium with the pressure inside our bodies.

However, the Earth's atmosphere actually has a lot of pressure. You might have seen

experiments where someone heats up an oil drum that's open at the top and then they seal it and cool it off.

As the air inside cools down, it reduces the pressure inside the drum and eventually it's crushed by the power of the atmosphere's pressure.

You also might have noticed pressure changes if you've been at a high altitude or flown in an airplane

and you had a headache or your ears would pop.

Just as the atmosphere has pressure, water exerts even more pressure. If you go down just 10 meters or 30 feet below the surface of the water, the pressure is twice that of what it is at the surface.

When the pressure increases it becomes

a very difficult, actually near impossible to breathe air which is at one

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