Bev Morgan, Diving Industry Pioneer

[Akimbo]

Bev Morgan's legendary humility has obscured
his diverse contributions to diving​

Very few Scuba divers have heard of Bev Morgan. Most that have only think of commercial and military diving. Au contraire mon ami. His legacy is reflected in every aspect of Scuba diving.

• Recreational Scuba training in the US
• Bring wetsuits to market in diving and surfing
• Publishing, he was the senior editor for Surfer and Skin Diver Magazines
• Exploring exotic Pacific diving locations
• Demand regulator development
• Equipment testing and evaluation
• Underwater systems for Hollywood production companies

Some of his more notable honors include:

• International Scuba Diving Hall of Fame in 2011
• NOGI Award for Arts in 1990 and Sports/Education in 1995 presented by the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences
• The Commercial Diving Hall of Fame , 1982
• DEMA's Hall of Fame in 1996,
• The International Legends of Diving

Full Disclosure and Personal Sidebar​

Bev Morgan was one of my teenage heroes, long before I knew anything about his work in Scuba diving earlier in life. I was obsessed with advanced diving during the time that the US Navy Sealab experiments dominated diving news. I had seen photos of Kirby Morgan diving helmets, mostly in Skin Diver Magazines, but the October 4, 1968 issue of Life Magazine introduced the divers behind the hardware.​

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Fold-out cover showcasing the Kirby Morgan Clam Shell mask made for the US Navy Sea Lab III program and their improved heavy gear hat.​

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It was 1969 and my senior year in High School when I convinced my parents to let me take a week off school to attend the OECON IV and MTS-ASME conference in San Diego (OECON = Offshore Engineering CONference and MTS-ASME = Marine Technology Society and American Society of Mechanical Engineers). Dozens of famous science, military, and commercial divers were speaking. I was wandering the small exhibit hall between speakers, which was full of oceanographic instruments. I suddenly spotted a few of those famous helmets and masks when everything else around me disappeared.​

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Suddenly a soft-spoken voice breaks my trance and asks if he can answer any questions. I look up from the Band Mask on a manikin head and see the name tag. Trying to be cool while "OMG it's BEV MORGAN!!!" is screaming in my head, I probably said something really stupid but mercifully can't remember what it was. Mr. Morgan soon became Bev and was amazingly gracious. He spent a lot of time with me as I asked about every little part in his booth. He managed to bring the conversation around to me where I explained that I planned to join the Navy with hopes of getting into the Sealab program one day.​

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Bev mentioned that the Sealab program (which was technically cancelled a few months before) was desperate for divers with electronics training. That offhand remark changed my life. I signed a delayed enlistment contract that "guaranteed" electronics school a few weeks later.​

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Bev invited me to Santa Barbara to see his shop near the airport, which would have to wait until after completing high school. Time was tight so I skipped the graduation ceremony in order to see the Kirby Morgan factory before leaving for boot camp. Bev wasted half his day showing me anything I wanted to see and answering an endless barrage of questions. I finally got out of his hair (my interpretation in hindsight) and he said "keep in touch". I was off to Navy boot camp in San Diego a few weeks later and in a six month electronics school by fall. I submitted my first "request chit" for diving school within a few weeks of starting class.​

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Diving was a secondary trade in the Navy then, meaning you had to have a primary skill before going to diving school. My request was denied. I tried to make a stronger case, gathered some recommendations, and submitted a second request... which was promptly denied. Being a little thick and oblivious to the ways of the Navy, I made an even stronger case and submitted request #3. Denied.​

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It was starting to occur to me that the dispatchers in Washington DC might be more concerned with meeting their quota for Aviation ETs during the Vietnam War than what a tiny group of Navy divers "might" be able to use. It was getting close to the end of school when I submitted my fourth request. I wrote letters to everyone I could think of asking for help, including Bev Morgan. A set of orders to a squadron arrived soon after. I learned enough by then to know that my new CO (Commanding Officer) wasn't likely to approve a fifth request for diving school and lose a sailor the Navy just spent half a year training to work for him.​

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To add even more insult to my already devastated life (remember I'm still a teenager and everything is dramatic), an instructor comes up several days later and says "they want to see you in the personnel department after class". Of course what I heard was "go over and pick up your fourth rejection". I trudged into the office and get passed around between few desks before finding the right guy. He barely looks up, hands me an envelope, and says "new orders".​

​

I'm really confused and a little scared as I open the clasp. The pre-printed form with a bunch of boxes made it hard to find where somebody typed (as-in typewriter) something like Report to US Naval Station San Diego for Second Class Diving School before proceeding to ATF-105 USS Moctobi. I had to ask the fantastically bored sailor behind the desk "what about the orders I got last week". "These cancel 'em"... which I suddenly remembered learning in boot camp. It was probably the happiest moment of my life.​

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It wasn't entirely clear to me how I'm going to get from a lowly E3 on a Fleet Tug in Japan to the world's most advanced deep diving program but it was a lot closer than in a squadron of sub hunters. I checked into diving school about a month later and this Chief looks at the three green stripes (meaning Airman) on my arm and says "What the hell are you doing here?". I was the first Airman or ET anyone could remember. Then his eyes light up and he says "This class is full so you'll be delayed a month. Report tomorrow and we'll find something for you to do". He leads me to a small locker/workshop below deck on the training barge, points to a stack of dusty vacuum tube diver amplifiers and says "fix 'em". It is becoming clear why my original class was suddenly too full.​

​

Two SPs (Shore Patrol/Navy cops) come onboard a few days later to arrest me for being AWOL from that squadron I had orders to. Fortunately the school's CO went to bat for me, said my orders were legal, and "you ain't get'in him". I just chalked it up to another Navy FUBAR and went back to work.​

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Decades later, long after seeing Bev dozens of times as a civilian in the commercial diving industry, I started to think about that incident and a series of other strange events before eventually being assigned to the Mark II Deep Dive System that was built to support Sealab III. Things weren't adding up and my suspicions eventually focused on Bev. I finally wrote him a letter and asked if he had a hand in these events. His reply included:​

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Yes, I did mention to the right people some of the directions you were interested in and I think they acted on it. Sometimes getting things done requires a little push under the table.​

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Sorry for the long story but it illustrates a lot about the nature of the man.​

Bret Gilliam chose this image of Bev for the cover of his book, Diving Pioneers and Innovators, over the twenty or so other famous divers who are far better known.

The entire chapter: Bev Morgan Pioneer, Pirate, Photographer, Entrepreneur, was reprinted in Tech Diving Mag, and can be downloaded here: Tech Diving Mag, Issue 14, December 2014

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[Akimbo]

Continued from previous post​

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Life Guard to Diving Pioneer
Bev Morgan was born in 1932 in Los Angeles California. He started surfing in 1946, graduated high school at 15, and dropped out of Los Angeles City Collage two years later to surf. He soon became a lifeguard for LA County.

He was surfing one day in San Diego when he met (Conrad) Connie Limbaugh, Jim Stewart, and Andy Rechnitzer from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Like most divers of that era, spearfishing was the initial attraction but the friendship soon grew beyond beach cookouts.

Part of Bev's job included body recovery using LA County Lifeguards' only boat, the Baywatch (seriously). I have never seen them but I understand that the instructions that came with an Aqua Lung included little more than "don't hold your breath". The body-count of divers rose high enough that the small diving community was getting concerned over intervention by heavy-handed government bureaucrats. The estimated fatality rate was 5-6% and there was serious discussion of outlawing Scuba diving in the county.

Bev, Connie Limbaugh, and E.R. Cross lobbied the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to create a 5-man board of advisers in 1953. A budget was authorized through the Department of Parks and Recreation to develop the LA County Water Safety Program. Bev worked with Limbaugh, Al Tillman, and Cross to develop the first formal skin and Scuba diving training program for recreational Scuba divers in the US.

Images of two different covers​

How Could a Lifeguard Write a Diving Textbook?
Bev Morgan and the general public knew very little about diving in the 1940s and early 1950s. What little they did know was represented by surface-supplied divers with copper helmets or the US Navy's Frogmen (UDT or Underwater Demolition Teams founded in World War II).

Jacques Cousteau's first successful test of the Aqua Lung was in June of 1943, but was largely unknown until the end of the war (see A Brief History of Diving, Post #2, Jacques-Yves Cousteau heading). Cousteau and L'Air Liquide formed La Spirotechnique to manufacture the Aqua Lung after the war and René Bussoz began importing them to the US in 1947. He sold them through René's Sporting Goods in Westwood, California.

Bussoz managed to get an order from the US Navy worth several hundred thousand dollars (about 10x in today's money). He met with Cousteau in Paris and negotiated exclusive rights for the Aqua Lung in the US. Knowing that the Government would be reluctant to do that much business with a sporting goods retailer, he formed US Divers in Los Angeles. Bussoz sold US Divers to Air Liquide in 1957. Note: US Divers is now Aqua Lung with the US Headquarters in Vista, California.

(Please forgive the mixed chronology but there were a lot of simultaneous developments)​

Los Angeles was a fast growing city with extensive manufacturing capability after the war. It was also home to several sporting goods manufactures that entered the Scuba market including Voit Rubber Company, Sportsways, and Healthways -- which later went bankrupt and became Scubapro (gross oversimplification, but that's another story).

Bev met fellow LA Lifeguards Rex Guthrie and Tom King around 1949-50. They were using surplus tilt-valve oxygen regulators from B-29 bombers adapted to rubber full face masks. That was when Bev began Scuba diving. They purchased a US Divers Aqua Lung soon after.

Scuba Training
The US Navy's 1" (25mm) thick Diving Manual was the most authoritative source available, but completely unsuitable for training civilian Scuba divers. The physics and physiology was all there but the procedures and equipment were intended for surface-supplied heavy gear divers. Like most government publications, it was also terminally boring, written by committee, and horribly illustrated.

E.R. Cross and the Sparling School of Deep Sea Diving
Cross was a Navy diver and helped write the curriculum for the Sparling School of Diving and Underwater Welding in Wilmington, California during off duty hours. He left active duty in 1946, purchased the school in 1947, and renamed it the Sparling School of Deep Sea Diving.

The Sparling School had one of the few high pressure breathing air compressors in the area so recreational divers started to show up for fills. Wilmington/LA Harbor was a considerable drive to René's Sporting Goods in Westwood who also had a compressor. Sparling also had a recompression chamber. Cross offered the first recreational sport diving class to improve skills of divers that were already active. He charged $25 (about $250 in 2017 inflation-adjusted dollars) and included 10 pool sessions and a chamber dive to 110' (33.5M) to demonstrate Boyle's Law and Nitrogen Narcosis.

Those classes led him to write and self-publish a small booklet/instruction manual titled Underwater Safety in 1951. It was the only source of Scuba training information publicly available. Ten thousand copies were printed and sold out in four months. He made a deal with Healthways to publish it and they sold 100,000 copies.

1956 Reprint, 88 Pages, 5½x8¼" (140x210mm)​

Connie Limbaugh, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Connie Limbaugh was an experienced skin (freediver today) and Scuba diver by the time he transferred to Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1950. He began to develop guidelines for training research divers in 1951 with Andy Rechnitzer. Limbaugh was appointed Scripps' first Marine Diving Specialist in December of 1953. Part of his responsibility was to develop a program for scientific diving and issue permits (certifications).

Limbaugh died in a cave diving accident in France on 20 March 1960 at the age of 35. Jim Stewart succeeded him and served as Scripps Diving Officer until his retirement in 1991.

American Red Cross
Fred Swankowski was the Director of Water Safety for the Long Beach Chapter of the American Red Cross. He taught the first recreational Scuba class in the US for non-divers at a pool in Long Beach, California through the YMCA. Bev completed the first or second course (he can't recall).

That is a brief overview of how Bev learned enough to write a diving textbook.

Dive Shop and Wetsuits
Bev read a report by Hugh Bradner at the Scripps Library that described a suit for thermal protection underwater made of closed-cell foam Neoprene. He soon made a suit for himself and friends started asking for one of their own.

He and Hap Jacobs started the Redondo Beach, California Dive 'n Surf retail shop in the early 1955. They sold USD's (US Divers) entire line, wetsuits, and surfboards. Fellow lifeguards and twin brothers, Bob and Bill Meistrell, borrowed $1,800 from their mom to buy Hap Jacobs share.

There were no industry associations or business guides for running dive shops in those days. They did everything including making wetsuits and repairing regulators. USD introduced a double hose single stage venturi-assisted regulator named Mistral. Unfortunately it had a significant design flaw. Bev tinkered with it and solved the problem. The short story is USD compensated him with a pickup truck load of dive gear. The dive industry was pretty informal then.

Bev sold his interest in Dive 'n Surf to the Meistrell brothers a couple of years later.

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[Akimbo]

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Dive Adventures in the Pacific
Long before anyone envisioned a dive travel industry, Bev boarded a 61' ketch named Chiriqui with some dive buddies to explore the South Pacific. They left Long Beach in 1957 and dove for a month at Tres Marias, a group of islands off of Mazatlan Mexico. They set sail for Acapulco and dove in places that had probably never seen divers including Cocos Island, the Galapagos, Easter Island, and Pitcairn Island where they dove on the remains of the HMS Bounty.

His still photographs and 16mm motion pictures from that voyage influenced many of the future pioneers of the diving travel industry.

Abalone and Oilfield Diver
Bev returned to California around 1960 and started commercial abalone diving. Ab diving was dominated by heavy-gear divers at that time but a few were experimenting with wetsuits and lightweight masks. Bev's experience with fiberglass and Scuba regulators led to building and modifying a number of surface-supplied full face masks.

The big money was being earned by divers working in construction and the offshore oil industry. Bev wasn't trained in heavy gear but managed to land a diving job in Alaska anyway. He was working in the Cook Inlet where the water was too cold for wetsuits so heavy gear was the only option. He figured out pretty fast that he didn’t have the experience to survive on the job and returned to Santa Barbara.

Bev would go surfing when the seas were too high for ab diving. He also made wetsuits for surfers but they were slow to catch-on. He finally changed attitudes by convincing competitive surfers on board manufacturer's teams to wear them. The marketing ploy worked, perhaps a little too well. He had about 1,000 orders in the first week. The short version of the story is Bev sold the surfing suit business to the Meistrell Brothers for $3,000 and Body Glove was born.

He spent the next year as an editor, writer, and photographer at Surfer Magazine. Meanwhile, exciting things were starting to happen in the offshore oil industry in Santa Barbara. Ab divers were being hired for repair and inspection work on drilling platforms. Water depths were also increasing rapidly.

Friend and fellow abalone diver Dan Wilson had just completed a HeO2 test dive using the Purisima diving bell. Wilson used a freeflow mask made for Abalone diving that Bev Morgan and Ramsey Parks modified by adding a demand regulator (Scuba second stage).

I devoured every word in the October 1967 issue of Skin Diver Magazine, but didn't pay much attention to the cover photographer's name.​

Kirby Morgan Corporation
After returning from Alaska in 1965, Bev met Bob Kirby at the Santa Barbara breakwater. Kirby was selling heavy gear helmets and wanted to make a new full face mask for abalone divers, which Bev had a lot of experience with. They each had different fabrication skills and worked well together. Bob was an ex-Navy diver trained to use the Mark V and was a talented metalsmith. Bev was an expert with demand regulators and fiberglass from years of building surfboards. KMC (Kirby Morgan Corporation) was founded in 1966.

Bob Kirby built the most advanced heavy gear helmets ever produced. He despised the US Navy's Mark V hat and joked that Chief Stillson must have been blind in one eye. His large faceplates (viewports) were made of 1" thick Acrylic/Plexiglass making the old-fashioned port guards unnecessary.​

The days of heavy gear was coming to an end as the offshore oil industry moved into deeper water, which required the use of Helium-Oxygen. Kirby Morgan produced a Helium Hat that was vastly superior to the US Navy's version, but the sales fell off in a few years because diving bells and deck decompression chambers were much more practical.

Helium Hats are basically a semi-closed circuit rebreather built into an air hat to conserve expensive breathing gas.​

Innovations
Bev and Bob constantly worked to improve the lightweight fiberglass masks and managed to make a meager living. One day, an abalone diver named Walt Swenson came to their shop. His whole face was badly bruised and the whites of his eyes were blood-red. He was not a happy customer. Walt was using one of their freeflow masks when the hose blew near the surface and the check valve on the mask failed. It sucked both of his eyes out of their sockets but he managed to pry the mask off his face before it starting sending soft tissue up the hose.

This is not a sea story. Heavy gear divers' bodies have been squeezed into their helmets and they had to be buried in them.​

They inspected the mask and found bits of hose stuck in the check valve. Even though it was the fault of the divers for not keeping their hoses clean, it didn't change the fact that someone nearly died in their mask. This understandably bothered Bev a lot.

All the lightweight masks at that time used a rigid metal or fiberglass frame and a soft face seal was glued in. It was a tedious job to repair face seals requiring scraping off the glue and rubber and waiting for new adhesive to cure. Bev's years of experience with wetsuits led him to an innovation that would not only solve this problem but prevent face squeeze. He made a loose-fitting hood with a very wide and soft face seal backed with open-cell foam rubber. That assembly was held to the rigid fiberglass frame with a metal band. The face seal was so wide and soft that the mask would flood before injuring the diver. The Band Mask was born.

The Dial-a-Breath
Another important innovation was the Dial-a-Breath® developed by Bob Kirby. Most demand masks they made previously were used a short distance below a diving bell. That allowed the pressure-reducing regulator to be set in the bell close to the second stages working pressure. Exactly like a Scuba second stage, there is a narrow inlet pressure range, or IP (Intermediate Pressure), where the regulator will operate without free flowing or breathing hard.

The problem with using a surface-supplied demand mask is that LP (Low Pressure) air compressors deliver 100-175 PSI (7-12 Bar) and the OBP (Over Bottom Pressure) supplying the regulator varies with the diver's depth. The first stage regulator automatically manages this problem for Scuba divers.

Bob's solution was to add a threaded plunger against the poppet spring opposite the inlet hose with a large adjustment range. My Band Mask has about 13 full revolutions stop-to-stop and handles about 80 to 200 PSI (5½ to 14 Bar). They couldn’t afford to patent the concept but they did register the Dial-a-Breath® trademark.

These images are of a Super Flow I had in the shop and shows the similarity to regulators made today with inhalation resistance controls.​

The diver would adjust the Dial-a-Breath knob after donning the mask until the regulator just began to freeflow and then tighten it just enough to make it stop. It had to be backed off on descent to prevent excessive breathing resistance as the OBP reduced and screwed down on ascent to prevent freeflow.

Dacor had a feature named Dial-a-Breath on a double hose regulator in 1962. It's not clear if Dacor was unaware of KMC's registration, didn't care to dispute it, no-longer used it, or simply operated in a different market. In any case, it is not related to the KMC Dial-a-Breath.

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Continued in the next post​

 

[Akimbo]

Continued from previous post​

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Bev offered to license the Dial-a-Breath to Gustav Dalla Valle of Scubapro but he turned it down. The idea was that a control with much less adjustment range would allow the diver to set the minimum inhalation resistance for the conditions. Dick Anderson, who ran R&D for Healthways before they went bankrupt, suggested incorporating the same function into Scubapro's regulators as a marketing feature. Dick was paid a small royalty for a short time based on a verbal agreement.

Growing Pains
KMC suffered through cash flow and unstable demand problems that are typical of most small start-up manufacturing companies in emerging markets. Bob left KMC in 1968 to pursue interests in the aviation market but remained friends with Bev. Bev sold the Band Mask product line to US Divers (USD) in 1970 and received a royalty, largely because they had the capital for tooling to cut production costs and could leverage their regulator manufacturing capacity.

Unfortunately USD's corporate structure didn't serve the quirky commercial diving market well and Bev started to get calls bemoaning the problems. Bev and Bob formed Diving Systems International in 1974 eventually manufacturing an improved Band Mask and introducing the SuperLite helmet series. Both were made from hand-laid fiberglass.

Kirby Morgan Again
Bev negotiated a buy-back of USD's Commercial Diving Division around 1990, which included rights to the name "Kirby Morgan". The company was renamed Kirby Morgan Dive Systems, Inc. It also included the injection molding tooling for the Band Mask frame, which was re-worked for various design upgrades and for stronger plastics.

Kirby Morgan's product line includes

• Band Masks
• Lightweight Helmets
• Full Face Masks
• Ultra-high Performance Demand Regulators
• Air Control Systems for Surface-Supplied Diving

After several unsuccessful attempts and decades of work the US Navy finally made a fleet-wide commitment to the Kirby Morgan SuperLite helmet. Kirby Morgan has out-lived dozens of mask and helmet manufacturers and dominates commercial and military markets around the world.

Training, repair, and testing facilities close to NEDU and the commercial diving centers in the Gulf of Mexico led to the formation of Dive Lab in Panama City Florida. The five acre facility includes four 5,000+ Ft² (465M²) buildings that house class rooms, hyperbaric equipment testing labs, administration, diving lockers, and other support functions. Scubaboard members might be familiar with Dive Lab through Scuba Diving Magazine's regulator testing reviews.

Bev Morgan has turned operations of the company over to his daughter Connie and is now based in Santa Maria, California. This video shows some of their facilities.

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Special thanks to @Sam Miller III, @John C. Ratliff, and @Luis H for their assistance with research for this thread.

Related Reading

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1. Diving Pioneers: An Oral History of Diving in America by Eric Hanauer

2. Diving Pioneers and Innovators by Bret Gilliam

3. A Biography of Conrad Limbaugh By Mary Lynn Price

4. The First US Scuba Training by Andreas B. Rechnitzer, PhD

5. Historical Diver, Volume 15 Issue 2, Number 51, Spring 2007

6. Hard Hat Divers Wear Dresses by Bob Kirby

7. The History of Oilfield Diving: An Industrial Adventure by Christopher Swann, @Oceanaut

Scubaboard Footnotes

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Diving without license/certification card

 

[Jack Hammer]

Wow, that's pretty cool history. I never really knew much about KM other than they made hardhat diving helmets. The more I read these articles the more I realize just how much common history so many dive/surf companies have.

 

[Schwob]

@ Akimbo & gang (well, there seems to be a group of "knowledgeable and experienced oldtimers" at work here trying to preserve "diving history stuff" for the uninitiated.... like me...):
...
Thanks!
...

 

[Saniflush]

Just got around to reading this thread. Amazing history and your own background @Akimbo . Thank you for sharing.

 

[Akimbo]

I thought you might find this interesting. The 1953 US Divers Catalog cover page read:

free swimming
DIVING
GEAR

U. S. DIVERS CO.
1045 Broxton Avnenue
W. Los Angeles 24, Calif
ARizona 9 8750 • BRadshaw 2-1596 < this was the phone number back then.​

This is OCR'd from the first page:

THE AQUA-LUNG
Until the invention of the Aqua-Lung, only highly trained specialists could explore the underwater world. This was an expensive venture, full of risks.

Now, thanks to this self-contained diving unit, any swimmer can dive among the wonders of the deep without training, below 100 feet and up to one hour, unhampered by hoses or lines.

No chemicals involved: no adjustments necessary.

The automatic demand regulator releases air only as needed at a pressure identical to that of surrounding water, irrespective of depth. This explains why the Aqua-Lung diver has no problem with his ears; the ear-drums, being exposed to equal pressures (water outside. air inside), will remain in a neutral state, free of pain.

The Aqua-Lung has been used for seven years without casualties; it is standard equipment in the French, British and U.S. Navies, at the Universities of California, Washington, Wisconsin, Stanford, and Southern California, Pomona College, Pacific Oceanic Fishery Investigations, Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Scripps Institute, American Red Cross. shipping companies. harbor commissions, life guards, 20th Century-Fox Film Corp. (as in their masterpiece, "The Frogmen"). The Aqua-Lung is also successfully used by thousands of yachtsmen and sport fishermen.

The Aqua-Lung is popular-priced, uses only compressed air (available most anywhere) is foolproof and needs little maintenance. It is not bulky and requires no helper. Just slip on the harness and swim down. The Aqua-Lung is weightless due to its buoyancy in the water.​

This says a lot about the laissez faire attitude of manufacturers of the time that led to the concern by the LA County Commissioners and the small diving community. I'm sure that @Sam Miller III can provide more perspective since he was in the middle of it all.

 

[Oceanaut]

Continued from previous post​

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Dive Adventures in the Pacific
Long before anyone envisioned a dive travel industry, Bev boarded a 61' ketch named Chiriqui with some dive buddies to explore the South Pacific. They left Long Beach in 1957 and dove for a month at Tres Marias, a group of islands off of Mazatlan Mexico. They set sail for Acapulco and dove in places that had probably never seen divers including Cocos Island, the Galapagos, Easter Island, and Pitcairn Island where they dove on the remains of the HMS Bounty.

His still photographs and 16mm motion pictures from that voyage influenced many of the future pioneers of the diving travel industry.

Abalone and Oilfield Diver
Bev returned to California around 1960 and started commercial abalone diving. Ab diving was dominated by heavy-gear divers at that time but a few were experimenting with wetsuits and lightweight masks. Bev's experience with fiberglass and Scuba regulators led to building and modifying a number of surface-supplied full face masks.

The big money was being earned by divers working in construction and the offshore oil industry. Bev wasn't trained in heavy gear but managed to land a diving job in Alaska anyway. He was working in the Cook Inlet where the water was too cold for wetsuits so heavy gear was the only option. He figured out pretty fast that he didn’t have the experience to survive on the job and returned to Santa Barbara.

Bev would go surfing when the seas were too high for ab diving. He also made wetsuits for surfers but they were slow to catch-on. He finally changed attitudes by convincing competitive surfers on board manufacturer's teams to wear them. The marketing ploy worked, perhaps a little too well. He had about 1,000 orders in the first week. The short version of the story is Bev sold the surfing suit business to the Meistrell Brothers for $3,000 and Body Glove was born.

He spent the next year as an editor, writer, and photographer at Surfer Magazine. Meanwhile, exciting things were starting to happen in the offshore oil industry in Santa Barbara. Ab divers were being hired for repair and inspection work on drilling platforms. Water depths were also increasing rapidly.

Friend and fellow abalone diver Dan Wilson had just completed a HeO2 test dive using the Purisima diving bell. Wilson used a freeflow mask made for Abalone diving that Bev Morgan and Ramsey Parks modified by adding a demand regulator (Scuba second stage).

View attachment 431753
I devoured every word in the October 1967 issue of Skin Diver Magazine, but didn't pay much attention to the cover photographer's name.​

Kirby Morgan Corporation
After returning from Alaska in 1965, Bev met Bob Kirby at the Santa Barbara breakwater. Kirby was selling heavy gear helmets and wanted to make a new full face mask for abalone divers, which Bev had a lot of experience with. They each had different fabrication skills and worked well together. Bob was an ex-Navy diver trained to use the Mark V and was a talented metalsmith. Bev was an expert with demand regulators and fiberglass from years of building surfboards. KMC (Kirby Morgan Corporation) was founded in 1966.

View attachment 431754
Bob Kirby built the most advanced heavy gear helmets ever produced. He despised the US Navy's Mark V hat and joked that Chief Stillson must have been blind in one eye. His large faceplates (viewports) were made of 1" thick Acrylic/Plexiglass making the old-fashioned port guards unnecessary.​

The days of heavy gear was coming to an end as the offshore oil industry moved into deeper water, which required the use of Helium-Oxygen. Kirby Morgan produced a Helium Hat that was vastly superior to the US Navy's version, but the sales fell off in a few years because diving bells and deck decompression chambers were much more practical.

View attachment 431755
Helium Hats are basically a semi-closed circuit rebreather built into an air hat to conserve expensive breathing gas.​

Innovations
Bev and Bob constantly worked to improve the lightweight fiberglass masks and managed to make a meager living. One day, an abalone diver named Walt Swenson came to their shop. His whole face was badly bruised and the whites of his eyes were blood-red. He was not a happy customer. Walt was using one of their freeflow masks when the hose blew near the surface and the check valve on the mask failed. It sucked both of his eyes out of their sockets but he managed to pry the mask off his face before it starting sending soft tissue up the hose.

This is not a sea story. Heavy gear divers' bodies have been squeezed into their helmets and they had to be buried in them.​

They inspected the mask and found bits of hose stuck in the check valve. Even though it was the fault of the divers for not keeping their hoses clean, it didn't change the fact that someone nearly died in their mask. This understandably bothered Bev a lot.

All the lightweight masks at that time used a rigid metal or fiberglass frame and a soft face seal was glued in. It was a tedious job to repair face seals requiring scraping off the glue and rubber and waiting for new adhesive to cure. Bev's years of experience with wetsuits led him to an innovation that would not only solve this problem but prevent face squeeze. He made a loose-fitting hood with a very wide and soft face seal backed with open-cell foam rubber. That assembly was held to the rigid fiberglass frame with a metal band. The face seal was so wide and soft that the mask would flood before injuring the diver. The Band Mask was born.

View attachment 431756​

The Dial-a-Breath
Another important innovation was the Dial-a-Breath® developed by Bob Kirby. Most demand masks they made previously were used a short distance below a diving bell. That allowed the pressure-reducing regulator to be set in the bell close to the second stages working pressure. Exactly like a Scuba second stage, there is a narrow inlet pressure range, or IP (Intermediate Pressure), where the regulator will operate without free flowing or breathing hard.

The problem with using a surface-supplied demand mask is that LP (Low Pressure) air compressors deliver 100-175 PSI (7-12 Bar) and the OBP (Over Bottom Pressure) supplying the regulator varies with the diver's depth. The first stage regulator automatically manages this problem for Scuba divers.

Bob's solution was to add a threaded plunger against the poppet spring opposite the inlet hose with a large adjustment range. My Band Mask has about 13 full revolutions stop-to-stop and handles about 80 to 200 PSI (5½ to 14 Bar). They couldn’t afford to patent the concept but they did register the Dial-a-Breath® trademark.

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These images are of a Super Flow I had in the shop and shows the similarity to regulators made today with inhalation resistance controls.​

The diver would adjust the Dial-a-Breath knob after donning the mask until the regulator just began to freeflow and then tighten it just enough to make it stop. It had to be backed off on descent to prevent excessive breathing resistance as the OBP reduced and screwed down on ascent to prevent freeflow.

Dacor had a feature named Dial-a-Breath on a double hose regulator in 1962. It's not clear if Dacor was unaware of KMC's registration, didn't care to dispute it, no-longer used it, or simply operated in a different market. In any case, it is not related to the KMC Dial-a-Breath.

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Continued in the next post​

Although Bev had thousands of hours in scuba and lightweight equipment, his claim to being a heavy gear diver rested solely on a few familiarization dives in Morro Bay where another diver, Bob Christensen, had put him down after hours on a telephone cable job. Bev was a natural in the water and a fast learner; but Cook Inlet was about as tough a place as anyone could imagine for a first working dive in heavy gear.

 

[Akimbo]

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