On to the "Olympic" snorkel, which can be seen on the right side of the Taurus flyer above. The accompanying caption reads: "
Olympic 32-34. Ping-pong ball closing element. Rubber belt."
Here's a closer image of the breathing tube, surrounded in the image below by the Gagum J-shaped snorkels reviewed in the previous message:
And here's another picture of the breathing tube on its own:
As the stamp on the image indicates, this snorkel is an exhibit in the collection of the Czech Historical Diving Society. The Czech caption reads: "Dýchací trubice (šnorchl) s míčkem, výroba NDR (později Maďarsko), výroba cca začátek 70-tých let", meaning "Breathing tube (snorkel) with ball valve, manufactured in the GDR (later Hungary), manufactured around the beginning of the 1970s".
So the Olympic snorkel, like the Gagum, originated in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) before its production transferred to the Hungarian People's Republic on the orders of COMECON, which decided that the manufacture of basic underwater swimming gear should be centralised in Hungary. The snorkel is probably unremarkable to any westerner around from the 1950s to the 1970s. My own first snorkel was a similar double-bend breathing tube with a ball valve, as illustrated in Typhoon's 1956 and 1966 catalogues:
However, the Hungarian Olympic snorkel appears to have been the only breathing tube with a ball valve ever available on the commercial market either in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. Anybody using such snorkels in these countries had either home-made them or had managed to source them from abroad.
At
:::... Magyar Búvár - Múzeum ...:::, the Hungarian Diving Museum website suggests that another snorkel with a different type of shut-off valve was available during the 1960s in Hungary:
The same web page refers to a "Gaston légzőcsövek" ("Gaston" breathing tube) in the repertoire of the FERUNION foreign trade company, but "Gaston" does not seem to be the name of the snorkel in the bottom right of the picture above. The image resolution isn't high enough to be certain, but the snorkel name looks more like "Carnby" or "Garnby". I'd welcome a fresh eye! Anyway, the snorkel in the picture appears to be fitted with what Cressi calls a "Gamma Valve", as seen on the Italian company's Caraibi snorkel:
The "Caraibi" remained in production at Cressi from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.
Well, that's about it for basic gear manufacture in the Hungarian People's Republic. In later years, the Italian Salvas company outsourced production to Hungary and there is still production of rubber fins in the modern republic, mainly to service demand for finswimming competitions.
This posting will also terminate my review of basic equipment produced in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Thank you to my faithful readers for your comments, observations, corrections and encouragement. This has been a learning experience for me and the research has raised as many questions as it has answered. The overall view I am left with is that much more gear was manufactured behind the "Iron Curtain" than I had anticipated. If Soviet and East European designs seem a little derivative in the light of western developments, we should not forget such examples as Bulgarian experimentation with long fin blades intended to enhance competitive finswimming. Above all, credit is due to oridinary citizens of these countries who toiled in their workshops at home to compensate for the lack of diving equipment in retail stores in their countries. I'm left puzzled too that landlocked Hungary should have made such an important contribution to the development and availability of basic gear in the eastern bloc, while Romania bordering on the Black Sea does not seem to have any diving equipment manufacturing base during the communist era. So many unanswered questions...
Still having the "bit between my teeth", I am planning to start a new thread here soon about the early development of basic diving equipment production in my own country, the UK. Having been invited to do so, I am also planning to begin a parallel thread in the "History of Scuba Diving: Tales from the Abyss" forum about the beginnings of the British Sub-Aqua Club. I was a member of the BSAC from 1966 to 1970 and I remain a passionate admirer of what the organisation has done in the name of British diving.
