Basic gear from the Hungarian People's Republic

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Scary indeed, John, and thanks for the additional information, Sam.

Yesterday I chanced upon a good collection of vintage diving masks on the website of the Museo torinese della attività subacquee (Turin museum of underwater activity) at http://www.museosubacqueotorinese.com/collezioni/Maschere. One of the exhibits is a Swimaster Wide View mask that made it as far as Italy:
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@David Wilson & @John C. Ratliff

This is one of the first production models
Note the "Khaki colored" nose piece was "reportedly" a WW !! gas mask.

Arthur Brown either discovered a large surplus supply or contracted with a supplier who had not converted from war time production to civilian production- the diving world will ever know at this junction of dive history

One thing is for certain it is an early production model identified by the "Khaki colored" nose piece.

David , old chap is is possible for you to contact the curator and inform him
Museo torinese della attività subacquee (Turin museum of underwater activity) at

All is well and drying out in CenCal

Sam Miller, III
 
Those are two scary pictures -- sure happy it is not in the dark of the night with lighting flashes and thunder clapping...

SDM
SDM,

If you think those were scary, try this one:

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I was a U.S. Navy-trained diver, you know. :wink:

SeaRat

PS, I'm wearing the SeawiscopeEY, which allows very near-field vision underwater.
 
Even scarier, John! I've posted your observations on the comments page of the Turin online museum, Sam; interesting how one distinctive feature of a diving artefact can help in dating it.

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Today we'll focus on the third and final diving mask on the Taurus flyer above, the "Kompensator".

Kompensator mask
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The caption for the mask on the flyer reads: "Kompensator. Two sizes. With pressure compensation nosepiece & metal frame." The illustration shows the mask's availability in three colours.

Like the other two models featured in the flyer, the Kompensator is East German in origin. The Kompensator masks below have German markings:
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"Gr. 3" is short for "Größe 3", German for "size 3" and reminder that some masks back in the 1960s and 1970s came in a range of sizes rather than in one size claiming to "fit most/all faces" as many nowadays do. The marking in the second image is "Guwelin", the mask's original manufacturer in East Berlin.

Here is a Bulgarian spearfisherman wearing a Hungarian Kompensator mask in 1973:
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This mask has an interesting design from the equalisation perspective. It looks like a cross between a classic Cressi Pinocchio "nosepiece" mask and an early Beuchat compensator mask with accordeon bosses:
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p-image-32364-grande-jpg.430019.jpg

Well, that's it for Hungarian People's Republic masks. I'll move on to snorkels in my next posting.
 
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As promised, on now to snorkels manufactured in the Hungarian People's Republic. We'll start with the breathing tubes with product names listed on the now familiar Taurus flyer above.

Gagum snorkel
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The caption on the flyer reads as follows for this model: "Gagum. Diameter 21 mm. 350 mm long. With long, straight, hard PVC tube without valve." I cannot resist comparing the Gagum's dimensions to what is prescribed in national Standards for snorkels. Here is my summary of six western Standards dating from 1969 to the present day:
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The Gagum snorkel is 350 millimetres in length. This measurement is too small for the British Standard (BS) of 1969 but compatible with the later German (DIN) and European (EN) Standards for all users. The inner diameter of the Gagum snorkel was 21 millimetres. This measurement is too big for the British Standard of 1969 but compatible with all the later German and European Standards provided the user is a fully developed adult.

Ga-Gum.png

Gagum (or GA-GUM) breathing tubes were available in several colours. They were J-shaped breathing tubes with a straight plastic barrel and a one-piece U-shaped non-collapsible rubber elbow and mouthpiece. The brand name "Ga-Gum" was embossed on the rubber elbow (see image above), but there was no other indication of provenance.

And here are some more images of this snorkel accompanied by a vintage Soviet mask:
vintage-russian-scuba-diving-mask-50s_1_b59ae169228ff9dc8f8ebbb54271bbd3.jpg
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The Gagum (or Ga-Gum) snorkel may have originated in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) before its production was transferred to Hungary. A snorkel of this design can be seen on the front cover of this East German book below left:
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and two examples can be seen in the collection of East German snorkels above right. I have a soft spot for this design as my first "professional" snorkel, bought when I joined my university sub-aqua club in the mid-1960s, was the yellow-barrelled blue-mouthpieced Typhoon T4 illustrated below from the Lillywhites 1967-1968 catalogue:
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I'll review the "Olympic" snorkel in the next post. It came with a ball valve, which was a rare feature of East European breathing tubes.
 
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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:
Hungarian_Snorkels_2.png


And here's another picture of the breathing tube on its own:
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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:
Typhoon_56-66.png

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:
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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:
Caraibi.png

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.
 
Post script
Voit was acquired by AMF (American Machine and Foundry) remained in business for a short time before closing their doors.
Willard Voit passed away many years ago but his children and grandchildren are alive and well in Orange county California

Harry Vetter was a early LA County instructor and was a member of the staff of the first NAUI instructors course held in Houston Texas in August 1960 and has the distinction being the oldest and with NAUI Instructors # 4 has the lowest number of any NAUI instructor alive.

After service in the USAF during Korea I returned to Long Beach where I began instructing with Harry at the Long beach YMCA in preparation of becoming an LA Co UW instructor, NAUI, PADI etc etc..This has been a friendship that has remained intact for over 60 years

Harry moved to Oregon entered the Antique business. We remained in contact via visits, letters, e mails and telephone conversations, the last telephone conversation being about 3 months ago, since that time I have been unable to reach him, since he is 88 I some how suspect the worse.

Those of you who have access to Skin Diver magazine, check out the last page - you will see a young Harry holding up a lobster, caught during a meet of our club , the Southern California Skin Divers club meet-- Also on the same page is Charlie Sturgil who made some of us a Sturgil diving mask along with his young daughter Lora Lee who later married Bobbie Mistral of Body Glove.

Allover the magazine is Jack Waite who was our diving buddy until his untimely death 40 years ago

Recreational diving was indeed a small world during its geneses

SDM
Would love to hear from you if you have any pics or info about my grandfather Jack Waite. My mom never had much to tell us about him.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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