Ted Eldred - Early Years

Early Years

Eldred was born in Melbourne in 1920. As a young man he lived by the sea near Sorrento on the Mornington Peninsula south of Melbourne. He started snorkelling as soon as mask, fins and snorkel were available, and wished that he could make or obtain some sort of free-swimming breathing set, until World War II intervened. After World War II in the late 1940s he designed a sport diving oxygen rebreather. Eldred said he had never dived with the Cousteau-Gagnan model of the Aqua Lung, but knew of its existence and its principle. The Aqua Lung was protected by patent and difficult to obtain in Australia. Siebe Gorman had the license to manufacture for Commonwealth countries and could not meet demands. When Eldred decided that rebreathers were not suitable for general sport use, he shifted his focus to developing the world's first single-hose open-circuit scuba set, both with tradename "Porpoise".