Jacques Cousteau

Jacques-Yves Cousteau was a French naval officer who co-invented the first successful open-circuit SCUBA in the 1940s, the apparatus that would unlock everything else. With it, he and Louis Malle co-directed The Silent World, one of the first films to capture the ocean depths in color; it took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1956 and the Academy Award for Best Documentary the next year, and remains one of the only documentaries ever to win at Cannes. Cousteau wrote books on his dives — his first, also called The Silent World, theorized that porpoises used echolocation — and from 1966 onward hosted…