The French inventor, mathematician, and religious Jean-Baptiste de La Chapelle (1710–1792) coined the term scaphandre to refer to a kind of floatation suit made of cork that he devised in 1775. To give shape to this term, he resorted to the sum of two lexical components of Greek, such as the following:
-The noun "skáphos", which can be translated as "boat" and as "basket".
-The word “anér, andrós”, which is synonymous with “man”.
Hence the term diving suit had the literal meaning of "basket man".
The idea came to our language as a diving suit, a word that refers, according to the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), to a device consisting of a waterproof suit and a closed helmet that has tubes and openings to renew the air and a glass in the area of the eyes. The diving suit allows you to stay and move under water.
The classic scuba or scuba diving is called the equipment - which combines a helmet, a suit and weighted boots - connected to the surface by means of a tube. With this type of diving suit, the diver remains attached to a boat or to the shore and receives a gas that he can breathe through the duct. The classic diving suit is used in explorations no more than 66 meters deep.
The scuba, on the other hand, has a gas reservoir that frees the person from dependence on a boat or the surface. The diver can move independently as long as she has breathing gases in her diving suit.
The notion of a diving suit can also be used with respect to the spacesuits worn by astronauts when exiting ships. These space suits can depend on the vehicle or give the astronaut autonomy, depending on its characteristics.
In the same way, we cannot ignore the existence of another series of models of diving suits. This would be the case, for example, of the so-called rigid diving suit, which can be autonomous or which can depend on the air that is supplied to the person from what is the surface.
It should be noted that it is used in what are great depths and that if it receives that name it is because the parts that shape it are precisely rigid.
Likewise, it is interesting to know that there was what was known as a stratonáutic diving suit, which was created in 1935 by the Granada military engineer Emilio Herrera Linares. It is considered that it was an origin of the diving suit used by astronauts and its objective was to be able to be used during a stratospheric trip in a hot air balloon.
Finally, we cannot ignore the existence of a film called "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly". It was released in 2007 and is directed by Julian Schnabel. It tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a man who in 1985 suffered a stroke that made him unable to speak and not move.