If you take a stroll along the Hampshire coast at Stokes Bay, and you care not to look across the water to the Isle of Wight, you might run into this chap.

He's an exhibit of the Historical Diving Society's museum, which is housed in No 2 Battery, one of a line of Victorian coastal fortifications built to protect the approaches to Portsmouth Harbour.

This is a German atmospheric diving suit, built by Neufeldt and Kuhnke in 1939. These suits allowed the occupant to remain at normal atmospheric pressure during the dive. The information board says that this design was of limited practical use, as the joints leaked in shallow water and seized up at depth, however one was successfully used to recover silver and gold from the wreck of SS Egypt which sank off Lishant, France in 1922.

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Icy North

15.05.17 Front Page

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