Max Gene Nohl, Milwaukee’s Deep Sea Diver

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Image via Wisconsin Historical Society

I Live Underwater by Max Gene Nohl

'I Live Underwater by Max Gene Nohl'

Although far from the ocean, Milwaukee was home to the man who invented the self-contained diving suit, Max Gene Nohl. He set a world record on Dec. 1, 1937, in that space suit prototype, reaching the depth of 420 feet … in Lake Michigan?

Nohl’s memoir, I Live Underwater, was nearly finished and already submitted to a literary agent when he died in a car crash in 1960. The unpublished manuscript was stored in the Milwaukee Public Library Archives where it caught attention from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. The Historical Society’s recent publication of I Live Underwater shows that Nohl was a good writer as well as an inventor and adventurer.

In childhood, Nohl nearly drowned, and as an adult, he was determined to conquer the water. Some of the ideas he had for constructing his diving suit were being floated in popular science magazines and the materials he used were readily available. He tested the suit in the swimming pool of the Milwaukee Athletic Society before taking his first plunge into the deep in the waters off Milwaukee’s North Shore. He called that dive “a world apart from earthly experience,” comparing the lakebed to “another planet.”

Nohl was one among those legendary figures from early 20th century America, the basement inventors, tinkering at their workbenches, but in his memoir, he admitted to having help, especially from E.M. End, a Marquette Medical School professor who advised him on the high-pressure oxygen-helium combo needed for sustaining the occupants of his diving suit.

Nohl described his handiwork as “a modernistic monster glistening with chrome.” His suit enabled deep sea explorations of all sorts, including shipwrecks. In her forward to I Live Underwater, maritime archeologist Tamara Thomsen points out that southeast Wisconsin became a hub for diving technology, including Johnson Wax’s Scubapro subsidiary in Racine. Scuba cylinders were produced by Milwaukee’s Pressed Steel Tanks and other gear by the city’s Global Manufacturing Corporation. Desco, “the longest running producer of underwater equipment,” was cofounded by Nohl.