Jacques Cousteau was born on June 11, 1910 in St. Andger-de-Cubzac in France. He always loved the underwater and machinery when he was growing up. He started swimming at the age of four, when his legacy of underwater studies began. At the age of 11, he built a model crane, and at 13, a battery-operated car. When he got older, he became interested in film-making. School often bored him, so he began to cause trouble. This led his parents to send him to a strict boarding school from which he went to the French naval academy in 1930. Six years later, he was stationed in Toulon as a artillery instructor, where he began his underwater studies. He also developed basic SCUBA (self-contained-underwater-breathing-apparatus) from the "Aqua-Lung", developed by Emile Gagnan, which made it easier for divers to go deeper distances and for a longer time.

In 1937, Cousteau married Simone Melchior and had two sons, Jean-Michel (1938) and Philippe (1940). During World War II, Cousteau developed a branch of the navy, which taught sailors how to dive and underwater photography techniques for spying purposes. These techniques were then used to clear German mines from French ports in 1943. As a reward, Jacques was appointed the president of the French Oceanographic Campaigns and received the French Legion of Honor, the highest honor in his country. Two years later, Cousteau retired from the navy and purchased the mini-submarine, Calypso, to continue his operations.

He wrote many books (All of which have sold millions of copies worldwide) including:

• The Living Sea (1963)
• Dolphins (1975)
• The Ocean World (1985).

His underwater films (both of which won Academy Awards for best documentary) include

• The Silent World (1956)
• World Without Sun (won an Oscar in 1966, the same year it was made)

Cousteau later produced more television documentaries such as Cousteau's Amazon (1984) and The Cousteau Odyssey, both of which won a combined number of more than forty Emmy nominations. In 1968, Cousteau was even asked to make a television series that introduced people to the undersea world of coral and fish. The show was a nonprofit organization that ran until 1974, accumulating more than 300,000 members worldwide. For his efforts in this aspect, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Reagan.

In 1979, Cousteau's life began to go downhill when his son, Philippe, was tragically killed in a seaplane crash. His wife died in 1990. Then he married Francine Triplett in 1991 and had two more children (Diane and Pierre-Yves). In 1996, he had a legal battle with his son, Jean-Michael, for overusing the Cousteau name. Jacques Cousteau died of a heart attack on June 25, 1997 in the great city of Paris, his homeland. Currently, his three children succeed him and are proud to be the descendants of such a great man.