PARIS, (UPI) -- The Cousteau Foundation reports undersea pioneer Jacques Cousteau has died two weeks after he celebrated his 87th birthday. His aides say today he had been ill for sometime. Other details of his death were not immediately available.
Cousteau, who turned 87 on June 11, opened the vast undersea world to humanity as co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung and brought its wonders to the living room of millions of others through his television films and best selling books.
But his own life story was as absorbing as his award-winning documentaries on whales and sharks and giant turtles.
A physical fitness addict who ate no sugar or animal fat, drank no milk or alcohol Cousteau in his 70s was still conducting and preparing expeditions aboard his famous ship, "Calypso," from which he saw as a world of inexhaustible opportunities for adventure.
Before his trip to the Amazon in 1982, Cousteau said,
"We are encountering as many surprising new facts as we did at the beginning."
Cousteau's age could not hinder his fascination with underwater life forms. He said,
"Age doesn't count. My experience enables me to out- perform young men who think diving is the privilege of strong young men. After all, my father started diving at 67."
Cousteau was preceded in death by his 37-year-old son Philippe, one of his chief collaborators who was killed in 1979 when the expedition plane he was landing on the River Tagus in Portugal struck a submerged object.
Cousteau's father, a lawyer, traveled as companion to a wealthy American and Cousteau spent his childhood on the move.
He learned English during a year in New York when he was 10. He was a sickly child but despite warnings about exerting himself he learned to swim and spent as much time as possible on beaches. Somewhat undisciplined, he was expelled from one school for breaking windows but he was gifted mechanically and built a 4-foot working model of a giant marine crane at 11.
In 1930 he passed the entrance examination for the Ecole Navale, France's naval academy, and three years later graduated second in his class as a second lieutenant. After winning his pilot's wings he was assigned to the naval base of Toulon on the Mediterranean where, having been given the kind of goggles worn by pearl divers in the South Seas, he realized the value of an apparatus that would enable humans to move freely about under water.
World War II interrupted his experiments and after the fall of France he joined the Resistance. One of the exploits he always refused to discuss was infiltrating Italian headquarters disguised as an Italian officer and photographing secret documents including the Italian navy code book. He was later decorated with the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre with Palm.
The Germans did not interfere with Cousteau's wartime interest in sea diving. When he said his aim was to become a "man-fish" they put him down as a harmless eccentric. The key to a successful aqua-lung came from Emile Gagnon, a Parisian engineer who had invented an automatic gas-feeder valve. In 1943 Cousteau made a historic dive.
With such sponsors as the National Geographic Society, the French Academy of Sciences, Texas A&M and NASA and, later on, television producers, Cousteau photographed life and archeology underseas as they had never been seen before. He also took part in many scientific experiments.
His activities expanded into many fields and became a kind of industry involving more than a dozen commercial and scientific companies, some of them, such as his diving equipment operation, highly profitable. His first major book on his work, "The Silent World," sold 5 million copies and became a full-length documentary film that won an Academy Award in 1957 after taking the Grand Prize at Cannes.
His filmed report on "World Without Sun" -- an underwater colony under the Red Sea inhabited for a month by "oceanauts" -- won an Academy Award in 1964. A whole series of books on adventures on land and sea followed.
He was director of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco and an officer of many other groups in science and ecology. He was honored many times with the gold medals of scientific societies and degrees from universities.
He married Simone Melchior in 1937. Their surviving son, Jean-Michel, is also in the Cousteau organization.