'Keeper of the Flame' Nick Icorn Featured at Third
International Dive Festival

Article by Sam and Debbie Lecocq

he was old enough to be involved. He was determined and with a little cutting and pasting altered his birth certificate, setting his date of birth back three years, so he would be old enough to enlist. He was accepted by the Marine Corps and participated in the Pacific theater during the war as a proud, very young Marine. After the war Nick returned to California where he was accepted for training as a Swimmer Scout in the 1st Beach Reconnaissance Platoon of the Marine Corps, a forerunner of today’s Marine amphibious units.

In 1950 Nick began his diving career using some of the earliest Cousteau-Gagnan Aqualungs. He was part of the first formal underwater instructors course conducted at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 1953 with Connie Limbaugh, the founder of dive training in the U.S. From that time forward Nick Icorn’s influence on diver training and instructor training programs was significant.

The following year Nick began working with the Los Angeles County Instructor training program and served on its board of directors for twelve years. He continued with his education in diving and was certified as an instructor by every major certification agency, providing him with a very wide perspective on the quality and contents of all the training programs in the United States. This served him and the diving industry very well as it was the foundation that would help him to revolutionize training programs in ways that made the sport safe and kept people diving.

In 1970 when Nick became PADI’s first and only executive director, PADI had only 234 instructors, a number that increased to 12,000 worldwide under his watch. The next year he conducted a survey on diving classes throughout the U.S. and discovered most did not include any open water training, not even an open water checkout dive. There were no restrictions on class size and no uniformity in the hours of instruction or the curriculum. Taking the initiative Nick wrote the first “Standards and Procedures Manual” for instructors that included very specific minimum requirements for diver training, followed very shortly by his manual “The Basic Scuba Course” which was a step-by-step comprehensive training manual for basic diving certification.

Nick’s third manual, “Open Water Training” probably changed the diver training more than any other publication. It was the first effort to incorporate multiple open water dives in the training process which was key to making the sport safer. It was also the first major attempt to replace the basic Scuba certification with an open water certification that properly prepared divers for situations they were likely to encounter in the ocean, situations far different and more demanding than those practiced in the pool training sessions.

All this came in the early 70’s at a time when the sport was growing tremendously, but with relatively little oversight or formal requirements for diver training. Many dive shops conducted very thorough training programs including open water dives, but some did not. The first dive shop to introduce a basic diver program with five open water dives was Pacific Diver Supply in Long Beach just a few miles from Nick’s house and owned by his good friend, Sam Lecocq.

Nick formulated a dive training program for PADI consisting of five open water dives and then implemented it under the new certification of “Open Water Diver”. He went on to write a series of specialty courses for those who wanted more advanced or specialized training, but who were necessarily interested to proceed on the path to instructor. The industry benefited enormously from the influx of more experienced, confident divers who were safe in open water conditions, continued diving and training throughout their lives to explore new areas of interest like underwater photography, wreck diving, night diving, etc.

After six years with PADI Nick was ready for a change, a different type of experience in the dive industry and turned to his friend Sam Lecocq who had just formed a company called U.S. Cavalero. Sam was designing a complete line of Scuba equipment for the U.S. and European market and was delighted to have Nick join him and participate in the design of the new line.

Nick also assisted Sam in design and marketing of a line of hydraulic equipment for commercial diving for Sam’s new company Brush Sub International. They designed and manufactured a variety of underwater ship cleaning devices for cleaning virtually everything underwater, including supertankers, Navy ships and submarines and pleasure craft. With Nick’s help this company became the largest manufacturer of underwater cleaning equipment in the world.

During his fifty years in diving Nick has always had a passion for the history and evolution of diving equipment. Very early on he began collecting diving equipment in the local area and from manufacturers throughout the U.S. This led him to research the earlier diving units and he mounted a search the world over for equipment that preceded those introduced here in the 1950’s.

Nick Icorn has assembled a museum of historical diving equipment that is unequaled. He has recovered equipment from all over the world, famous and obscure, and has personally helped to preserve the tangible evidence of diving’s evolution. Divers throughout the U.S. have enjoyed his displays and presentations at dive shows and conventions. Nick is now in the process of establishing the first permanent diving museum in the United States, the National Underwater Museum. We all owe Nick a debt of gratitude for preserving diving’s past and during the months ahead we will be discussing ways to help with fundraising and promotion to find a home for the first American diving museum.

Nick Icorn will be here at Portage Quarry for the International Legends of Diving Festival taking place August 8th through the 10th and he will have some key pieces from his historical diving collection. One of the most treasured items in his collection is the rare Commeinhes Scuba unit from 1937 which is the first fully automatic self-contained underwater breathing unit. It was designed and manufactured by Georges Commeinhes in France, and produced before the Aqualung. This will be the first time that the Commeinhes unit has ever been displayed in North America outside of California. Nick will also present his “Evolution of Diving” series with over 100 slides and displays illustrating the development of the sport.

Joining Nick at Portage Quarry this August will be Sam and Debbie Lecocq, all three divers from Long Beach, California. They have worked together through the years as divers, engineers and technical writers, at trade shows, and now as dive historians.

Nick’s accomplishments, awards and exploits are too numerous to recount in this one web page so look for future articles on Nick in the months ahead.

Nick Icorn - Experience for the Hall of Fame

• Nick Icorn attended the first instructor’s course in the U. S. at Scripps Institute in 1953.

• Mr. Icorn has been with the L. A. County Instructors Program since 1954.

• He is qualified as an instructor with NAUI, SSI, YMCA and NASDS.

• Was the first Executive Director and one of the founders of PADI, Project Director for NAUI, and program Director of NASDS.

• He has been a design engineer for US Divers, Healthways, Cavalero, Airco Cryogenics, Sherwood Selpac, and Ocean Dynamics.

• He has twice been presented with the NOGI Award from Academy of U/W Arts and Science, and the Conrad Limbaugh Memorial Award.

• Mr. Icorn was presented with the DEMA Reaching Out Award and inducted into the Diving Hall of Fame.

• He currently serves as the Director of the National Underwater Museum.

© 2008 Samuel G. Lecocq and Debborah Lecocq
All Rights Reserved.

 Debborah Lecocq and Samuel G. Lecocq