Henri G. Delauze

The founder of COMEX and its world renowned subsea services in 1961, Henri Delauze anticipated the oil industry need for deep diving assistance and created a hyperbaric experimental center.  Here scientists and engineers could study the effects of pressure on divers and develop new subsea techniques.  He personally participated in the first dives with helium at depths of 335m and 360m during which the high pressure nervous syndrome was discovered and described.  Under his leadership COMEX developed many of the technologies now used by all the offshore industry such as the diving spread configurations, hyperbaric welding, cold and hot tapping, abrasive jetting and underwater NDT.