North Vancouver’s undersea pioneer Phil Nuytten dead at 81
From NASA to National Geographic to the Navy, this North Vancouver visionary’s inventions brought breakthroughs in the deep When the Second Narrows bridge collapsed in 1958, one of the first rescuers in the water was Phil Nuytten.
The 17-year-old from North Vancouver was the go-to guy for diving gear, having founded the West Coast’s first ever dive shop two years earlier. At 15, he wasn’t old enough to get a business licence so his mother put it in her name.
Since the bridge collapse, Nuytten spent a lifetime dedicated to research and innovation of submersible diving suits and submarines to make exploring the world’s oceans safe.
He died on Saturday, after a short illness, at the age of 81.
“There’s been all sorts of things said about him. The most common one is ‘Renaissance man,’ but I always think of him as sort of a going concern,” said Virginia Cowell, Nuytten’s daughter who still works in the family business. “He was always going in five directions and had projects on the go at all times. I’m surprised the man had time to sleep.”
Nuytten founded numerous companies that spread around the world, including Oceaneering International Inc., Can-Dive and Nuytco. Their works opened up new ways to reach the deep sea for academics, the private sector and the world’s navies.
Much of Nuytten’s work was done at his East Esplanade office – the only one in Lower Lonsdale to have a 110,000-litre dive tank in the parking lot, used for everything from testing new inventions to training NASA’s astronauts.
Historic discovery
In the 1970s, he became famous for his Newtsuit, an underwater exosuit that made it possible for a single diver to explore depths never previously possible. He appeared on the front cover of the July 1983 National Geographic being hoisted from the ice following a dive to the shipwreck of HMS Breadalbane, one of the ships lost in the 1853 manhunt for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition.
