Siebe Gorman Salvus

  The Salvus is a light oxygen rebreather for industrial use (including by firemen and in coalmine rescue) or in shallow diving. Its duration on a filling is 30 to 40 minutes. It was very common in Britain during World War II and for a long time afterwards. Underwater the Salvus is very compact and can be used where a diver with a bigger breathing set cannot get in, such as inside cockpits of ditched aircraft. It was made by Siebe Gorman in London.

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Its arrangement can be seen from the image. It is a pendulum-type system with one breathing tube. This type is the Neck Salvus: there was another type, for use on land only, where the counterlung (= breathing bag) hung by his left hip from the cyinder and canister pack. That pack is a metal plate (probably aluminium), with a webbing sheet stuck to one side to protect its user's diving suit or overall. The absorbent canister and the cylinder are fastened to it by a strap that can be unbuckled. It has no plastic in its construction.

The mask has an inner mouth-and-nose mask to cut down on dead-space. It does not have a shutoff valve. It has a wooden plug fastened to it by a light chain; that plug fits into the breathing tube entry inside the mask to stop debris from entering, but is not a watertight seal. The mask and its tube unscrews from the canister and can be replaced by a tube ending in a mouthpiece. The mouthpiece tube has a shutoff valve at the mouthpiece. The Salvus mouthpiece also has an attached noseclip. A pair of industrial-type eyes-only goggles was included with the set when it came. That mouthpiece has an outer flap that goes outside the lips and is extended into straps fastened behind the neck.

(That makes the mouthpiece much securer against coming out or leaking. In a test when diving with an open-circuit aqualung that had that sort of strapped-in mouthpiece, the diver went limp as if unconscious, to test the mouthpiece, and as a result he rolled belly-up, and his cheeks inflated, and the mouthpiece tried to float out, but its strap and outer flap kept it in and watertight.)

The breathing bag makes the diver very stern-heavy, but that can be cured by putting 6 pounds of diver's weights (e.g. a pair of lead-shot-filled anklets) inside the wetsuit chest. The Salvus has no provision to connect to a buoyancy device; but the Salvus can be worn with a separate diver's lifejacket (not a stab jacket) which has its own small inflation cylinder.

There is a small water catchment sump and drain on the underside of the canister. Its cylinder pressure gauge is on a flexible metal tube and fits in a circular webbing pouch threaded on the waist harness strap.

The bag tube unscrews from the canister pack. The diagonal strap clips onto a corner of the side-pack. The cylinder has a constant-flow valve and a bypass. The thread on top of the cylinder is the same as on a blowtorch oxygen cylinder but the opposite gender, for easy refilling by decanting.

War-surplus Salvuses were much used by early sport divers in Britain and Australia in the 1950's before aqualungs became readily affordably available.

See this link for the coalmine rescue on 7-9th September 1950 at Knockshinnoch Castle Colliery near New Cumnock, Ayrshire, Scotland when 115 trapped miners were equipped with Salvuses to bring them out through a gas-filled mine passage.