I Live Underwater

An outdoor adventure memoir by a legendary diver and innovator who never stopped pushing the limit

I Live Underwater is the highly anticipated posthumous memoir of Max Nohl, a larger-than-life thrill seeker and treasure hunter who revolutionized deep-sea diving. Recounting harrowing experiences with tangled air-hoses, hungry sharks, untested scientific theories, and painful cases of the bends, Nohl’s vivid narrative shows how his unquenchable thirst for adventure propelled him to transcend fear and become one of the field’s great innovators—shattering the diving record in 1937 as the first person to dive deeper than 400 feet. 

Beginning with the disquieting childhood experiences that inspired his obsession with the underwater world, Nohl goes on to discuss his innovative work on the first self-contained diving suit as a student at MIT and his risky experiments in breathing helium to achieve deeper dives. In addition to making vital contributions to the commercial diving industry, Nohl was a pioneer in underwater filming, developing equipment and techniques that were employed in many Hollywood film and television productions. 

After Nohl’s sudden death in 1960 in a car accident, his nearly complete memoir sat in the Milwaukee Public Library Archives—unpublished, until now. Accompanying this page-turning text is a dynamic assortment of images, including Nohl’s original pen-and-ink sketches and historic photos of Nohl and his collaborators. A foreword by Wisconsin Historical Society maritime archaeologist Tamara Thomsen provides insights into Nohl’s many important contributions to the diving world and to Wisconsin history and culture.

Includes stories of dives in Lake Michigan (near Milwaukee), the North Atlantic (near Marblehead and Martha’s Vineyard), Walden Pond, the Gulf Coast (near Morgan City, Louisiana, and Panama City, Apalachicola, Wakulla Springs, and Tarpon Springs in Florida), and the Caribbean (near Haiti and the Dominican Republic).