History of Diving Museum

The Parade of Nations groups helmets by region and country, with flags and recorded narration by museum founder Dr. Joe Bauer. The collection includes unusual equipment such as a Canadian ice-crusher helmet and a Soviet plexiglass helmet used in cosmonaut training. The collection shows how diving gear was shaped by different jobs, environments and national traditions.

The Art McKee room follows a South Florida treasure diver who took visitors underwater in a Miller-Dunn helmet before SCUBA was widely available. It includes his personal gear and objects tied to the 1733 Spanish treasure fleet, whose 13 ships were lost in a hurricane. A separate silver bar recovered from the Atocha wreck is there to touch and lift, an unusually hands-on detail in a museum about equipment and salvage.

The locally made Miller-Dunn Divinhood helmet helped carry helmet diving into sport diving, marine biology and treasure hunting alongside its commercial and military uses. Another display follows the shift toward SCUBA: Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan introduced the double-hose Aqua-Lung in 1942, and the exhibit explains how its pressure regulator worked.

William Beebe's lab tells a different kind of diving story. Beebe and engineer Otis Barton descended more than 3,000 feet in the Bathysphere to observe deep-sea animals in their natural habitat; illustrator Else Bostelmann made detailed images of creatures such as anglerfish. At the end of the SCUBA exhibit, a 50-gallon aquarium holds native Florida Keys reef fish and coral, including angelfish, parrotfish and wrasse.

The Mark V display connects heavy diving gear with the Pearl Harbor salvage operation, which the museum says involved more than 20,000 hours underwater. One glove belonged to Donna Tobias, the U.S. Navy's first female deep-sea diver. It gives the machinery a personal scale and makes clear how demanding this work was.

The museum is at 82990 Overseas Highway, Mile Marker 83, on the bayside in Islamorada. Key West-bound drivers approach on the right; Miami-bound drivers approach on the left. The museum lists ample parking, an adjacent gravel lot for oversize vehicles, accessible parking and a ramp to the entrance. A loaner wheelchair is available first-come, first-served. The museum store sells diving-themed gifts.