Max Gene Nohl, Milwaukee’s Deep Sea Diver

I Live Underwater by Max Gene Nohl

'I Live Underwater by Max Gene Nohl'

Although far from the ocean, Milwaukee was home to the man who invented the self-contained diving suit, Max Gene Nohl. He set a world record on Dec. 1, 1937, in that space suit prototype, reaching the depth of 420 feet … in Lake Michigan?

Nohl’s memoir, I Live Underwater , was nearly finished and already submitted to a literary agent when he died in a car crash in 1960. The unpublished manuscript was stored in the Milwaukee Public Library Archives where it caught attention from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. The Historical Society’s recent publication of I Live Underwater shows that Nohl was a good writer as well as an inventor and adventurer.

In childhood, Nohl nearly drowned, and as an adult, he was