At DEMA Show 2025, the nonprofit Historical Diving Society highlighted a 34-year mission to preserve the sport’s heritage, anchored by a quarterly journal that first published in January 1993 and has never missed an issue, including during the pandemic.
Founded in 1992 after a launch event at Santa Barbara City College, the society set out to be a national hub for divers interested in the people, equipment and milestones that shaped both recreational and commercial diving. Before social media, the journal functioned as a “museum in the mailbox,” with copies mailing to readers in roughly 40 countries pre-COVID, according to the society.
The latest tally puts the publication at 125 consecutive issues.
Memberships include individual, lifetime, corporate and sponsor levels, with the journal serving as the organization’s core offering. The society maintains a steady presence on the industry calendar, appearing at consumer shows such as Beneath the Sea and Scuba Show, as well as the commercial-diving Underwater Intervention expo in New Orleans.
Programming over the years has ranged from lectures and conferences to collector-focused coverage such as auction reports on classic scuba gear, commercial helmets, underwater cameras and historic books. Similar historical-diving groups operate in the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, but the US society keeps a lean footprint to focus resources on publishing and preservation efforts.
Leaders say the mission is education and preservation: Giving divers a place to discover how innovations moved from commercial work into recreational use and why that lineage still informs training, design and safety today.
Individual memberships are US$65/€60 per year.
Corporate memberships are $180/€167 per year.
For more info, go to hds.org.
