DivingHistory.com Lockwood Pioneer Scuba Diving Museum 
Scuba Museum Opens in Illinois, Dive Shop Owner Continues Diving Legacy
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By Rick Stratton
Northeast Dive News publisher
Part as a promise to his friend and founder of the museum and part as an effort to ensure a lasting legacy, Dan Johnson, dive store owner and diving instructor, has opened a scuba diving museum.
The 1,800-square-foot museum, called Lockwood Pioneer Diving Museum, is at 7307 North Alpine Road, Love Park, Ill. It is in the same complex with Loves Park Scuba.
The museum is named in honor of James Lockwood, who built scuba equipment in the late 1930s. Lockwood, born in Racine, Wis., moved to Rockford as a young man. He founded Lockwood Oil Co. service stations in Rockford, but sold the company to pursue his passionscuba diving. He died in 2003 at age 92.
“Jim Lockwood was a scuba diving pioneer. He helped establish the sport of scuba diving and bring it to the mainstream,” Johnson said. “He was active in the sport of diving well before Cousteau ‘invented’ scuba with the first artificial diving lung.”
Lockwood was one of the early pioneers of the sport, building his own rebreathers in 1938. Lockwood developed an underwater camera housing that was used in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and developed underwater props for the film “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”
In 1937, Lockwood became friends with well-known diver Max G. Nohl, who set a record of 420 feet in 1937 for deepest dive made in a diving suit. This dive was originally scheduled for 350 feet but Nohl reportedly said, “Hey there’s no bottom here. Drop me down to the bottom.” The support crew did as instructed and broke the record. Project physicist Dr. Edgar End had a fit because he had to refigure his dive tables.
Lockwood and Nohl worked on numerous projects with diving buddies and fellow pioneers Ivan Vestrem and Jack Browne, exploring shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. Lockwood, a peace maker, would smooth things when Nohl and Browne butted heads.
In the 1940s he served in the Navy and the Coast Guard, and ran the rescue for the Wolverine to save pilots who went down in Lake Michigan. He also ran the submarine Peto (the first submarine built in the Great Lakes) down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico on its way to Australia during World War II. Lockwood then set up a shop in Chicago to experiment on military rebreathers. After the war, Lockwood traveled extensively and worked with many professionals in the scuba diving world. In the 1950s he became editor of “Undersea Digest,” an early diving magazine, spending much of his time writing and lecturing on his numerous discoveries and inventions. Lockwood worked as an ambassador of the sport, negotiating for the release of nine American scuba divers held for a time in Cuba by Fidel Castro.
In the late 1960s, Lockwood discovered the remnants of an ancient Haitian temple which pre-dated the Incan and Aztec civilizations. In h