Guy Gilpatric’s seminal late-1930s spearfishing treatise The Compleat Goggler featured the image above captioned thus: “Mr. Alec Kramarenko, his gun, his goggles and his game. The pistol grip of the gun is just below Mr. Kramarenko’s right hand; the reel is clearly visible further up the barrel. Note the size of the solid steel arrow and how it has traversed the fish—a loup. The goggles are of excellent design, giving about the widest possible field of vision. The rubber bulb at the centre of them is a pressure-equaliser for deep diving”. The latter was a variation on the bulbs of Polynesian origin with which Roger Pulvénis decided to equip the monogoggle in 1938.
Under the Tsarist regime, Alec (Alexandre) Kramarenko’s father owned vast salmon fisheries on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. After the Russian Revolution began in 1917 amidst World War I, Kramarenko fled Russia for Japan. During his three-year stay in the country, Alec observed Japanese swimmers wearing goggles to avoid being blinded by the water.
By 1932, Kramarenko had moved to Nice on the French Riviera, where he began each day with a dip in the Baie des Anges. After fruitlessly searching local retail outlets for swimming goggles resembling ones he had seen in Japan, he decided to make his own. Like the Japanese models, his first pair was made from wood. As soon as he dived with them, they flooded with water and subjected his eyeballs to painful suction. Double vision also proved a risk factor unless both lenses were perfectly aligned.
Several years of experimentation led Kramarenko to replace his hitherto binocular goggles with the kidney-shaped single-lens visor illustrated in the introductory photograph. With both eyes enclosed and aligned but excluding the nose, the greater facial coverage of this “Monogoggle” design also facilitated a leak-tight seal, while a rubber bulb squeezed air in at depth to counter eye-popping water pressure. The same photograph shows a speargun described thus by Gilpatric: “The gun most used on the Riviera is that invented by Mr Alec Kramarenk. This is a spring gun operating in about the same principle as the familiar toy pistol which shoots a wooden arrow with a rubber vacuum-cup tip. Mr Kramarenko’s spring is sufficiently powerful to drive a four-foot steel shaft into a merou ten to fifteen feet away; smaller fish, of course, are completely traversed”. This weapon represented a great improvement on the precursor of all underwater spearguns, Roger Pulvénis’s "Waterless", which straddled the divide between the hand-spears and the first models featuring the classic handle invented in 1937 by Kramarenko.
By the age of 29 in 1938, Kramarenko had acquired a business partner in the person of American expatriate Charles Henry Wilen, who had lived in Nice since the end of World War I. According to Gilpatric, non-swimmer Major Wilen of the US Expeditionary Forces of 1917 elected to lie on an inflated inner tube looking down through his goggles with his gun ready, while Kramarenko effortlessly dived and swam underwater, chasing and shooting fish in their own element. In business matters, however, Wilen wielded the upper hand. By way of example, his name always preceded Kramarenko’s in joint patent applications. In tribute to Wilen’s nationality, moreover, their spearfishing equipment manufacturing company was called the “United Service Agency” (USA), while their later flagship product ranges were branded “Le Masque Américain” (The American Mask) and “Le Fusil Américain” (The American Speargun).
Kramarenko and Wilen were pipped at the post by Maxime Forjot when it came to patenting the first nose-enclosing diving mask and snorkel in France, but they did manage to patent the first side-mounted snorkel (complete with ball valve) in the USA:
As for United Service Agency fishing guns, the following Kramarenko-designed Arbalux became the élite option, pictured here by the Musée Dumas in Sanary-sur-Mer:
One catalogue billed this sling-operated weapon with its four rates of loading power as capable of “dethroning any other system”. I have illustrated other equipment created by Kramarenko in the article dedicated to the United Service Agency in "History/Profiles".
With World War II in progress, Wilen resettled in California in autumn 1940. By the close of hostilities in 1945, he was seeking States-side facilities for underwater hunting equipment production because such gear attracted a 40% luxury tax.
The Nice-based United Service Agency thrived throughout the 1950s. Here I can declare a personal interest, having recently purchased the vintage snorkel-mask above traceable to that decade and embossed with the brand name “Le Masque Américain”, to celebrate Alexandre Kramarenko and Charles Henry Wilen’s association in the underwater fishing business.
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