English wool merchant John Lethbridge of Devonshire constructed the first enclosed diving suit, a reinforced leather-covered oak barrel with a glass porthole and armholes sealed with leather cuffs. This 'diving engine' allowed a single person to work underwater for about 30 minutes, representing a major advance in atmospheric diving technology.

Lethbridge's barrel suit, a marvel of practical ingenuity, became a fixture in popular accounts of underwater adventure. This device and its successors captured the poetic imagination as symbols of human isolation and fragility in the alien environment of the deep, themes that would find expression in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, particularly in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.