Elwyn Gates, the US underwater-imaging technologist who founded Gates Underwater Products, has died two days after his 89th birthday.
Describing Gates as not only a pioneer inventor but “a diver, a photographer, a mentor and a lover of life”, his former company stated that “from diving unique places to meeting new friends to machining his innovative designs, and always with his beloved wife Annie by his side, Elwyn had a life well and deeply lived. He will be sorely missed.”
Gates was born on 10 December, 1936 and had become an enthusiastic scuba diver and underwater photographer long before he started developing his own camera equipment.
In the late 1960s he began building kit in his garage, looking for ways to help photographers achieve more precise, reliable results on their dives.
An early aim was to enable high-quality macro shots to be obtained using the popular Nikonos III underwater camera. His experimentation succeeded when he tried inserting a plastic tube fastened by rubber bands between camera and lens.
By attaching a ground-glass plate to a camera at the focal plane with a Plexiglas window behind it, he proved able to find the precise focal point with any set-up. This led him to produce the Nikonos Extension Tube, which would eventually notch up more than 100,000 sales.
Gates then turned his attention to strobe connectors, having noted that only Nikon was able to supply the means of attaching third-party strobes to Nikonos cameras. His relatively inexpensive alternative proved to be another good seller.
Into housings
Gates’ Plexiglas underwater housings for film and stills cameras and strobes followed, and over time developed a reputation for being ‘bulletproof’. “I would spend weeks building a housing that did not pay very well for the time it took to do it,” he said. “With experience, I started getting more people to hire me to do stuff for them.”
His robust products proved popular with professional photographers, marine researchers and also military users as well as recreational divers.
A housing for the compact Sony Betacam won Gates an Emmy award for technical achievement in 1987, after it had been used by Stanton Waterman, Bob Sloan and Howard Hall to film an episode of Spirit of Adventure: Beneath the Sea, the Galapagos.
As further compact systems such as the Sony TRV101 and PC7 Handycam became popular in the mid-1990s, Gates ignored advice and came up with his own small aluminium housing with simple ports.
The company says that this product sold faster than any other model in its history, as the industry continued its transition from film to video cameras and digital camcorders.
Gates and his wife and business partner Annie sold up to another couple, John & Karen Ellerbrock, in 2002, but Gates Underwater Products maintained the founder’s design ethos from its base in Poway, California.
‘Elegance and simplicity’
Esprit Film & Television is Gates’ UK distributor and its leading service centre outside the USA. “Many of the innovations that Elwyn Gates initiated we’re still using, so we’re incredibly grateful for his work,” director Dave Blackham told Divernet. “Although he had not been involved with the business for a very great time we still benefit from his expertise, innovation and generosity of spirit even now.
“Many of his innovations were optical and part of his success was down to the elegance and simplicity of his designs, which is not easy to achieve in a hi-tech world. A lot of kit out there at the moment is overdesigned or underbuilt, but Elwyn’s heritage runs through the whole product line.
“We still look at his original designs to understand what was going through his mind, as a source of inspiration to see how things should be done. John and Karen picked up the baton very well and just extended his legacy forward – and I see no reason why that would change in the immediate future.”
Elwyn Gates, who lived not far from Poway in Encinitas on the Pacific coast, died on 12 December. Annie Gates, known as the “founding mother” of Gates Underwater Products, had preceded him on 25 August.
