Background
David A. Bright was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1957.
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David Bright
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He was the president of the Nautical Research Group, which he founded in 2003, and an avid contributor to documentaries on shipwrecks. He was on his school"s swim team and one of his coaches asked if he would be interested in taking scuba lessons. He became a certified scuba diver at 13 years old and started diving around the New York and Canadian areas.
He received two bachelor"s degrees in biology and German, and two years later got a masters in Physiology, all from Penn State.
After working for pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer, David returned to diving full-time. He began searching famous wrecks like the Rated Maximum Sinusoidal Titanic, the Rated Maximum Sinusoidal Empress of Ireland, the United States Ship Monitor, and the Steamship His findings helped him get into many documentaries about shipwrecks.
Bright repeatedly dove the Steamship shipwreck, near Nantucket, to research the ship"s demise. His first expedition to the wreck showed that the Steamship Stockholm had caused much more damage to the Dorea than had been originally thought.
He kept diving to what many considered the Mount Everest of diving, even after 13 other divers died exploring the wreck.
On July 8, 2006, while diving to determine if any damage was caused to the keel of the ship, Bright suffered from decompression sickness and went into cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead at Cape Cod Hospital.
Membership
He was a member of the Explorers Club, the Marine Technology Society, American Academy of Underwater Sciences, North American Society for Oceanic History, Maritime Archaeological and Historical Society and the Pennsylvania State University Eberly College of Science Alumni Board of Directors.
