Thirty-six years before Michael Phelps, in a Beijing swimming pool, became the standard-bearer for how fast a human being could move through the water, there was Mark Spitz at the Olympics in Munich, Germany. And decades before Spitz, there was Johnny Weissmuller, aka Tarzan, who in the 1920s set dozens of world marks, including 51 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle, a record that stood for 16 years.

The man who broke it was Alan Ford, a 19-year-old Yale student. He bettered his record three more times in the next 13 months, until he became the first swimmer to break 50 seconds for 100 yards, a barrier that some likened to the four-minute mile. No one else accomplished the feat for another eight years.

Ford became known as the human fish, an unofficial title he took over from Weissmuller. He was, simply put, the fastest swimmer in the world.

He died Nov. 3 at age 84 in Sarasota, Fla., where he lived. The cause was emphysema, his son Robert said, a result of a smoking habit that began in the Navy after Ford graduated from Yale.

Unusual champion

Ford was an unusual champion. At 5 feet 9 inches and a muscular 170 pounds, he was far smaller than Weissmuller. Unlike Spitz and Phelps, he was built more like a bullet than a beanpole.

Under the tutelage of the legendary Yale coach Bob Kiphuth, who emphasized muscle building and dry-land training — this was before the advent of goggles, when swimmers were restricted to about 90 minutes a day in a chlorine-treated pool — Ford became a physical specimen.

In a series of photographs in Life magazine, he was shown demonstrating his freestyle stroke, and displaying his physique, lying face down on a table in his swim trunks.

“He had the perfect body for swimming,” Phil Moriarty, one of Ford’s coaches at Yale, said in a telephone interview on Friday.