See Aqualung for other meanings of the word "aqualung".

Aqua-lung was the original name for the first open-circuit SCUBA diving equipment, developed by Emile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau in 1943"Year by Year 1943" -- History Channel International. It consists of a high pressure diving cylinder and a diving regulator that supplies the diver with breathing gas at ambient pressure, via a demand valve. Before that, there were a few attempts at constant-flow compressed-air breathing sets. Aqualung and Aqua Lung are registered trademarks for diving equipment.

In Britain, for very many years after public interest in scuba diving began around 1953, the word "aqualung" was commonly used in speech and in publications as a generic term for divers' open-circuit demand-valve-controlled breathing apparatus; and also in figurative uses such as "the water spider's aqualung of air bubbles". The word got into the Russian language as a generic noun "akvalang".

In the USA, U.S.Divers managed to fend this tendency off and keep "Aqualung" as a trade name and let the word "scuba" be the generic.

Over time, the word "SCUBA" came into common usage for that type of equipment, but with the increasing popularity of a different, "closed circuit" type of SCUBA, named the "rebreather", a need has arisen for another short but precise word to describe the original open-circuit SCUBA.

See also

• Timeline of underwater technology for details of this development.
• Scuba sets for description of modern breathing sets.

References

External links

• Aqua Lung manufacturers site (English, French, German, Italian, Czech, and Japanese language versions available)
• Aqua Lung (Also known as Mistral Regulator)

Diving equipment | Lungenautomat | Akwalung | Aqualung | Aqua-lung