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Aqua-lung was the original name for the first open-circuit SCUBA diving equipment, developed by Emile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau in 1942. 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.
See Timeline of underwater technology and SCUBA for details of this development.
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 languageRussian /'ruski j'zk/) is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, inclu as a generic noun "akvalang".
Over time, "SCUBA" came into common usage for that type of equipment, but with the increasing popularity of a second, "closed circuit" type of SCUBA, named the " rebreatherDescription A Rebreather is a type of breathing equipment that provides an oxygen-based breathing gas and recycles exhaled gases. This recycling reduces the volume of breathing gas used making a rebreather a lightweight and compact machine for supplying b", a need has arisen for another short but precise word to describe the original open-circuit SCUBA.