Before the 1940s, scuba diving didn't really exist because the word scuba didn't exist. Scuba was originally an acronym that stood for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and although it was coined by Christian J. Lambertsen for his rebreather, it was French naval officer French engineer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Emile Gagnan's 1943 invention, the Aqua-Lung, that would go down in history as the original scuba gear.
Cousteau was interested in underwater exploration, but diving bells and diving suits at the time allowed neither flexibility nor mobility. It wouldn't be until he met Gagnan, who had created a new valve for regulating gas flow, that the two of them were able to invent a new valve that allowed for underwater breathing, according to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
According to "The World's Oceans," edited by Rainer F. Buschmann and Lance Nolde, by 1948, Cousteau was using the Aqua-Lung along with scientists to launch the first underwater archeological expedition as they searched for the wreckage of Mahdia, a Roman ship that sank off the coast of Tunisia around the 1st century B.C.E. By the 1950s, the Aqua-Lung was available for purchase to the U.S. public, and its technology had revolutionized, if not outright created, the scuba industry. Lemelson-MIT writes that the technology of the Aqua-Lung continues to be used as "part of virtually every set of modern SCUBA gear in the world."
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