Aqua-lung
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- Aqualung is the title of an album and a hit song by the rock band Jethro Tull, who had not at the time realised that the word was a trademark.
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. 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".
Over time, "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.
- Aqua Lung manufacturers site (http://www.aqualung.com/) (English, French, German, Italian, Chech, and Japanese language versions available)de:Lungenautomat