Buddy diving just before and after the Second World War. After the invention of the "aqualung" by Cousteau and Gagnan, the first commercially underwater breathing apparatus became available for sale for sporting purposes in the late 1940s. As the new sport of scuba diving rapidly expanded through the 1950s, several sporting organisations—notably the YMCA—began programmes to train swimming enthusiasts in this new aquatic pastime, and began to codify what they believed were proper practises for this expanding sport. The YMCA considered the buddy system a useful corollary to the "never swim alone" rule of their swimming and lifesaving programmes. Cousteau himself independently
Pierre-Antoine Cousteau most well-known post-war work was "Les lois de l'hospitalité" in which he justified collaboration, arguing "we [the collaborators] did not commit an error of judgement. There were just too many tanks and too many planes against us". He fell seriously ill in the late 1950s and had to withdraw from politics, requiring regular blood transfusions to survive. He died age 52 in Paris. Pierre-Antoine Cousteau Pierre-Antoine Cousteau (18 March 1906 – 17 December 1958) was a French far right polemicist and journalist. He was the brother of the famous explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. He was born in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, and educated