Jacques Cousteau and Pierre-Antoine was released in 1954. During the 1940s, Cousteau is credited with improving the aqua-lung design which gave birth to the open-circuit scuba technology used today. According to his first book, "" (1953), Cousteau started diving with Fernez goggles in 1936, and in 1939 used the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus invented in 1926 by Commander Yves le Prieur. Cousteau was not satisfied with the length of time he could spend underwater with the Le Prieur apparatus so he improved it to extend underwater duration by adding a demand regulator, invented in 1942 by Émile Gagnan. In 1943 Cousteau tried
Jacques Cousteau with the Cannes Film Festival 1951). Cousteau and the "Élie Monnier" then took part in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard's bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, during the 1949 expedition to Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy was able to reuse the sphere of the bathyscaphe to construct the FNRS-3. The adventures of this period are told in the two books "" (1953, by Cousteau and Dumas) and "Plongées sans câble" (1954, by Philippe Tailliez). In 1949, Cousteau left the French Navy. In 1950, he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns (FOC), and leased a ship called "Calypso" from Thomas Loel