Many inventors in ancient times worked on diving methods. One was Leonardo DeVinci, who around 1500 designed a diving rig that would have worked if better materials had been available. He used leather tubes lined with steel coils to prevent the tubes being crushed.
The tubes extend to a surface float, and air is drawn into the tubes by the divers breathing, with no pump being used. This resulted in a very limited depth that the device would work in. If a diver's lung capacity was 5 liters, if the tubing of his mask had much more than 2 liters capacity, he would not be able get a good breath of air. it doesn't take much tubing to have a capacity of 2, 3 and 4 liters. So this device was definitely a shallow water device more akin to snorkeling than SCUBA. One source thought the device was to help soldiers cross bodies of water, and it would work for that.
Like most of Leonardo's ideas, this design was never published or actually built, and thus did not affect the development of science and technology of the times.
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