The Invention of the Snorkle

I was watching Liv (dear friends daughter) running around with a snorkle in her mouth pretending to be an elephant yesterday and it got me to thinking...(uho). Do you think whoever invented the snorkle did so because they were watching an elephant swimming around and thought - gee, if I had a tube like that I could breath underwater too? Because, if you ever really LOOK at a snorkle - it really does look like an elephant's trunk - except the part that is the end of the elephant nose is the part that we put in our mouth (kind of gross when thought of that way but terribly effective all in all). So now I am going to google this and enlighten you with the results;
http://www.totallyabsurd.com/toiletsnorkel.htm
First off I have discovered my inability to spell - that would be SNORKEL - for all you superior spelling wizards out there (and I would have fixed it but it was kind of funny)... and then I found this...
http://www.time.com/time/2003/inventions/invsnorkel.html (I soooo want one of these - Happy 30 soon - what a perfect gift to awe me with) Then I found this and promptly stopped looking... you will see why...
http://www.pussysnorkel.com/facts.htm And so I have learned that googling the most innocent of things is never really safe even though at first - I really thought someone invented a snorkle for a cat and I was intrigued (naive maybe?) anyhoo...
What I never found out was who invented the frickin snorkel or how they came up with it. So I have used my powers of deductive reasoning to decide that there is a very good possibility that they came up with this idea while watching an elephant. From this day forward that is what I will choose to beleive. There you have it. End of story. (But please share any ideas you have - unless it is along the lines of that last - shudder - search).
Ta.