The deepest depths in the oceans and the people who try to visit them are in the news lately — and coincidentally, one of the first two people to visit the Challenger Deep (the deepest known spot on Earth) was born today in 1922: Jaques Piccard.
Piccard was born into an adventuring family; his father was Auguste Piccard, who set the record for reaching the highest altitude in a balloon in the early 1930s. So when Jacques reached the deepest possible depth, either the same family had set the records for the highest and lowest explorations, or Jacques had proved to be the exact opposite of his father. Sort of. Jacques’ son Bertrand has continued the tradition; he was in the first round-the-world balloon flight in 1999 and the first solar-powered round-the-world airplane flight in 2009.
Anyway, Jacques designed a submersible he called a “bathyscaphe,” and got some support from the US Navy. They were thinking about submersibles for salvage and rescue operations, and Jacques’ vessel the Trieste was a test to see if it was possible to build a vessel that could reach the sea floor. It was — Piccard designed the Trieste to reach at least 24,000 feet deep, and once they managed that, chose an even more ambitious voyage: 35,000 feet down in the Challenger Deep.
Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh from the Navy rode the Trieste down — at 30,000 feet they heard a loud crack, but decided to keep going. They reached the bottom, but the Trieste was just an experimental vessel; it didn’t have any scientific instruments aboard, and no way to collect specimens, even though Walsh and Piccard saw — through the small windows— some kind of shrimp and what might have been a fish.
Then they noticed cracks in the windows, and dropped their ballast to head for the surface. They were only able to stay on the bottom for 20 minutes. It took more than 3 hours to float back up. They planned a second visit, but it never happened; the Trieste was expensive to run and incapable of actually doing anything useful once it reached the bottom — it couldn’t even take photos. So the exploration of the deepest parts of the ocean moved on to newer, more capable submersibles.
Piccard did some more oceanic explorations, but nothing to match his trip the the Challenger Deep. His trip was the first, and nobody managed to return there for 52 years, when James Cameron (the movie director) managed it in a one-person submersible. Piccard’s record stood for decades — I’d be tempted to call it a towering achievement, but after thinking deeply I’ve decided that idea wouldn’t really float.
