In June 1953 the French Navy launched their first bathyscaphe, the FNRS-3, which used many of the parts of its predecessor.Īfter working briefly with the French, Piccard and his son Jacques went to Italy and organized a consortium of Swiss and Italian sponsors to build a new bathyscaphe, Trieste. It was taken to the French naval shipyard in Toulon for a complete reconstruction and upgrading. ![]() Both were successful but the submersible was not very seaworthy on the surface. It made a manned dive to 90 feet and a single unmanned dive to 4,600 feet. Piccard's first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, was tested in 1948. They contained several tons of very small steel pellets, or "shot." ![]() Once the dive began the descent was slowed or stopped by releasing solid weights from ballast containers (shot tubs) fitted to the float. When vented, they filled with seawater so that the slightly heavy bathyscaphe would submerge. The float had ballast tanks to provide positive buoyancy while on the surface. Suspended beneath it was the thick-walled cabin for the crew. The balloon (called the float) was a thin metal shell filled with lighter-than-water gasoline. He called it "bathyscaphe" from the Greek words for deep and ship. In the late 1930s a Swiss physicist, Auguste Piccard, began development of an "underwater free balloon" for deep ocean exploration. ![]() Below, Walsh describes the final adjustments made to their bathyscaphe, Trieste, during the test dives leading up to the big event, and recounts the excitement and tension he experienced during the dive itself. Navy officer, and Swiss ocean engineer Jacques Piccard. Incredibly, the other two men made the trip together in 1960: Don Walsh, a U.S. Movie director and explorer James Cameron did it in 2012. Only three humans have made it to the deepest point on the planet, 10,989 meters down. Editor’s Note: The April 2014 issue of Scientific American presents an agenda for exploring the ocean’s deepest trenches, and reports on manned and unmanned submersibles that will dive there to look for exotic creatures, evidence of how tsunamis get so large, and perhaps the origin of life on earth.
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