Word: floaters
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...just as a blimp navigates the air. Her crew compartment is a forged and welded steel sphere about 8 ft. in diameter with walls 3½ in. thick. This is the only part designed to resist the enormous pressure of the deep sea. It hangs below a "floater": a submarine-shaped hull of thin steel about 60 feet long and filled with 22,000 gallons of gasoline...
...floater does the duty of a balloon's gas-filled bag. Since its gasoline is about two-thirds as heavy as sea water and only slightly compressible, its buoyancy supports the ship even under heavy pressure...
Electromagnetic Ballast. The Trieste's vertical movements are controlled just like a balloon's. To descend, it releases gasoline, which makes it heavier in the water. To rise it drops ballast. The Trieste's ballast is four tons of iron filings stowed in containers in the floater. Electromagnets, which make iron filings stick together, keep the ballast from moving. When their current is cut off, the filings flow into the sea. This system "fails safe." If anything happens to the ship's power supply, the ballast is dropped automatically. Then the Trieste, lightened, will rise...
...floater has two small, electrically driven propellers, which move it horizontally. They make the Trieste more like a blimp than like the passively floating balloon in which Professor Piccard, then a mere 48, set an altitude record...
...pressure sphere. His son, Jacques, 30, was already on board, crammed among oxygen bottles, apparatus and 102 instruments, including a movie camera. When the professor closed a massive door, the Trieste was ready to dive. Men from the corvette opened valves, letting sea water into parts of the floater. They scurried aboard their boats, and the Trieste sank gently under the grey...