Word: piccards
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Trieste is Professor Auguste Piccard's newest "bathyscaphe."* On the surface she looks vaguely like a ship, but she is really an underwater balloon designed to sail the depths of the sea 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 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...
...Feet Down. On a rough and rainy night last week, this odd craft was towed to a point 18 miles south of the island of Ponza where the Tyrrhenian Trench is 10,000 ft. deep. Just after the cheerless dawn, old Professor Piccard, a black Basque beret over his white hair, boarded the Trieste from an Italian navy corvette and climbed down a tube leading to the 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...
...hours and 18 minutes later she popped to the surface, cheerful as a bubble. After the water had been forced from the access tube, Professor Piccard and Jacques came to the deck of the floater and were rowed to the corvette. Leaning on his son, the professor whispered in French: "You speak, Jacques. The credit is all yours...
...Jacques. It was he who guided the Trieste." There had been no trouble at all; the Trieste had functioned perfectly. She had snuggled down on the sea bottom (where the pressure was about 500 lbs. per square inch) "as on a soft wadding." The result, said Piccard, "is what he had foreseen. It is possible for man to descend into the sea depths using means created by him. The problem is to overcome physical obstacles by using physical principles." He had not felt, he made clear, that he was running much risk. "Everyone," he remarked, "is in the habit...