Word: piccards
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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...
...Auguste Piccard, 64, who once set a high-flying record in a balloon (and later promised his anxious wife that he would never balloon again), had to give up his current try at ocean diving. After two weeks of mechanical trouble off the Cape Verde Islands, he sent the 40-ton bathyscaphe down, unmanned, on a test dip of 4,250 feet (deeper than the man-aboard record of 3,028 feet set in 1934 by William Beebe, but far short of the 2½ miles Professor Piccard was hoping for). When the bathyscaphe surfaced, it was caught...