Word: piccards
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...determined scientist always has new worlds to conquer. Professor Auguste Piccard, who broke the altitude record in a free balloon in 1932,* is nearly ready to try for the undersea depth record too. Last week 63-year-old Scientist Piccard told the North American Newspaper Alliance about the "bathyscaphe" (from the Greek for "depth ship"), his submarine balloon which will descend into the sea suspended from a steel and aluminum "gas bag" full of lightweight gasoline...
...door (a thick plate) and two windows, one of them set in the center of the door. Instead of glass, or the quartz used by William Beebe in his record-holding (3,028 ft.) bathysphere, the windows will be Plexiglas cones with the narrow ends pointing inward. Professor Piccard theorizes that the pressure will squash the elastic Plexiglas windows firmly into their sockets...
...present depth record is held by William Beebe, who dangled on a cable 3,028 feet below the ocean's surface in a hollow steel "bathysphere." Professor Piccard plans a bolder approach. His bathyvessel, which he began designing before the war, will be a true submarine, as free-swimming as a mackerel. His goal, he told newsmen last week, is 4,000 meters, nearly 2½ miles below the surface. The Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research will sponsor the big dive...
Sphere & Float. The pressure-resisting part of the submarine will be a 15-ton steel sphere nearly 7 feet in diameter, with walls 3½ inches thick. By itself, packed with apparatus and Professor Piccard, it would sink like a stone forever. But immediately above the sphere will be a submerged, boat-shaped float filled with light buoyant oil, which cannot be squashed. Below it, held tight by powerful electromagnets, will be enough iron ballast to make the submarine sink. When the Professor shuts off the current from a one-ton battery, the electromagnets will drop the ballast...
Explorer Beebe saw notably little from the windows of his dangling bathysphere. Professor Piccard hopes to see more. As two small electric propellers maneuver his submarine through the calm black depths at three miles an hour, two powerful arc lamps will light up the water around it. Automatic cameras will take ten pictures a second through conical quartz portholes...