Jacques Piccard
Jacques Piccard is a Swiss oceanic engineer noted for making the deepest ever ocean dive in the bathyscape Trieste, a submersible vessel he helped build with his father, Auguste Piccard.
Jacques Ernest-Jean Piccard was born in Belgium in 1922, where his Swiss-born father taught at the city's university. He enrolled at the University of Geneva where he studied economics, history and physics and then put his education on hold for a year in 1944 to serve with the French First Army. Upon leaving the service, he resumed studies and went on to receive his degree in 1946.
In the 1950s, he joined his father in designing new and improved ‘deep ships’ or bathyscaphes. Their fifty foot long navigable diving vessel, the Trieste, consisted of a heavier-than-water steel cabin that could resist sea pressure and a float filled with gasoline to provide lift. In 1953, the father and son duo launched the Trieste to a depth of 10,168 ft off the coast of Italy.
Jacques Piccard encouraged by this success took his ideas to the United States government and by 1958 the U.S. Navy had bought the Trieste and redesigned the cabin so the vehicle could descend to deeper ocean trenches. Subsequently, the Navy asked Piccard to serve as their consultant on deep diving and deep ocean navigation.
It was during this time that Piccard performed what may turn out to be his most noteworthy accomplishment – in 1960, Piccard, along with U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh, made a dive in the Trieste to the deepest known point on Earth. The team descended 35,810 feet into the area known as the Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean's Marianas Trench.
Piccard and Walsh made this journey in a steel capsule just six feet across, at the base of the ship. It took the nearly five hours to make the dive to the ocean floor to a point just short of 7 miles deep, which set a new submarine depth record.
In later years, the Trieste helped locate the sunken nuclear submarine U.S.S. Thresher, and documented information on another sunken sub, U.S.S. Scorpion.
The original Trieste now sits in the Navy Museum in Washington, D.C.
In the 1960s, Piccard continued to work with his father and designed the first tourist submarine. The mesoscaphe, as they called it, was an underwater observation vehicle capable of carrying 40 tourists.
Since then, Piccard has continued the oceanographic work inspired by his father and has served as a consultant for a number of private deep-sea research organisations. His son, Bertrand, has kept the Piccard spirit of adventure alive – in 1999, he and his team mate, Brian Jones, became the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon. As the writer, Jacques Lacarrière, in analysing the influence of the Piccard family has said, ‘These three incarnate man's wildest dreams - metamorphosing into a fish or a bird. But what is even more amazing is that they have succeeded in transforming their dreams into reality.
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