What do you do when you want to go to the lowest degree on the surface of the Earth — a place so deeply beneath the ocean it could beat you with its intense press ? If you ’re Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard , you build up a bathyscaph , of course of instruction .
The physical object above isTrieste , the first - ever craft to make it all the manner to the Challenger Deep , the lowest place in the Mariana Trench ( and thus the integral ocean ) , in 1960 . The craft was designed by Piccard , an adventurous physicist , discoverer , and adventurer who had antecedently been known for his defy expeditiousness into the sky . In 1931 , he hadascended almost 10 milesinto the atmospheric state in an airtight aluminum nut tucked into a hot strain balloon , demolishing aircraft altitude records and get worthful observance about the demeanour of cosmic shaft of light .
But Piccard did n’t just want to go upward . He was also obsess with going in the other direction : down into the oceans . To make such a feat potential , he devise thebathyscaphe , a kind of inverse of his red-hot air balloon testis . The concept — a self - actuate , submersible diving event vessel — was an advance on thebathysphere , a variety of deep - ocean bubble lour to the sea with a cable , which had been contrive by Americans William Beebe and Otis Barton in the late twenties .
The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is so great it can crush submarines , not to mention less craft . To resist that pressure , theTriesterelied on a weighty steel crew cabin , as well as separate tankful filled with petrol and air . The gasoline — which is lighter than weewee and does not compress under pressure like some other substances — helped the crew to maneuver and voyage . The air storage tank , which would slowly fill with H2O while fall , helped the vas to descend , and worked in concert with a scheme of cone - shape containers filled with iron ballast . To ascend back up to the Earth’s surface , attraction would issue the iron ballast .
Piccard work up his first bathyscaph in the 1940s and 1950s , but theTriestewas the most ambitious of them all . The inventor supervised its building for the French Navy , which used it for several years . In 1958 theU.S. Office of Naval Researchbought it for its hazardous trip yet — a declension to the earth ’s deepest post , the Mariana Trench .
Piccard , however , was in his LXX , and did not go along for the head trip . He send his Word Jacques instead , along with anAmerican Navy lieutenantnamed Don Walsh . Before completing Project Nekton , as it was call , the group did multiple test dives in Guam . Then the fateful day came : January 23 , 1960 . The hydronauts equipped themselves withchocolate barsand sonar hydrophones and lead down … and down … and down .
So what was there to see so far down in the ocean?Some pretty weird clobber , it turn out : sediment the hydronauts described as “ diatomaceous ooze , ” and bioluminescent puppet gleaming against the shadow . It took five hour to get the seven miles down and another three to get back up , but by the time Piccard and Walsh emerged , sap , they were heroes .
For years , nobody ever return to the Challenger Deep , not until James Cameron manageda much - hyped solo divethere in 2012 . But Piccard and Walsh were the first — and these Clarence Shepard Day Jr. , the trade that took them to that mystifying place lives in theNational Museum of the United States Navyin Washington , D.C. True to its renowned manakin , it ’s the museum ’s most photographed artifact , and a reminder that sometimes the race to the bottom can be a ripe affair .
