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Seven Miles Down: The Story of the Bathyscaph Trieste
(The complete story of the bathyscaph Trieste from the 194...)
The complete story of the bathyscaph Trieste from the 1948 dives of the FNRS-2 off Dakar to the 1960 seven-mile dive in the Challenger Deep off Guam. The story covers the Trieste's European-sponsred dives off Italy (1953-1956), the Office of Naval Research-sponsored Mediterranean dives in 1957 leading to the purchase of the Trieste by the Navy, subsequent dives off San Diego, and finally the ultradeep dives of Project Nekton.
(Editeur : Arthaud Date de parution : 1954 Description : I...)
Editeur : Arthaud Date de parution : 1954 Description : In-8, 284 pages, photos noir et blanc hors-texte, jaquette, broché, occasion, bon état. Envois quotidiens du mardi au samedi. Les commandes sont adressées sous enveloppes bulles. Photos supplémentaires de l'ouvrage sur simple demande. Réponses aux questions dans les 12h00. Librairie Le Piano-Livre. Merci. Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks
Auguste Antoine Piccard was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer. He was mostly known for his record-breaking helium-filled balloon flights and for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2.
Background
Auguste Piccard was born into an academic family in Basel, Switzerland on January 28, 1884. He had a twin brother, Jean Felix Piccard.
The Piccar family had a long and notable history in the area. Auguste and Jean Felix’s grandfather had been chief commissioner of the region in which the family lived, and their uncle owned the Piccard-Pictet Company in Geneva, manufacturers of hydroelectric turbines. The twins’ mother was Helene Haltenhoff Piccard, an their father Jules Piccard was the chair of the department of chemistry at the University of Basel.
Education
After graduation from the local high school, Piccard and his twin brother entered the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where Auguste majored in mechanical engineering and Jean Felix majored in chemical engineering. They both received their bachelor of science degrees and then went on to complete doctorates in their respective fields. Piccard received Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1907.
Piccard and his twin brother both became professors, and collaborated in a variety of research projects.
Between 1907 and 1920, Auguste taught in Zurich. He then accepted an appointment as professor of physics at the Brussels Polytechnic Institute, a post he held until his retirement in 1954.
One of Piccard’s earliest interests was the Earth’s upper atmosphere and the cosmic rays to be detected there. He was not alone, of course, in this interest. As early as 1783, scientists had been using lighter-than-air balloons to carry themselves and their instruments into the atmosphere to study its properties. In 1804, for example, the French physicist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac had ridden a balloon 23,000 feet into the atmosphere where he collected samples of air for later analysis. Auguste and Jean Felix made their own first balloon ascension from Zurich in 1913, after which, in 1915, they both joined the balloon section of the Swiss army for a period of service.
The use of balloons to study the atmosphere involved an inherent risk and limitation, however. At a certain altitude, the air becomes so thin that humans can no longer function. In 1862, the English meteorologist James Glashier lost consciousness as his balloon reached an altitude of 29,000 feet. He survived only because his companion was able to maneuver the balloon back to earth. Such occurrences made it clear that open-air balloons could be used only below certain altitudes.
Piccard’s view was that unmanned ascents could never provide the quality of data that could be obtained from balloons in which humans could travel. He resolved, therefore, to design a pressurized gondola in which observers could travel well beyond the 29,000 foot level that had marked the previous barrier to manned flight.
By 1930, his first design was ready for testing. The gondola was made of an air-tight aluminum shell that could be pressurized to sea-level pressures and was then suspended from a hydrogen-filled balloon. On May 27, 1931, Piccard and a colleague, Paul Kipfer, took off in their airship from Augsburg, Germany. They eventually reached an altitude of 51,775 feet, by far the highest altitude so far attained by human researchers. About fifteen months later, on August 18, 1932, Piccard made another record-breaking ascent, this time to a height of 53,139 feet after departing from Zurich. His companion on this flight was Max Cosyns.
Piccard made more than two dozen more balloon ascensions before he retired from the activity in 1937. During that time, he collected valuable new information on atmospheric electricity and radioactivity, as well as cosmic radiation. Probably more important, he continued to improve on the design of his aircraft, making the kinds of improvements that would eventually allow other scientists to reach altitudes of more than 100,000 feet.
In the late 1930s, Piccard shifted his attention to a new challenge: the ocean depths. He became convinced that the same techniques used to study the thin upper atmosphere could be used in the high-pressure depths of the oceans. He began work on the design of a bathyscaphe, or “ship of the deep.” The bathyscaphe consisted of two parts. The lower portion of the vessel was an air-tight steel sphere, built to withstand pressures of 12,000 pounds per square inch, where researchers rode. The upper part of the bathyscaphe consisted of a 5,200 cubic foot metal tank containing heptane that provided the vessel with buoyancy. The bathyscaphe operated under its own power and could rise or sink by having seawater pumped into the flotation chamber or iron pellets dumped from the same chamber.
The first test of the bathyscaphe took place in 1948, but the vessel was able to dive no deeper than about a mile below sea level, far less than Piccard had hoped. He continued to modify the design of his vessel, however, and a second test five years later was more successful.
In 1953, he and his son Jacques traveled to a depth of 10,335 feet off the coast of Capri, a depth three times as great as the previous record set by William Beebe in his bathysphere in 1934. The Piccards also built another bathyscaphe, the Trieste, which was sold to the U.S. Navy for research use. The Trieste was used in a 1960 expedition that took Jacques Piccard and U.S. Navy lieutenant Don Walsh to a depth of 35,802 feet in the Mariana Trench off the coast of Guam. Piccard and his son Jacques were working on yet another modification of the bathyscaphe design—to be called a mesoscaphe.
Achievements
Auguste Antoine Piccard is known for his record-breaking helium filled balloon flights, with which he studied Earth's upper atmosphere and cosmic rays, and for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean's depths. Thus he earned his fame by exploring higher into the Earth’s atmosphere and deeper into its oceans than any person had before him.
In recognition of his many accomplishments in balloon flight, Piccard was awarded the Gold Medal of the Belgian Aero Club.
