![]() I asked the boss and he said, “Yes, invite him to lunch and you should come too”.Īndy brought Jacques Piccard with him. One warm summer’s day he came to my office aboard the submarine tender to ask if he could give a Trieste briefing for the Commodore. I had to figure out how to get back to sea and NEL’s Dr. I had the ‘honor’ of being the first to be ‘shanghaied’. However, his personnel allowance did not provide for one, so it was decided to recruit an officer from one of the submarines for this unofficial appointment. The flotilla Commodore thought that he should have an aide. It was a big command, with 24 submarines and four support ships. In 1958 I was a submarine lieutenant temporarily serving on the staff of Submarine Flotilla One in San Diego. He knew a good deal about Trieste, havingparticipated in the 1957 Capri dives and from mid-1958 he’d been busy at NEL putting together the sub’s shoreside infrastructure. Rechnitzer became the newly mintedchief scientist and manager for the program. In addition,ONR hired Jacques Piccard and Giuseppe Buono as consultants tohelp the Navy learn how to operate and maintain the submersible.ĭr. The Navy Electronics Laboratory (NEL) there would be the new home of Trieste. Purchased from the Piccards in January1958,it was shipped to San Diego that summer. At the end of the Capri program, it was recommended that the Navy acquire Trieste. Each was tasked to evaluate how this platform could improve the way he did his science. ![]() ![]() From July to October a total of 26 dives involved marine scientists from a wide variety of disciplines. In 1957 ONR contracted for a series of demonstration dives at Capri. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) in London showed any interest. Among others, the British and American navies were approached. By 1956 they were looking for an organization to lease it on a long-term basis. In 1954 she made one dive in 1955 it did not operate at all. The Piccards soon found Trieste’s operational costs were too much for them to manage. By the end of September,father and son had made a dive to 10,392 feet (3,200m) in the Tyrrhenian Sea, near the Island of Ponza. Launched on 1 August 1953, it represented lessons learned from FNRS-2 and their work with FNRS-3. In June 1953 the French Navy launched their first bathyscaph, the FNRS-3,which used many of its predecessor’s parts.Īfter working briefly with the French, Professor Piccard and his son Jacques went to Italy and organized a consortium of Swiss and Italian sponsors to build a new bathyscaph, Trieste. Both were successful but the submersible proved unseaworthy on the surface it was taken to the French naval shipyard in Toulon for a complete reconstruction and upgrading. It made a manned test to 90 feet (27m) and a single unmanned dive to 4,600 feet (1,400m). Piccard’s first bathyscaph, FNRS-2, was tested in 1948. In an emergency theshot tubsthemselves could be dropped. Dumping this ballast was controlled by an electromagnet that allowed the shot to flow freewhen it was turned off. For this purpose, ballast containers (shot tubs) were fitted to the float, holding several tons of small steel pellets, or ‘shot’. Releasing solid weights would slow or stop the descent. ![]() When vented, they filled with seawater allowing the slightly heavy bathyscaph tosubmerge. The float had ballast tanks to provide positive buoyancy while on the surface. Suspended beneath was the thick-walled cabin for the crew. The ‘balloon’ (called the float) was a thin metal shell filled with lighter-than-water gasoline. He’d thought about the concept for many years – since his first year at Zurich Polytechnical School – calling the vessel a‘bathyscaph’,from the Greek words for deep and ship. In the late 1930s Swiss physicist Professor Auguste Piccard began development of an ‘underwater free balloon’ for deep ocean exploration. On the 50 th anniversary of this historic achievement, Don tells his story for DIVER readers. No human has returned to this abyssal region since then and sadly his colleague on that dive, Swiss marine explorer Jacques Piccard, recently died. The Bathyscaph Trieste Story DIVER contributor Don Walsh is the deepest man alive, co-piloting the bathyscaph Trieste to the deepest point in the world ocean – the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific’s Mariana Trench on January 23, 1960. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |