An Ocean Explorer Departs

[beamjockey]

I have just learned that Jacques Piccard has died.

His 1960 descent with Don Walsh into the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the Earth's oceans, was a celebrated feat of exploration.

The craft they used was a "bathyscaphe", which Piccard had built with his father, the physicist Auguste Piccard. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.

The bathyscaphe was a deep-sea ship with a cigar-shaped hull above a small, spherical cabin, and travelled using the principles of buoyancy and ballast.

Piccard observed: "By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole. We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."

I came across this news in the course of investigating whether Auguste and Jean Piccard were twin scientists . Yup. Sadly, only Auguste was a physicist; Jean was a chemist. Identical? Apparently.

(Jean's wife was also an identical twin.)

Comments

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I wonder if NCC1701-A/B/C/D's Jean-Luc got his name from him, in spite of the latter's americanized spelling.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've always assumed that was the case.

[dftscript.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Uhm. I think he was actually supposed to be a descendant of the family. They've had generations of explorers and innovators:

• Auguste (1884-1962), physicist


• Jean (1884-1963), chemist


• Jeannette (1895-1981), physicist, and the first woman to be ordained an Episcopalian priest.


• Jacques (1922-2008), oceanographer


• Don (1926- ), balloonist


• Bertrand (1958- ), psychiatrist and balloonist (Actually, they are all balloonists!)

Quite the tribe.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Yes, alas, another hero gone. As a kid, my dreams were in the stars with the astronauts, but were also under the sea with Cousteau and Piccard and Walsh

bathyscaphe

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

As I recall, the name of that particular bathyscaphe was "Trieste". There was a remarkable period of submersible development in the 1960's leading to the discovery of the mid ocean vents among other things.

The Chemist/Physicist pairing occurs from time to time. I am a chemist and, sadly, Peter a physicist.