Bathyscaphe

The invention: A submersible vessel capable of exploring the
deepest trenches of the world’s oceans.
The people behind the invention:
William Beebe (1877-1962), an American biologist and explorer
Auguste Piccard (1884-1962), a Swiss-born Belgian physicist
Jacques Piccard (1922- ), a Swiss ocean engineer
Early Exploration of the Deep Sea
The first human penetration of the deep ocean was made byWilliam
Beebe in 1934, when he descended 923 meters into the Atlantic
Ocean near Bermuda. His diving chamber was a 1.5-meter steel ball
that he named Bathysphere, from the Greek word bathys (deep) and
the word sphere, for its shape. He found that a sphere resists pressure
in all directions equally and is not easily crushed if it is constructed
of thick steel. The bathysphere weighed 2.5 metric tons. It
had no buoyancy and was lowered from a surface ship on a single
2.2-centimeter cable; a broken cable would have meant certain
death for the bathysphere’s passengers.
Numerous deep dives by Beebe and his engineer colleague, Otis
Barton, were the first uses of submersibles for science. Through two
small viewing ports, they were able to observe and photograph
many deep-sea creatures in their natural habitats for the first time.
They also made valuable observations on the behavior of light as
the submersible descended, noting that the green surface water became
pale blue at 100 meters, dark blue at 200 meters, and nearly
black at 300 meters. A technique called “contour diving” was particularly
dangerous. In this practice, the bathysphere was slowly
towed close to the seafloor. On one such dive, the bathysphere narrowly
missed crashing into a coral crag, but the explorers learned a
great deal about the submarine geology of Bermuda and the biology
of a coral-reef community. Beebe wrote several popular and scientific
books about his adventures that did much to arouse interest in
the ocean.
Testing the Bathyscaphe
The next important phase in the exploration of the deep ocean
was led by the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard. In 1948, he launched
a new type of deep-sea research craft that did not require a cable and
that could return to the surface by means of its own buoyancy. He
called the craft a bathyscaphe, which is Greek for “deep boat.”
Piccard began work on the bathyscaphe in 1937, supported by a
grant from the Belgian National Scientific Research Fund. The German
occupation of Belgium early in World War II cut the project
short, but Piccard continued his work after the war. The finished
bathyscaphe was named FNRS 2, for the initials of the Belgian fund
that had sponsored the project. The vessel was ready for testing in
the fall of 1948.
The first bathyscaphe, as well as later versions, consisted of
two basic components: first, a heavy steel cabin to accommodate
observers, which looked somewhat like an enlarged version of
Beebe’s bathysphere; and second, a light container called a float,
filled with gasoline, that provided lifting power because it was
lighter than water. Enough iron shot was stored in silos to cause
the vessel to descend. When this ballast was released, the gasoline
in the float gave the bathyscaphe sufficient buoyancy to return to
the surface.
Piccard’s bathyscaphe had a number of ingenious devices. Jacques-
Yves Cousteau, inventor of the Aqualung six years earlier, contributed
a mechanical claw that was used to take samples of rocks, sediment,
and bottom creatures. A seven-barreled harpoon gun, operated
by water pressure, was attached to the sphere to capture
specimens of giant squids or other large marine animals for study.
The harpoons had electrical-shock heads to stun the “sea monsters,”
and if that did not work, the harpoon could give a lethal injection of
strychnine poison. Inside the sphere were various instruments for
measuring the deep-sea environment, including a Geiger counter
for monitoring cosmic rays. The air-purification system could support
two people for up to twenty-four hours. The bathyscaphe had a
radar mast to broadcast its location as soon as it surfaced. This was
essential because there was no way for the crew to open the sphere
from the inside.The FNRS 2 was first tested off the Cape Verde Islands with the
assistance of the French navy. Although Piccard descended to only
25 meters, the dive demonstrated the potential of the bathyscaphe.
On the second dive, the vessel was severely damaged by waves, and
further tests were suspended. Aredesigned and rebuilt bathyscaphe,
renamed FNRS 3 and operated by the French navy, descended to a
depth of 4,049 meters off Dakar, Senegal, on the west coast of Africa
in early 1954.
In August, 1953, Auguste Piccard, with his son Jacques, launched a greatly improved bathyscaphe, the Trieste, which they named for the
Italian city in which it was built. In September of the same year, the
Trieste successfully dived to 3,150 meters in the Mediterranean Sea. The
Piccards glimpsed, for the first time, animals living on the seafloor at
that depth. In 1958, the U.S. Navy purchased the Trieste and transported
it to California, where it was equipped with a new cabin designed
to enable the vessel to reach the seabed of the great oceanic
trenches. Several successful descents were made in the Pacific by
Jacques Piccard, and on January 23, 1960, Piccard, accompanied by
Lieutenant DonaldWalsh of the U.S. Navy, dived a record 10,916 meters
to the bottom of the Mariana Trench near the island of Guam.
Impact
The oceans have always raised formidable barriers to humanity’s
curiosity and understanding. In 1960, two events demonstrated the
ability of humans to travel underwater for prolonged periods and to
observe the extreme depths of the ocean. The nuclear submarine
Triton circumnavigated the world while submerged, and Jacques
Piccard and Lieutenant Donald Walsh descended nearly 11 kilometers
to the bottom of the ocean’s greatest depression aboard the
Trieste. After sinking for four hours and forty-eight minutes, the
Trieste landed in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, the
deepest known spot on the ocean floor. The explorers remained on
the bottom for only twenty minutes, but they answered one of the
biggest questions about the sea: Can animals live in the immense
cold and pressure of the deep trenches? Observations of red shrimp
and flatfishes proved that the answer was yes.
The Trieste played another important role in undersea exploration
when, in 1963, it located and photographed the wreckage of the
nuclear submarine Thresher. The Thresher had mysteriously disappeared
on a test dive off the New England coast, and the Navy had
been unable to find a trace of the lost submarine using surface vessels
equipped with sonar and remote-control cameras on cables.
Only the Trieste could actually search the bottom. On its third dive,
the bathyscaphe found a piece of the wreckage, and it eventually
photographed a 3,000-meter trail of debris that led to Thresher‘s hull,
at a depth of 2.5 kilometers.These exploits showed clearly that scientific submersibles could
be used anywhere in the ocean. Piccard’s work thus opened the last
geographic frontier on Earth.