The
Trieste
Another visionary who pioneered
the next major development in undersea exploration was a man named Auguste
Piccard. A brilliant inventor who was always looking for the next opportunity,
he seized upon the scientific community’s fascination with exploring
the deep sea in person and built the modern precursor to the manned
submersible, the Trieste. Named after the Italian city that bankrolled
the huge development costs for building the craft, it was much larger
and sturdier than Beebe’s bathysphere.
The crew cabin was larger and roomier than the bathysphere and it had
much thicker walls, making it able to withstand the higher pressures
of deeper dives. It had the significant advancement of being controllable
by the occupant/pilot so that it did not need to be tethered to a surface
ship. Piccard had developed an ingenious method for allowing a pilot
to control the buoyancy of the Trieste, alternately using a huge, 50-foot
long tank filled with gasoline (which is lighter than seawater) and
lead pellets as a counterweight or ballast, which could be released
in controlled amounts allowing the Trieste to rise. This early version
of the Trieste did not get the financial backing and support it needed
to mount continuing exploratory dives, so it was abandoned after a few
years as unfeasible.
In the wake of World War II and the increasing global
tensions of the cold war, the United States’ interests in undersea
exploration came to be seen as an urgent priority. It was determined
that the ocean depths could be exploited for significant military advantages
in the area of undersea communications via sonar (sound waves) and the
gathering of intelligence on sunken enemy submarines. It was the U.S.
Navy’s drive to gain the upper hand at all costs that fueled the
costly construction of the Trieste’s predecessor, the Trieste
II. Backed by the considerable capital of the U.S. Navy budget, the
Trieste II was designed, built and outfitted for optimal use as military
craft that just so happened to be capable of diving to extreme depths.
In fact, it was the Trieste II that set the world record for the deepest
manned dive in the ocean when it touched bottom in the Marianas Trench,
in over 35,000 feet of water in 1951.
Jacques Piccard, the son of Auguste,
and a Navy submariner, Don Walsh, took that record dive in 1951. It
took over four hours to drop to the very bottom of the sea in the Challenger
Deep. Can you imagine the fear and tension the two men must have felt
as they descended silently for hours into the unblinking darkness, falling
into depths no human being alive had been to? How they must have wondered
if, and when, the hull of the Trieste II would begin to cave and buckle
from the extreme pressure, or if it would implode suddenly and violently
without warning? Even at that incredible depth, with unimaginable pressure
of 16,000 pounds per square inch and utter blackness, Piccard and Walsh
observed living organisms, swimming effortlessly about. Unfortunately,
they had no camera with them on that dive, and one of the external lights
imploded from the extreme pressures of the deep so that could not have
successfully photographed what they saw anyway. Skeptics later criticized
Piccard’s observations, claiming that they must have been hallucinating
at such a depth, for it seemed impossible that anything could be found
living in such inhospitable conditions. So costly and risky was this
manned descent into the Challenger Deep
that no one has done it since.
Alvin -->
