Bathyscaphe
Since the early 1700s when Edmund Halley invented the first diving bell, oceanographers and engineers had been putting forth a series of efforts to overcome the obstacles associated with deep sea exploration.
The diving bell and diving helmet extended a person's time in the water by increasing the duration of the air supply. The bathysphere, invented by Americans William Beebe and Otis Barton in 1930, extended greatly a diver's depth range by protecting the diver from deep water pressure. However, to more fully explore the oceans, researchers still needed lateral mobility and independence from surface support vessels.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Swiss physicist, Professor Auguste Piccard, worked on various prototypes of a vessel intended to give deep sea explorers the mobility they were after; he called it the bathyscaphe from the Greek words for "deep" and "boat. "
His success came with two vessels, the French Navy FNRS 3, manned by Georges Houot and Pierre-Henri Willm, and the Trieste, manned by Piccard and his son, Jacques. The latter vessel was named for the Italian port at the north end of the Adriatic Sea which hosted the latter part of his research project.
Piccard's bathyscaphes were built along the same concept as his lighter-than-air atmospheric research balloons. The round bathysphere-like diving chamber, six feet seven in (2.0 m) in diameter, was suspended under the belly of a fifty foot (15.2 m) compartmentalized float. The compartments were filled with lighter-than-water gasoline. The gasoline was used for buoyancy, not as fuel. To descend, the occupants would release measured the ascent, iron ballast pellets were released. The vessel could be maneuvered by releasing a combination of gasoline and ballast. A pair of battery-driven screw propellers gave the bathyscaphe lateral mobility.
The Trieste made a record-setting dive of 10,335 feet (3,150 m) in the Mediterranean Sea, off Capri, in 1953, after several years of work and unsuccessful test dives.
The French took the record in the FNRS 3 with a dive of 13,287 feet (4,063 m) in 1954 in the Atlantic Ocean off Dakar, West Africa. Jacques Piccard and the U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh regained the title in the Trieste in 1960 with a descent to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean 250 miles (402.25 km) southeast of Guam. This dive went to 35,800 feet (10,911 m), a mile deeper than the height of Mt. Everest!
Today, sophisticated methods of remote sensing have enabled humans to explore the ocean in greater detail. As with space exploration, unmanned missions using semi-autonomous vehicles can yield more information at less cost and risk. Unmanned submersibles are being used for locating and recovering items from deep shipwrecks (the Titanic, for instance). Marine geologists remotely map the ocean bottom with increasing detail, as well as observe and photograph activities of plate tectonics along mid-ocean ridges and rifts.
Despite this, manned deep sea expeditions will continue as long as direct participation is required.
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