Trieste's first deep dives

Auguste Piccard · 1953 CE · Earth

Trieste's first deep dives — Auguste Piccard · 1953 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Prove that a bathyscaphe of his own design could carry a crew to great depth and bring it back unaided.

Historical context

A sphere on a cable can only go as deep as the cable is long, and the cable is the weakest part. Piccard's answer was to cut it: a float of petrol for lift, iron shot for ballast, and a craft that would rise by itself if the power failed. Trieste was launched in August 1953 and proved the idea off Naples and Ponza within two months.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Launched at Castellammare

    1 August 1953

    On 1 August 1953 the shipyard at Castellammare di Stabia slides into the water a float fifteen metres long with a steel ball bolted under it.

  2. First dives off Capri

    August 1953

    In August the new craft makes its working trials in the deep water at the mouth of the Bay of Naples, a few hundred metres at a time.

  3. Towed towards Ponza

    1953 CE

    The bathyscaphe cannot steam anywhere; a tug drags it north-west across the Tyrrhenian Sea towards the deepest water within reach.

  4. Down through the basin

    1953 CE

    Father and son seal themselves into a sphere two metres across and sink through the layered water of the Tyrrhenian basin at about half a metre a second.

  5. Three thousand one hundred and fifty metres

    30 September 1953

    On 30 September 1953 the gauge reads 3,150 metres, more than three times the depth Beebe reached, and the craft settles on the mud of the basin floor.

  6. Sold to a navy

    1953 CE

    The dives make Trieste the deepest-diving craft in existence and, within five years, too expensive for its inventor to keep.

Outcome

3,150 metres off Ponza on 30 September 1953, the deepest crewed dive then made, and a craft the United States Navy soon bought.

Auguste Piccard

Physicist who flew a pressurised sphere into the stratosphere and then inverted the idea to invent the bathyscaphe, a free deep-diving craft.

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Sources

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