EUROPEAN DIARY:Jacques Piccard was an adventurer whose real-life exploits inspired cartoon and film legends
EUROPE LOST one of its most intrepid explorers at the weekend with the death of Jacques Piccard, who was called a modern-day "Captain Nemo" due to his undersea expeditions.
The 86-year-old is best known for diving 11 km beneath the Pacific in a specially built submarine in 1960 to explore the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on the earth's surface. The dive, which has never been repeated, helped to inspire a ban on nuclear dumping at sea when Piccard discovered life at that extraordinary depth.
"The depth gauge read 6,300 fathoms - 37,800 feet. The time - 1306 hours," wrote Piccard in his account of the record-breaking voyage, Seven Miles Down. "And as we were settling this final fathom, I saw a wonderful thing. Lying on the bottom just beneath us was some type of flatfish, resembling a sole, about one foot long and six inches across . . . Could life exist in the greatest depths of the ocean? It could! . . . Moving along the bottom, partly in the ooze and partly in the water, he disappeared into his night."
At the time scientists were wondering what to do with nuclear waste and the idea of sinking it in deep trenches on the sea floor was being actively considered. Piccard's discovery of a flatfish and a shrimp on the ocean floor put paid to that proposal.
The voyage to the bottom of the sea took five hours, although Piccard and his US co-pilot Don Walsh spent just 20 minutes on the seabed because of cracks that appeared in the window of their vessel due to the water pressure. They later reported they had heard a large bang as they made their descent into the trench but chose to continue their dive.
Piccard later undertook groundbreaking research on the flow of the Gulf Stream in a four-week undersea mission in the Atlantic, which Nasa used for its astronaut programme to determine how people would react to long periods in sealed vessels.
Born in Brussels in 1922, Piccard moved to Switzerland to teach economics before teaming up with his father, the physicist and inventor Auguste Piccard, to build submersibles capable of reaching great depths. The father and son designed several vessels before they built the bathyscaphe Trieste, which conquered the Marina Trench.
The Piccard family has an extraordinary tradition of exploration. Jacques' father was a professor of physics at the Free University of Brussels where he developed an interest in hot-air ballooning.
In the 1930s he developed a pressurised aluminium gondola capable of carrying people to high altitudes. He took 27 high-altitude flights and set a world altitude record of 23,000m before turning his creative flair to submarines.
Auguste Piccard's ballooning exploits created quite a stir in Belgium and almost certainly provided the inspiration for the nutty professor character called Calculus in Herge's famous Adventures of Tintin comic strip. Auguste and his twin brother Jean Felix Piccard, a US-based chemist, engineer and inventor, also provided the inspiration to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry for the popular character Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Jean Felix invented "clustered ballooning", where a person is attached by a harness to a cluster of relatively small helium-inflated rubber balloons. He also co-invented plastic balloons with his wife and later developed electronic systems for emptying ballast bags.
This Piccard spirit for exploration has lived on in Jacques' son Bertrand, who in 1999 beat Virgin boss Richard Branson in a race to be the first person to circumnavigate the earth in a hot-air balloon. Bertrand and his co-pilot Brian Jones travelled 45,755 km in a balloon flight lasting 19 days and 21 hours to claim the coveted record.
"He passed on to me a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will, and confidence in the face of the unknown," said Bertrand in a press statement released at the weekend announcing his father's death.
Bertrand, who is a psychiatrist by profession, has not lost his sense of adventure and is carrying on the family tradition. In 2004 he announced a project to design a solar-powered, long-range glider that can circumnavigate the world by 2011. Given his family history and his own achievements to date few would bet against him making it happen.