Jacques Piccard

Jacques Piccard (1922- ), Swiss oceanographic engineer, who piloted his bathyscaphe to the bottom of the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean, the lowest point on the Earth.

Piccard was born in Brussels, Belgium, the only son of the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard. Jacques Piccard received a degree in economics from the University of Geneva in 1946, where he became an assistant professor in that subject. While working as an economist in Trieste, Italy, he received an offer from local industry to help him build a bathyscaphe. Piccard accepted the offer, and in 1952 the Trieste, a bathyscaphe designed by his father, was completed.

In 1957 the United States Navy financed a series of dives by the Trieste off the island of Capri, in Italy, and purchased the bathyscaphe; Jacques Piccard was hired to work with the Trieste as a scientific consultant. In 1959 the bathyscaphe was brought to the island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. After many engineering trials, on January 23, 1960, Piccard, who piloted the vessel, and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh dived in the Trieste to the bottom of the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth. At 10,912 metres (35,800 feet) below sea level, the Challenger Deep is farther from sea level than is the highest point on Earth, Mount Everest (8,850 m/29,035 ft). US President Dwight Eisenhower awarded both Piccard and Walsh the Distinguished Public Service award in 1960 for this achievement.

After completing work with the US Navy, Piccard returned to Lausanne, in Switzerland, where he designed and built the Auguste Piccard, a sight-seeing submarine. The submarine made hundreds of trips, carrying 33,000 tourists to a depth of 100 m (330 ft) in Lake Geneva during the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva in 1964. Later, with the interest of American industry and the US Naval Oceanographic Office, Piccard developed another submarine, the Ben Franklin (or PX-15), which was designed to study ocean currents. During one month in 1969, Piccard and five observers drifted unpropelled in the Gulf Stream along the east coast of the United States, travelling from Palm Beach, Florida, to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Piccard's popular writings include the book he wrote with the American oceanographer Robert Dietz, Seven Miles Down (1961), which describes the Challenger Deep dive. He also wrote The Sun Beneath the Sea (1971). Piccard's son Bertrand continued the family's illustrious tradition of exploration when, with the British balloonist Brian Jones, he made the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world in a balloon, the Breitling Orbiter 3, in March 1999.

See also Deep-Sea Exploration.