Episode Details

Auguste Piccard, born in Basel, Switzerland in 1884 alongside his twin brother Jean-Félix, studied at the ETH in Zurich, became a physics professor at the Free University of Brussels in 1922, and sat at the Solvay Congresses with Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, and Albert Einstein. Physicists needed clean measurements of cosmic rays, which the atmosphere degrades, so with funding from the Belgian FNRS he designed a sealed, pressurized aluminum gondola to hang beneath a hydrogen balloon. On May 27, 1931 he and assistant Paul Kipfer launched from Augsburg, Germany wearing improvised pillow helmets, rose to 15,781 meters, and became the first humans to enter the stratosphere, proving the pressurized cabin concept that airliners depend on today.

Piccard then ran the math in reverse for the deep sea. His bathyscaphe used a thick steel sphere to resist crushing pressure, a float filled with gasoline because liquid barely compresses, and iron ballast held by a magnetic release that dropped the weights to let the craft rise. World War II delayed the work until 1945. The FNRS-2 made unmanned dives in 1948, the French Navy later took a redesigned version past 4,100 meters in 1954, and in 1953 Auguste and his son Jacques dove a second bathyscaphe to 3,150 meters. He died of a heart attack in Lausanne in 1962 at 78.

• The pressure he faced deep down exceeded 6,700 pounds per square inch, like three elephants on a postage stamp.
• A sphere spreads pressure evenly with no corners to act as weak points.
• He and Kipfer are credited as the first humans to directly observe the curvature of the Earth.
• Hergé based Tintin's Professor Calculus on the tall, long necked Piccard he saw in Brussels.
• Gene Roddenberry named Captain Jean-Luc Picard in honor of Auguste and Jean-Félix Piccard.