The Wonderful Professor

Mme. Auguste Piccard put her foot down. Middle-aged professors, she declared, especially her husband, should not risk their lives year after year making record-breaking balloon flights into the stratosphere. To her surprise, Professor Piccard solemnly promised to stay out of balloons.

Why Stop? Mme. Piccard was understandably startled by her husband's easy acquiescence. All through the 1920s Auguste had taught mechanical engineering at the University of Brussels, but his first love was always the free-ballooning he did with his twin brother Jean. After years of practice in conventional balloons, the tall, scrawny professor with his outlandish head of wispy white hair, designed his own gasbag, his own spherical, airtight gondola, squeezed into the risky contraption one morning in 1931 and climbed 51,775 ft. over Augsburg, Bavaria--almost two miles higher than any airplane had yet flown. Just a year later Professor Piccard soared aloft to set a second altitude record (53,153 ft.).

Why would he want to stop? To her dismay, his wife soon learned the answer.

The skinny adventurer had simply decided on a new direction. His next destination was the black bottom of the ocean, and he did not propose to go there in anything as tame as a bathysphere, one of the steel-walled, cable-controlled balls that were used at the time for deep-water research.

Instead Piccard designed a free-cruising "underwater balloon" which he named a bathyscaphe.-- It had a small, thick-walled steel sphere to resist the pressure of the depths and a thin-walled hull filled with light, almost incompressible gasoline to give it buoyancy. For cruising, it used electricity from storage batteries to drive a small propeller.

Low Record. This unlikely craft was not built until after World War II. The first model was ready in 1948, when Pro fessor Piccard was 64. In it, he and his son Jacques descended 6,889 ft-under the Mediterranean, more than doubling the depth record (3,028 ft.) of William Beebe's cable-lowered bathysphere. On a later voyage in 1953, the elderly but still tough professor cruised the improved bathy scaphe* Trieste along the bottom off the west coast of Italy, more than 10,000 ft.

down. He and Jacques, he said, were not merely seeking adventure. "On the con trary," he insisted, "I wish to show that the bathyscaphe is a dependable scien tific device in which the father of a family may entrust himself without anxiety." He raised no objections when in 1960 Jacques cruised the good ship Trieste to the bot tom of the Marianas Trench, the deepest known place in the ocean, where the water pressure at 37,800 ft. is eight tons per square inch.

After his Trieste reached the ultimate ocean depth, Professor Piccard did not rest on his triumphs. He was full of plans for improved submarine vessels to explore the deeps under better control, and as he charged around Lausanne, Switzerland, this year, he looked, at 78, hardly more scrawny than when he first climbed into the stratosphere 30 years before. Death had brushed close to him so many times that the wonderful professor seemed im mune. But last week the only man to break both depth and altitude records died at home of a heart attack.

* From Greek for "deep ship."

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