Oceanographers learned to rely on robotic vehicles to probe the places that humans couldn’t go. By building craft that could reach 6000 meters, they could explore 98 percent of the ocean, they argued-everything but the mysterious trenches. The next-generation research subs built by oceanography institutions around the world also stuck to shallower depths. The Trieste team expected to conduct many deep dives with their vehicle, but the Navy, citing safety concerns, decided to limit the craft to depths above 6000 meters. Navy had abandoned manned exploration of the world’s deepest abysses.
“It’s amazing that no one has ever gone back,” Walsh says in a rueful voice.īy the end of the 1960s the U.S. Instead, they watched five decades tick by without a return. “I just thought it would be fun,” he says.
Most Navy men didn’t think the position of bathyscaphe captain offered much scope for advancement, but Walsh didn’t much worry about that. He was one of only two men to answer the call, and he got the job. “It was like the first two airplanes in the world-who are you going to get to fly them?” Walsh remembers. So it put out a call for volunteers to all submarine crews on the west coast of the United States. The Navy realized that it didn’t have any bathyscaphe pilots-unsurprisingly, since only two of the experimental vehicles existed in the world. Piccard and his father designed the vehicle together and sold it to the U.S. The crew cabin, a cramped steel sphere, was suspended from a massive tank holding about 130 000 liters of gasoline-which, with less density than water, would provide the buoyancy necessary to lift the craft from the chasm. They made the trip in a vehicle called a bathyscaphe, which looked something like an underwater dirigible. To date, those two men are the only human beings who have laid eyes on the Mariana Trench seafloor-and in an ironic twist, they didn’t see much of anything. Navy lieutenant and a submariner when he made the journey down with Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard in 1960. IEEE Spectrum recently interviewed Don Walsh, who was a U.S. Navy.Currently vying to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench are following in the path of two trailblazers who took the plunge in a peculiar underwater vehicle 52 years ago. In early 1980, the bathyscaphe was transported to the Washington Navy Yard where the vessel was placed on exhibit at the National Museum of the U.S. After a number of dives, Trieste discovered debris from Thresher 220 miles off Cape Cod that included the submarine’s sail, which clearly showed the number “593.” For her part in the Thresher search, the bathyscaphe and her commander received the Navy Unit Commendation.Īfter the search mission was complete, Trieste was taken out of service and returned to San Diego. Trieste was transported across the country to Boston where she began to search for the lost submarine. In April 1963, nuclear submarine Thresher (SSN-593) was lost with all hands off the Massachusetts coast. Beginning in December of 1958, Trieste was fitted with a stronger sphere, fabricated by the Krupp Iron Works of Germany.įollowing the ship’s fabrication, Trieste was transported to Guam to participate in Project “Nekton.” On 23 January 1960, Trieste made history when Lieutenant Don Walsh, USN, and Jacques Piccard descended seven miles to the Challenger Deep-located at the southern end of the Mariana Trench-the deepest known point of the Earth’s oceans.įollowing the historic dive, the bathyscaphe was overhauled and then conducted a number of dives out of the San Diego area supporting Navy research objectives. Navy acquired the vessel in August 1958 and transported the bathyscaphe to San Diego, California, where she was homeported. In August 1953, the bathyscaphe was first placed in the water and later in that month, Piccard and his son, Jacques, dove to a depth of five fathoms.Īfter several years of operations in the Mediterranean, the U.S. Scientific and navigational instruments for the vessel came from Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.
In 1952, Piccard was invited to Trieste, Italy, to commence construction. World War II delayed his work on the deep-sea research submarine until 1945 when he worked with the French government on the development of the craft. Trieste-a research bathyscaphe-was the development of a concept first studied in 1937 by Swiss physicist and balloonist Auguste Piccard.
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