Jacques Piccard, Ph.D.

:: Hon. Jacques Piccard, Ph.D. - Science - 1967

Jacques Piccard is a Belgian explorer, engineer and physicist, known for having developed underwater vehicles for studying ocean currents. He is the only person (as of 2006), along with Lt. Don Walsh, to have reached the deepest point on the earth's surface, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench. Jacques Piccard was born July 28, 1922 in Brussels, Belgium to his famous Swiss born father, Auguste Piccard, who was himself an adventurer and engineer. When Jacques was born, Auguste was a professor at the University of Brussels. Jacques also helped his father build the bathyscaphe for deep-sea exploration. On January 23, 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reached the ocean floor in the Challenger Deep with his bathyscaphe Trieste. The depth of the descent was measured at 10,916 meters (35,813 feet), later more accurate measurements in 1995 have found the Challenger Deep to be less deep at 10,911 m (35,797 ft). The

descent took almost five hours and the two men spent barely twenty minutes on the ocean floor before undertaking the 3 hour 15 minute ascent. Following the success of the bathyscaphe, Auguste and Jacques then began developing a "mesoscaphe"--a ship that could operate at depths of up to 2,000 feet. Piccard envisioned it as a tourist submarine, and the first mesoscaphe, Auguste Piccard, carried more than 30,000 passengers into Lake Geneva at the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964-65. Working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Piccard then developed a second vessel, the Ben Franklin, for the Gulf Stream Mission, which studied the physical and biological features of the Gulf Stream on its month-long voyage from Florida to Nova Scotia in 1969. His account of that voyage was published in The Sun Beneath the Sea. During the 1970's, Piccard formed the Foundation for the Study and Preservation of Seas and Lakes based in Cully, Switzerland and began warning about the dangers of pollution and overfishing. His new submersibles included Forel, launched in 1979, which made more than 700 dives in European lakes for scientific, industrial, and recovery missions. Although he continued his research for governments, universities, and the police, his efforts in later years included developing passenger vessels. He developed more than 40 innovative designs for commercial sightseeing submersibles, of which half a dozen were built. Piccard also became a founder of the Exploration Society of America, an international travel group