Depth Ship

A determined scientist always has new worlds to conquer. Professor Auguste Piccard, who broke the altitude record in a free balloon in 1932,* is nearly ready to try for the undersea depth record too. Last week 63-year-old Scientist Piccard told the North American Newspaper Alliance about the "bathyscaphe" (from the Greek for "depth ship"), his submarine balloon which will descend into the sea suspended from a steel and aluminum "gas bag" full of lightweight gasoline.

Heavyweight. Long planned (TIME, July 8, 1946), the bathyscaphe is now about completed in Belgium. Cast as two steel hemispheres (see cut), it is 6 1/2 feet in outside diameter. The walls are 3 1/2 inches thick at their thinnest point. The professor thinks that they will withstand nearly 6,000 pounds of pressure per square inch--the pressure he expects to find more than 12,000 feet below the surface of the sea.

There will be one door (a thick plate) and two windows, one of them set in the center of the door. Instead of glass, or the quartz used by William Beebe in his record-holding (3,028 ft.) bathysphere, the windows will be Plexiglas cones with the narrow ends pointing inward. Professor Piccard theorizes that the pressure will squash the elastic Plexiglas windows firmly into their sockets.

The steel sphere and its contents will be heavy enough to sink. To keep it from sinking right to the bottom of the sea and staying there, it will be suspended from streamlined aluminum containers filled with aviation gasoline, which is considerably lighter than water and almost incompressible. Fully loaded, the bathyscaphe will weigh about 40 tons. Because the winches of the mother ship cannot support this weight, the gasoline and half the ballast must be added after the bathyscaphe is in the Water.

Trial Dip. The cramped (141 cubic foot) space inside the steel-shelled coconut will be crammed with control apparatus, batteries and instruments. The bathyscaphe will carry enough oxygen to keep two men alive for more than 32 hours, and chemicals to absorb the carbon dioxide given off by their breathing. Powerful searchlights outside the cabin will light up the sea, and allow fish and other bathyfauna to be observed and photographed. Because time for note-taking will be short, a recording device will bring back a running commentary on the dive. The depth ship's experimental compass will be outside the cabin too, since the earth's magnetism will not penetrate the thick steel walls.

Since radio does not work well under water, the bathyscaphe will use a shortwave sound device lent by the British Admiralty, which developed it for communication between submarines.

The descent will be made, if all goes well, in the Gulf of Guinea off West Africa, some time in September. First, Professor Piccard intends to drop the unmanned bathyscaphe into the sea with a pressure-controlled instrument on board to bring it up again when it has reached a certain depth. If it rises as he expects it to do, the professor himself will take the plunge.

* 53,153 feet. It was broken again in 1935 by Orvil Anderson and Albert W. Stevens, U.S. Army Air Corps, who went to 72,395 feet in a sealed, spherical gondola like Piccard's.

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