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To the Uttermost Depths and Back
During the decades humans first reached outer space, they were also reaching for the ocean’s uttermost depths. They even managed to reach those depths before placing a man in orbit.
“Opening the Great Depths: The Bathyscaph Trieste and Pioneers of Undersea Exploration,” by Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers tells that story. It is a history of Trieste. It also fits Trieste into its historical context.
The authors reveal an unexpected origin for the bathyscaph: high altitude ballooning. Its initiator, Swiss academic Auguste Piccard made his name in the 1920s setting altitude records in free-flight balloons. His purpose was scientific, measuring cosmic rays at stratospheric altitudes. He was equally interested in plumbing the ocean’s depths. He used concepts developed for balloons in designing the bathyscaph, an ocean-plumbing balloon. Gasoline substituted for hydrogen to provide buoyancy, iron shot provided ballast, with the crew in a pressurized spherical compartment.
His vision had to wait until World War II ended. A first attempt ended in failure in 1948, largely due to funding. The sponsoring nations, Belgium and France, impoverished by World War II underfunded the effort.
Trieste, his second attempt, was a last flourish of back-yard Edisons until perhaps Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Auguste, with his son Jacques, designed Trieste, obtaining private funding for construction. The craft was named for the city where it was built, then independent. Its first sphere built in the Italian steel town Terni. Everything came together by 1953 when Auguste made a dive of 10,300 feet in it.
Funding problems plagued this civilian effort. In 1958, the US Navy purchased Trieste, along with Jacques Piccard’s services. In 1960, with a new, stronger sphere and Piccard aboard, Trieste took humans to a depth of 36,700 feet.
This was the start of a remarkable quarter-century US Navy career for Trieste and its two successors. It is easy to confuse the three vessels. For security reasons, the Navy let people assume all three were the upgrades of same vessel. The authors sort this all out.
They take readers through the program’s accomplishments and challenges. Trieste dived on sunken nuclear submarines Thresher and Scorpion, recovered reentry capsules from US spy satellites from the ocean floor and conducted scientific research missions. There were plans to use it to scoop up Soviet nose cones.
Polmar and Mathers present an informative, entertaining, and fascinating story in “Opening the Great Depths.” This book will captivate readers.
“Opening the Great Depths: The Bathyscaph Trieste and Pioneers of Undersea Exploration,” by Norman Polmar and Lee J. Mathers, Naval Institute Press, 2021, 304 pages, $44.95 (hardcover), $33.99 (Ebook)
This review was written by Mark Lardas who writes at Ricochet as Seawriter. Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, historian, and model-maker, lives in League City, TX. His website is marklardas.com.
Published in History
Long, long ago did the story of Trieste along with the action photo of Navy LT Don Walsh in the Time-Life book The Sea – l still have it – excite my spirit and thus led me on a long academic journey. I look forward to reading this new book!
I’m sure I’m not alone in preferring ocean exploration to space exploration. Why the obsession with finding life “out there” when there’s so much more to discover and understand here? Why mine asteroids before mining the ocean depths? Where are the seafloor farms and gardens anticipated by Jules Verne?
The universe is rightly fascinating. But Earth alone offers endless discovery.
It’s not either or. Embrace the power of and. We can do both.
Bathyscaph is one of my favorite words.
Be careful what you fish for? Or, if on finding the Lovecraftian horrors of the great abyss, make sure to put the lid back down after, maybe. Carefully, if you please. Don’t want to wake anything up, now, do we.
More seriously, though, this could be a further post of its own.
Yes, I can see that. One of my favorite phrases is “dynamic cone penetrometer.” Apparently it’s important to the Air Force kids so that they can figure out how many aircraft of how much weight with how many troops on board can the airfield hands before we got to do maintenance. Still. Dynamic Cone Penetrometer. I like knowing what it is, and that it sounds kind of dirty. Sorry. Just me.