If, at the last moment, something doesn’t go well, I shall turn the propellers, and you will know that we must give up the dive.” “When I have closed the door,” I tell him, “you may open the entrance-tube valves and proceed with normal operations. I hurry up the ladder onto the deck and give final instructions to Buono. Under these conditions the foremost desire of a cabin passenger is to penetrate as quickly as possible into the depths, which alone can shield him from the rolling waves. The big gasoline-filled float above our spherical cabin was the plaything of the waves, and the whole machine was rocking hard. In the sphere the air was good-fresh and dry, thanks to the silica gel placed on board before our departure from Guam. This dive we were making was to be decisive for Don as well as for me: If everything went as planned, he would take over as the bathyscaph’s pilot, and I, having shown the Trieste‘s capabilities to the utmost, would return to Switzerland and set to work constructing a new machine. Navy officer in charge of the Trieste, had already made six dives, the latest to 24,000 feet with me two weeks previously. The bathyscaph functions like a balloon in the sea, deriving its buoyancy from lighter-than-water gasoline instead of the balloon’s lighter-than-air gas.ĭon Walsh joined us on the bathyscaph’s deck. Hence it is necessary merely to cut the current, an operation that is always possible, in order to lighten the bathyscaph and cause it to ascend automatically. One of my father’s basic ideas when he invented the bathyscaph was to hold the ballast-in this case mainly iron pellets-by means of electromagnets. The main electric circuits control release of ballast. “Then, if everything is in order, we shall dive immediately.” “I am going to check the main electric circuits in the sphere,” I replied to Buono. More than 800 TNT explosions had followed one another for two days before the Challenger Deep was marked.Īll that work, those four days of laborious towing, the unavoidable fatigue that resulted for the crew-was it all to be lost? Should we risk months of delay because a few instruments-important, to be sure, but not vital-were lacking? Indeed, the bottom had been carefully sounded. A few dozen yards away on the water burned some flares which our escort destroyer had placed to show us the exact spot where the dive should begin. The bathyscaph looked like a victim of battle rather than an undersea laboratory about to explore the Mariana Trench-the deepest place in the oceans. The tachometer, indicating speed of descent and ascent, had been completely demolished during the towing, though it rode eight feet above water level and had weathered more than 50 dives.Īnother instrument, a vertical current meter, was partly broken and hanging miserably on its support. At that moment waves were sweeping the bathyscaph’s deck without ceasing, and we had just discovered that the surface telephone, which enabled the pilot to give his final instructions before the dive, had been torn away. The United States Navy’s ocean-going tugboat Wandank had been towing the Trieste for four days now we were some 220 miles from our base on Guam. In fact, I was wondering the same thing myself. Now he was wondering whether it was not sheer madness for the bathyscaph to attempt to descend 36,000 feet-nearly seven miles-under existing conditions. A 37-year-old Italian, he had already prepared the Trieste for diving 64 times, first in the Mediterranean and this year in the western Pacific off Guam. The voice of our faithful engineer, Giuseppe Buono, was taut with anxiety. “Do you think we shall be able to make the dive?” This article was originally published in the August 1960 issue of National Geographic magazine and retains the original language and spellings.
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