At the end of World War II, Dr. Jacques Piccard was a professor of international economics and his father, Professor Auguste Piccard, was a distinguished physicist. In the late 1940s they began to work together to develop a manned submersible that could take scientists into the sea. Their improbable “Swiss submarine” would open the depths for thousands of explorers.
Jacques, who had been an assistant professor at the University of Geneva, joined the project in 1948 to assist his father. It was the beginning of a very different career for this non-engineer. He never went back to academia, and by the time of his death in 2008 he was recognized as one of the leading submersible engineers in the world.
The Piccards’ first bathyscaph (literally, “deep boat” in Greek) was tested in 1948. The third and final bathyscaph was the Trieste. Launched in 1953 and based near Naples, for four years she made dives along the southwest coast of Italy. In September 1953, the Piccards dove together to 10,300 feet. It was the last dive for the 70-year-old elder Piccard, although he remained active in the ongoing work as a consultant.
From the beginning, the Piccards found the cost of operating the large and complex undersea vehicle was beyond their means. In fact, they did not operate at all in 1955. Then, in 1957, the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research chartered the Trieste for a series of 25 dives. And as a result, in early 1958 the Navy bought the Trieste. Jacques was hired as a consultant to show the new owners how to operate and maintain her. The Swiss submarine had joined the U.S. Navy!
In January 1960, the former Swiss economics professor and an American submarine officer named Lieutenant Don Walsh (the author of this article) dove the Trieste to the deepest place in the World Ocean—the Marianas Trench, 35,800 feet down. After the dive, Piccard left the Navy project and began to work on new ideas for manned submersibles.
His first major project was the mesoscaphe Auguste Piccard. Built for the 1964 Swiss National Fair at Lausanne, she was the world’s first tourist submarine. Fitted with large windows, airline-style seating and uniformed hostesses, she carried 33,000 tourists down to 1,000 feet in Lake Geneva during the yearlong fair.
Sadly, the Auguste Piccard was two decades ahead of her time for the development of tourist diving. Success there did not come until 1985, when Atlantis Submarines in Canada launched the first of its 15 tourist subs. Those popular submarines have carried more than 7 million passengers in perfect safety. As for the Auguste Piccard, she was not a financial success after the Swiss National Fair. But she is now being restored at the Swiss Transport Museum in Lucerne.
Piccard’s next big project was the mesoscaphe Ben Franklin, sponsored by Grumman Aerospace Corporation. Capable of diving to 2,000 feet, the 130-ton submersible was a quasi-submarine with all the necessities for her six-person crew to live and work on board for prolonged periods of time.
In July 1969, with Piccard as mission commander, the Ben Franklin submerged off Florida to begin a month-long “Gulf Stream Drift Mission.” The vessel remained submerged for the entire trip, making scientific observations from 600 to 2,000 feet as she drifted north. At mission’s end she surfaced 300 miles south of Halifax, Nova Scotia, having traveled 1,444 miles. As with the Auguste Piccard, the Ben Franklin was never a commercial success and eventually ended up at the Vancouver Maritime Museum in British Columbia.
In was nearly a decade later, in 1979, when Piccard launched his next submersible, the F. A. Forel, designed for operating in Swiss and European lakes as well as the Mediterranean. By the time of her retirement in 2005, the Forel had made hundreds of research dives, with Piccard himself piloting many of them.
His final “electric submarine,” the PS-16, was built in Switzerland in 1988 by Sulzer for the Deep Line Submersibles company of Zurich. She was to be a 16-passenger tourist submarine operating primarily in Swiss lakes. Unfortunately, Sulzer did not complete her before Deep Line’s funding ran out. Moved to the United States, the sub was completed by a new owner but has never carried a revenue passenger and today sits in Florida, unused.
While the fate of his last submersible greatly disappointed Piccard, he continued with a variety of underwater-project proposals until his death. A sense of his creativity can be gained from the sequential numbers he assigned to his submersible projects: While PX-1 was the Trieste and the Sulzer sub was PX-44, his archives show that has last submersible project was PX-68.
A remarkable record for a former economics professor who was apprenticed by his physicist father to build the world’s deepest-diving manned submersible.