Trieste Anniversary Party

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Akimbo

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Tangential to this board but hopefully interesting: The 50th Anniversary Party for Trieste's dive to the deepest spot on earth is happening today.

Trieste hoisted out of water image - Ocean exploration past, present, and future (images) - CNET News

Not a review, but a heads up. The book Seven Miles Down The Story of the Bathyscaph Trieste by Jacques Piccard and Robert Dietz is very good if you are interested. There is a brief mention of August Piccard's work in Cousteau's The Silent World.

I got to climb around the Trieste when she was mothballed in the Washington Navy Yard in 1970/71. She was also the vehicle that surveyed the wreckage of the USS Thresher (SSN-593) in 8,300' off Cape Cod. I worked on her replacement, the Trieste II, for several months just before seeing the momma.
 
Very interesting; just like space travel, we are somewhat withdrawing from exploration of the deep sea too. I thought I had Jacques Piccard's book Seven Miles Down, but found out it was his other book, The Sun Beneath the Sea, A thirty-day drift of 1500 miles in the depths of the Golf Stream. I think Auguste Piccard was Jacques Piccard's father--they both pursued the bathyscaphe concept, and Auguste's work was the bathyscaphe (which was its name too--before there was more than one). Here is what Jacques Cousteau said about the first dive:
Dumas and Tailliez swam down with the bathyscaphe. At one hundred and fifty feet they got the last glimpse of her rapidly disappearing into the blue. If the bathyscaphe did not return, Piccard's wonderful idea was finished forever. A failure today meant that the dream of science of penetrating the last earthly unknown would be set back decades. If the bathyscaphe returned, we knew that in our lifetime, depth vehicles built on her principles would carry men into the abyss.

An impressive silence ruled the ships. I pledged a bottle of cognac to the first man to spot the bathyscaphe. The crew scampered up the masts and funnel, and the blue sky was dotted with the red pompons of the matelots. After twenty-nine minutes came an ear-splitting shout from mechanic Dudbout, "There she is!" The balloon emerged from the ocean two hundred yards off. We were so overstrained at the sight of the marvel that it took a moment to grasp a very odd fact. The well-fastened aluminum radar mast was wleanly removed, as though by a mechanic.

The divers went into the water en masse and raced to inspect her. I swam around the submerged machine and found her floating well wit no gas leaks, but the thin plates of the balloon, especially where they passed through the surface, were rending, billowing, and sucking inward like the cheeks of an obese giant puffing on a fire.

By sundown we managed to get the bathyscaphe alongside the mother ship, but the flotilla was drifting away from the shelter of the island, and we could not get a hook on the submarine. Georges and a deck mate from the Scaldis stood atop the balloon, trying again and again to make her fast. The submarine pitched and rolled in a freshening breeze, and we feared she would be destroyed by crashing into the Scaldis Dumas and Tailliez worked all night on the Scaldis to avert the collision. They could not couple gas hoses to siphon her silos. Cosyns ordered the gas tanks blown with compressed carbon dioxide. Plumes of gas vapor enveloped the Scaldis. A spark would have touched off an explosion which would have certainly destroyed both vessels. Georges and th deck mate clung heroically to the valves, receiving jets of gasoline in their faces. They completedtheir work and were taken off, temporarily blind and exhausted. Through the night we fought to save the bathyscaphe. She was at last lowered into her hangar in the glorious sunrise.

It sickened us to look at the vehicle of our overweening ambitions. The envelope was lacerated beyond repair. One of the motors and propellers was torn away. Inside the balloon was a mess of paint dissolved by the escaping gasoline. We opened the hatch to examine the instruments. We read the automatic gauge showing the depth attained, and made temperature and salinity corrections. The bathyscaphe had reached four thousand six hundred feet.

The ironical fact was that she had survived all the pressures of the deep, with the exception of the mysterious loss of the radar mast, and then been knocked out of commission by a mild surface swell. We had the machine to carry mn to the abyss, but we could not pass it through the molecular tissue of air and water.

The bathyscaphe has been redesigned to make her seaworthy. She can be towed without the use of a mother ship. The pilots can enter immediately before the plunge and come out of the observation car as soon as the vellel has surfaced. There will be another trial. I am confident that the second bathyscaphe will take men to the basement of the world.
Jacques Cousteau, The Silent World, "The Submarine Dirigible," pages 191-193.
Auguste Piccard had before this dive accomplished the first manned dive to 100 feet. The second dive was unmanned. The interesting thing to me is that Cousteau's divers were critical to the safety, and Cousteau himself critical to the decisions to continue to experiment with the bathyscaphe when Captain La force "demanded that we abandon the trial before the bathyscaphe crashed through the hull of his vessel. I heatedly opposed this notion..." This all happened in November of 1948.

SeaRat
 
The arguments you describe followed the Trieste till the end, on many levels. The whole bathyscaphe concept was a scary proposition. It is basically a giant and very thin wall container filled with aviation fuel so the steel ball and batteries float. Both Trieste I and II had to be filled with tens of thousands of gallons of av-gas while in the water next to the support ship. Having a delicate and barely seaworthy tank filled with volatile fuel bobbing near the side your ship was not the sort of thing skippers saw as their path to Admiral.

There was 67,000 gallons on the Trieste -II which only had a 20,000' working depth. Thankfully, syntactic foam obsoleted the bathyscaphe concept before anyone was hurt. It would not have taken much to send Trieste, the floating dry dock support platform, and the tug that towed her to the bottom.

The fuel that leaked from Trieste II ate our wetsuits, burned our skin, and made a visible slick all around her; especially after surfacing. She used iron shot for trim control so you had to refill her steel shot tubs without causing a spark.

I was lucky to leave her just before she got orders to the Pacific to find and survey the Soviet Sub the Hughes Glomar Explorer as built to recover. From what buddies told me later, nobody knew what they were doing for those nine months except the pilots, a photographer's mate, and a few "civilians" that manned some of the electronics. They had no clue until the Explorer's cover story was blown.
 
I had the pleasure of attending the Explorer's Club (Washington Group) recption on Tuesday evening to celebrate the anniversay. Don Walsh was the speaker and he was introduced by George Martin. It was a good evening. I liked Don's comment that he is writing a book - "The Right Stuff but Wrong Direction" :)
 

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