Jacques Piccard, Explorer
From the Associated Press:
GENEVA – Jacques Piccard, a scientist and underwater explorer who plunged deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, died Saturday, his son’s company said. He was 86.
Piccard died at his Lake Geneva home in Switzerland, the company Solar Impulse said.
Exploration ran in the Piccard family. Jacques’ physicist father, Auguste, was the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere and his son, Bertrand, was the first man to fly a balloon nonstop around the world.
Jacques Piccard helped his father invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel that allows humans to descend to great depths.
On Jan. 23, 1960, he and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh took the vessel into the Pacific’s Mariana Trench and dove to a depth of 35,800 feet — nearly seven miles (11 kilometers) below sea level. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.
Photo courtesy of www.about.ch