![]() ![]() The first journeys were detailed in the Jacques Cousteau book The Silent World. There was no access tunnel the sphere had to be loaded and unloaded while on deck. The float held 37,850 litres (8,330 imp gal 10,000 US gal) of aviation gasoline. Propulsion was provided by battery-driven electric motors. ( FNRS-1 had been the balloon used for Piccard's ascent into the stratosphere in 1938). The first bathyscaphe was dubbed FNRS-2, named after the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, and built in Belgium from 1946 to 1948 by Auguste Piccard. This is a fail-safe device as it requires no power to ascend in fact, in the event of a power failure, shot runs out by gravity and ascent is automatic. The iron shot containers are in the form of one or more hoppers which are open at the bottom throughout the dive, the iron shot being held in place by an electromagnet at the neck. Instead, ballast in the form of iron shot is released to ascend, the shot being lost to the ocean floor. For example, the pressure at the bottom of the Challenger Deep is more than seven times that in a standard "H-type" compressed gas cylinder. To descend, a bathyscaphe floods air tanks with sea water, but unlike a submarine the water in the flooded tanks cannot be displaced with compressed air to ascend, because the water pressures at the depths for which the craft was designed to operate are too great. Īuguste Piccard, inventor of the first bathyscaphe, composed the name bathyscaphe using the Ancient Greek words βαθύς ( bathús), meaning "deep", and σκάφος ( skáphos), meaning "vessel, ship". Buoyancy at the surface can be trimmed easily by replacing gasoline with water, which is denser. By contrast, the crew cabin must withstand a huge pressure differential and is massively built. The incompressibility of the gasoline means the tanks can be very lightly constructed, since the pressure inside and outside the tanks equalises, eliminating any differential. The float is filled with gasoline because it is readily available, buoyant, and, for all practical purposes, incompressible. ![]() Bathyscaphe Trieste before its only dive into the Mariana Trench The Trieste in 1958Ī bathyscaphe ( / ˈ b æ θ ɪ ˌ s k eɪ f, - ˌ s k æ f/) is a free-diving, self-propelled deep-sea submersible, consisting of a crew cabin similar to a Bathysphere, but suspended below a float rather than from a surface cable, as in the classic Bathysphere design. ![]()
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