Piccard, Jacques-Ernest-Jean

▪ 2009

      Swiss oceanic engineer, economist, and physicist

born July 28, 1922, Brussels, Belg.

died Nov. 1, 2008, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switz.

helped his father, Auguste Piccard, build the bathyscaphe for deep-sea exploration and invented the mesoscaphe, an undersea vessel for exploring middle depths. Piccard studied at the University of Geneva, taking a year off (1944–45) to serve with the French First Army. Upon receiving his licentiate in 1946, he taught at the university for two years before entering private teaching. Meanwhile, he was helping his father to design bathyscaphes, and in 1953 they took the Trieste on a dive of 3,099 m (10,168 ft) off the island of Ponza, Italy. In 1958 the U.S. Navy bought the vessel and retained Piccard as a consultant. On Jan. 23, 1960, he and Naval Lieut. Don Walsh set a submarine depth record by descending the Trieste 10,916 m (35,810 ft) into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Piccard recounted this feat in Seven Miles Down (1961), written with Robert Dietz. He introduced his first mesoscaphe, the Auguste Piccard, at the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition in Lausanne. In 1969 he drifted some 3,000 km (1,800 mi) along the east coast of North America in the mesoscaphe Ben Franklin, conducting research on the Gulf Stream for the U.S. Navy. Later Piccard was a consultant scientist for several private American organizations for deep-sea research. In the 1970s he founded the Foundation for the Study and Protection of Seas and Lakes, based in Cully, Switz. In 1999 his son Bertrand Piccard, together with Englishman Brian Jones, completed the first nonstop circumnavigation of the globe in a balloon.

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