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In the rarified air of the stratosphere, Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard ascended to unprecedented heights.
His pioneering 1931 balloon flight into the upper atmosphere saw Piccard reach an altitude over 50,000 feet, obliterating the previous record.
Sealed in a pressurized aluminum gondola, he and his assistant Paul Kipfer became the first people to enter the stratosphere, where the sky above them looked far darker than anyone had seen it from the ground.
Piccard’s stratospheric journey heralded a new age of high-altitude exploration.
Braving the freezing cold and air pressures on the edge of survival, Piccard emerged from the stratosphere with invaluable cosmic ray measurements and a new perspective on our planet’s place in the vast cosmos.
His revolutionary balloon flights epitomized the boundless human thirst for discovery in realms beyond our natural limits.
By daring to rise above the troposphere into the uncharted stratosphere, Auguste Piccard earned his place as an intrepid trailblazer who first opened the door to near space. Decades later, his grandson Bertrand would co-pilot the Breitling Orbiter 3 on the first nonstop balloon flight around the world.
AUGUSTE PICCARD HELD THE RECORD FOR REACHING THE HIGHEST ALTITUDE IN A BALLOON
Auguste Piccard’s record-shattering balloon ascent to the stratosphere in 1931 was an aviation achievement of pioneering proportions.
On May 27th, Piccard along with Paul Kipfer took to the skies above Augsburg, Germany in the gondola of their hydrogen balloon, named FNRS after the Belgian research fund that paid for it.
Climbing to 15,781 meters (51,775 feet), they obliterated the previous altitude record.
A tangled valve rope kept them aloft for about 17 hours, and they came down that night on the Gurgl glacier in the Austrian Alps. Along the way Piccard collected the cosmic-ray measurements he had gone up for.
The next year he went higher still. On August 18, 1932, Piccard and Max Cosyns launched from Dübendorf, near Zürich, and reached 16,201 meters (53,153 feet).
This singular feat, born out of scientific curiosity regarding the upper atmosphere, ushered in a new era of high-altitude balloon aviation.
Piccard’s triumphant flight showed mankind’s immense potential to push the boundaries of exploration ever skyward when unfettered imagination combined with technological ingenuity.
HE WAS AN EARLY PIONEER OF THE BATHYSCAPHE, A DEEP-DIVING SUBMARINE
Piccard’s next idea was a craft that worked like an underwater balloon: a pressure-proof steel cabin hung beneath a float filled with gasoline, which is lighter than water and barely compresses under pressure.
The first of these bathyscaphes, FNRS-2, went to sea off the Cape Verde Islands in 1948. Piccard and the naturalist Théodore Monod made a shallow manned dive of about 25 meters, and an unmanned test dive that November reached roughly 1,380 meters before a storm badly damaged the float.
Piccard then teamed up with his son Jacques to build a better bathyscaphe, Trieste, in Italy. On September 30, 1953, father and son took it to 3,150 meters (10,335 feet) off the island of Ponza, a depth record at the time.
Auguste never reached the Mariana Trench. That dive belonged to Jacques and US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh, who took Trieste to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, nearly 11,000 meters down, on January 23, 1960.
AUGUSTE PICCARD STUDIED COSMIC RAYS AT HIGH ALTITUDES
Auguste Piccard’s pioneering high-altitude balloon flights placed him on the forefront of studying cosmic radiation in the 1930s.
During his two ascents into the stratosphere, Piccard gathered measurements of cosmic rays bombarding the upper atmosphere. At altitudes above 50,000 feet, far beyond the heights where James Glaisher had blacked out in an open basket in 1862, he entered unfamiliar territory where the full impact of exposure was unknown.
THE BATHYSCAPHE WAS FUNDED BY BELGIUM’S NATIONAL RESEARCH FUND
Piccard designed FNRS-2 with money from Belgium’s Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, the national research fund that had also paid for his stratosphere balloon and gave both craft their initials.
After storm damage ended the 1948 trials, the project passed to the French Navy, which rebuilt the vessel as FNRS-3. Piccard left for Italy to build Trieste, and a French crew, Georges Houot and Pierre Willm, took FNRS-3 to 4,050 meters off Dakar in 1954 without him.
