One of the most daring moments in diving dates right back to 1960 when sub-aqua diving legend Jacques Piccard plunged almost seven miles under the sea. The feat earned Piccard the nickname "Captain Nemo", after the hero of the Jules Verne science fiction novel, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Adventure ran in Piccard’s family. His father, Auguste, was the first to ride a hot air balloon into the stratosphere, and his son, Bertrand, was the first to fly a hot air balloon non-stop around the world. But the exploit that put Jacques Piccard in the record books was his 1960 dive into the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench – the deepest point in the earth's crust.
True, Piccard and his deep-sea buddy US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh were cocooned in a submersible called a bathyscaphe (Greek for “deep ship”). Still, their feat makes modern shark cage exploits look tame.
Imagine how it feels to go seven miles under and witness animals thought unable to live at such depths.
"By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole," Piccard said. "We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."
After his epic dive, Piccard worked for NASA and built four mid-depth submarines including the first for tourists – demonstrated at the 1964 Swiss National Exhibition when it took 33,000 passengers to Lake Geneva’s bottom.
The daredevil scientist died in 2008. His son, Jacques, said that he passed on “a sense of curiosity, a desire to mistrust dogmas and common assumptions, a belief in free will, and confidence in the face of the unknown."
Jacques Piccard’s astonishingly bold seven-mile descent remains the deepest human dive ever.
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