When Herg茅, the Belgian cartoonist, needed a model for his eccentric Professor Calculus in the Tintin cartoons, he didn鈥檛 have to look far. His lanky, long-haired boffin is the spitting image of Auguste Piccard, a Swiss physicist working at the University of Brussels. And the cartoon鈥檚 heroic voyages-with a nuclear-powered Moonrocket and shark submarine-bear an uncanny resemblance to Piccard鈥檚 real-life adventures.
PICCARD wasn鈥檛 particularly interested in fame or in breaking records. He wanted to find out what happened when cosmic rays from outer space hit the upper atmosphere. That meant going higher than any person had before.
Pilots in open cockpit planes had risked life and lungs by flying to 13 000 metres, but Piccard needed to go much higher. At such a height there wasn鈥檛 enough oxygen to support either life or a combustion engine. So Piccard decided that he needed a hydrogen-filled balloon, to get round the engine problem, and a pressurised gondola to ensure he survived the trip.
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The balloon bit was easy, although it had to be ten times the normal size to allow for the huge expansion of the hydrogen as the balloon rose to the rarefied regions of the atmosphere where the pressure is a tenth that at sea level. The gondola, in which two men and an assortment of instruments were to travel, was more of a challenge.
It had to be sealed so that the scientists could breathe and carry out their experiments in a near normal atmosphere. It also had to be made from a material that didn鈥檛 interfere with the cosmic rays passing through the sphere. That meant it had be electrically and magnetically neutral. And it had to be light but strong enough to prevent explosive decompression during the journey.
Piccard decided on aluminium. At that time the only people with any idea of how to handle aluminium were more interested in beer than balloons. Engineers working for Belgium鈥檚 breweries had successfully welded together large panels of aluminium to make big, rounded vats that withstood the rigours of the brewing process. Such skills were just what Piccard needed. Using the same techniques, the brewery engineers shaped three pieces of metal by hand and welded them together to form a sphere. The walls were just 3.5 millimetres thick.
Piccard fitted his sphere with the breathing apparatus that had maintained the atmosphere inside German U-boats during the First World War. The two oxygen tanks would last 16 hours.
With his assistant Paul Kipfer, Piccard made a first attempt to reach the stratosphere on 27 May 1931. During the ascent, precious oxygen leaked through a hole. Worse still, when the men wanted to descend, the valve that released gas from the balloon jammed, almost condemning them to stay airborne until long after the air ran out.
With time running out, the valve opened and the balloon finally began to descend. As soon as it was safe, Piccard and Kipfer threw open a hatch to let in some fresh but freezing air. To round off the hair-raising trip, the balloon crashlanded on a remote Alpine glacier. The pair had reached 15 300 metres, but they had spent so much time fixing things that they had made only one measurement of cosmic radiation. The adventure, Piccard admitted, was much more dangerous than he had expected.
Undeterred, he built a second sphere-the one on display at Wroughton-with a more reliable system for controlling the balloon from inside the sealed cabin. On 18 August 1932, Piccard and Max Cosyns took off from D眉bendorf aerodrome near Z眉rich. Twelve hours later, they landed safely in a field just south of Lake Garda in Italy after reaching a record altitude of 16 940 metres.
This trip was less eventful than the first, although mercury from a broken thermometer could have eaten through the aluminium sphere if Piccard and Cosyns hadn鈥檛 hastily mopped up the skittering droplets.
Scientifically, the flight was a great success. Piccard showed that cosmic radiation did become more intense at higher altitudes but that even at great heights, few high-energy particles penetrated the sphere-suggesting that humans could survive journeys into the stratosphere and on into space.
Not content with going up, Piccard designed a craft that could take him down into the depths of the sea. His bathyscaph was a 鈥渄epth balloon鈥�, which would sink under its own weight and 鈥渇ly鈥� back to the surface with the help of a giant float filled with petrol, which is lighter than seawater. The descent was controlled by taking on water to counter the float; the ascent fine-tuned by releasing ballast.
This time, the sphere was made from thick steel to withstand the fantastic pressure in the deep sea. The hazards were enormous-and not all of them predictable. 鈥淭he dangers of entanglement from giant sea fauna on the ocean bed cannot even be guessed at,鈥� warned the News Chronicle in 1948 as Piccard got ready to test his craft.
A dummy run in 1948 proved that the bathyscaph worked. In 1953, Piccard built a bigger version, the legendary Trieste. Although he was now 69 years old, Auguste joined his son Jacques in a pioneering dive off the Italian coast near Naples, reaching a depth of 3150 metres.
In 1960, Trieste, now owned by the US Navy, broke another record. This time, Jacques and the American Don Walsh reached a depth of 10 911 metres in the Marianas Trench, the deepest spot in the ocean.
Ballooning-whether it is upwards or downwards-seems to run in the Piccard family. Auguste鈥檚 twin Jean-Felix helped to design high-altitude balloons for the US Air Force that took men to more than 30 000 metres. And in March this year, Auguste鈥檚 grandson Bertrand and his pilot Brian Jones became the first balloonists to circle the world. Their craft, the Breitling Orbiter 3, had a bed, a toilet and heating. But take away the little luxuries and it isn鈥檛 a lot different from the giant beer can that took Auguste to such heights sixty years ago.