Auguste Antoine Piccard (1884 –1962) was a Swiss physicist,
inventor and explorer.
In 1930, an interest in ballooning, and a curiosity about
the upper atmosphere led him to design a spherical, pressurized aluminum
gondola that would allow ascent to great altitude without requiring a pressure
suit. Supported by the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique
(FNRS) Piccard constructed his gondola.
An important motivation for his research in the upper
atmosphere were measurements of cosmic radiation, which were supposed to give
experimental evidence for the theories of Albert Einstein, whom Piccard knew
from the Solvay conferences and who was a fellow alumnus of ETH. On May 27, 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul
Kipfer took off from Augsburg, Germany, and
reached a record altitude of 15,781 m (51,775 ft).
In the mid-1930s, Piccard's interests shifted when he
realized that a modification of his high altitude balloon cockpit would allow
descent into the deep ocean. By 1937, he had designed the bathyscaphe, a small
steel gondola built to withstand great external pressure. Auguste Piccard was
the inspiration for Professor Cuthbert Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin by
Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Piccard held a teaching appointment in Brussels where
Hergé spotted his unmistakable figure in the street.
This connection was confirmed by Hergé in an interview with
Numa Sadoul.
"Calculus is a reduced scale Piccard, as the real chap
was very tall. He had an interminable neck that sprouted from a collar that was
much too large... I made Calculus a mini-Piccard, otherwise I would have had to
enlarge the frames of the cartoon strip."
No comments:
Post a Comment