Page 154 - The Secret Museum

saw Piccard on the street, he recognized him as the classic eccentric ‘man of science’

and was inspired to create Professor Cuthbert Calculus, who appears in many of the
Tintin stories: ‘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.’

Piccard loved adventure and believed that ‘exploration is the sport of the
scientist.’ He practised this sport all his life and made 27 stratospheric ascents in
total, reaching a top height of 21,946 metres. His balloon trips were useful as well as

daring. He brought back information about the stratosphere, where no one had ever
been, provided data that helped lead up to the first space flights and proved that it
was possible for a human to survive at such an altitude (there had been several fatal
attempts before). He researched cosmic rays about which nothing was known at the
time. His gondola design and his balloon innovations (he used just a little hydrogen
in the balloon on the ground, which expanded as he ascended) helped balloonists

cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He also contributed significantly to weather
forecasting. Every day, balloons are sent into high altitudes to monitor atmospheric
conditions and help predict the weather. Nowadays, they go unmanned, without a
zany scientist inside.

It was not only heights that Piccard soared to: he helped set the world record for
the deepest anyone has ever been down into the ocean. Jacques Piccard, his son (with
his father’s help), adapted the gondola design so it worked in the water. He called it
a bathyscaphe, which means ‘deep ship’ in Ancient Greek. Inside one named the

Trieste, Jacques travelled with Don Walsh to the deepest spot known on Earth, the
bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. This was in 1960. It took them
4 hours and 48 minutes to get down there. They ate chocolate as they descended
through the still, clear water until they reached the bottom, where they measured the
depth as 10,916 metres. They all but landed on a fish. Piccard said, ‘Our fish was the
instantaneous reply (after years of work!) to a question that thousands of
oceanographers had been asking themselves for decades.’ Later on, they saw a

shrimp.

Until March 2012, they were the only humans ever to have made it so far down
into the ocean. Then James Cameron made world headlines when he followed in the
twosome’s bubbles – Don Walsh was there to see him off – and dropped down,
alone, into the abyss.

National Geographic streamed live news online, news stations covered the story,
and he and his wife tweeted. She tweeted his last words to her: ‘Bye, baby … See
you in the sunshine,’ and how a rainbow appeared over the spot where her husband
had descended. Everyone wondered, will he make it? He wrote a list of things that

could go wrong that was posted on the National Geographic website; it included
being ‘smashed into jam’ should his pilot sphere implode. On the same webpage, it
says that Don Walsh had pointed out the risks of ‘flying a research sub too close to a