Page 155 - The Secret Museum

hydrothermal vent’ where the water temperature is around 400°C (752°F) and would
melt the sub’s viewpoint. As we know, James Cameron made it there and back with
no problems, and described it as ‘a very lunar, very desolate place’, a ‘completely
alien world’. The next evening, he was at the London première of the 3D version of
Titanic. ‘Oh yeah! I am also that guy that does the red carpet stuff,’ he said to the
BBC’s reporter. He filmed the deep-sea dive for a 3D movie release and broke a

record for it being the deepest solo dive ever. He went far further than his earlier
dives down to the sunken Titanic, but I don’t think he got further down than Piccard.

Cameron talked to Don Walsh, who was there when he resurfaced, about the
record: ‘There’s no way of measuring it super-accurately. You can bounce a laser off
the moon and know within a couple of centimetres how far away the moon is, but
you’ll never know how deep the ocean is, because you’re measuring waves, the
sound through seawater, the changes in temperature and salinity. The error margin is
tens of metres. I said, “Let’s just share it.” We shook on that.’

There is a younger Piccard who is carrying on the adventuring tradition. Auguste’s
grandson Bertrand Piccard has been around the earth in a balloon (1999) and is
currently planning to circumnavigate the globe using only solar power to demonstrate

the potential of renewable energy. The main challenge is gathering enough sunlight as
he flies by day to last him through the night.

As well as the gondola, the behind-the-scenes warehouses contain thousands of
scientific treasures, including one of the earliest UK cash machines; a submarine, like
the one in For Your Eyes Only; the Channel Tunnel tunnelling machine; the world’s
first full-size hovercraft; an electric taxi from 1897; a hundred-year-old lump of
reinforced concrete; and a Soviet supercomputer called the BESM-6 that was cutting-
edge technology during the Cold War but now looks like a collection of blue

wardrobes. The objects are spread out between aircraft hangars.

Peter Turvey, the curator of Wroughton’s store, took me to see them all. We
zipped around between hangars in his jeep, driving along the runway. The heaviest
item we saw was the Wood Press. It weighs 127 kilograms and is part of the last
printing press used in Fleet Street. It spewed out 50,000 newspapers an hour until
1987. In 1999, industrial archaeologists spent four months taking it apart and five
more rebuilding it on site. Beside it, some of the things that were found inside the
machine are on display, such as empty beans tins and shoes.

Piccard’s gondola shares a hangar with Peter Turvey’s favourite object: a tandem
where the two riders sit side by side and cycle at the same time. Unsurprisingly – and
unlike Piccard’s – this is one prototype that didn’t take off.