A Swiss Family's Triple Crown
A ballooning dynasty proves what goes up also goes down--and round the world
After an hour of watching the sky, the balloonists at the hot-air ballooning festival in Château-d'Oex, Switzerland, drink up their coffee; the organizers say the high-altitude winds have let up enough for them to take off. The crews start up the noisy, generator-run fans and the flat colorful balloons slowly expand, then, one by one, rise from the hard-packed snow and drift toward the encircling Alps. It takes only a few people to launch a balloon, so clearly something is up in the vicinity of one silvery balloon, where dozens of people, many wielding cameras and press badges, have converged. Swiss President Joseph Deiss climbs into the open basket. But it is the pilot, reaching up to fire the burners with a gloved hand, who is the main attraction. After all, Switzerland gets a new president every year, but Bertrand Piccard headed up the first team to fly a balloon nonstop around the world.
In 1999, when Piccard and his British copilot Brian Jones embarked on that trip, Piccard was embracing a family tradition. Bertrand's father, Jacques Piccard, in 1960 became the first person to descend to the deepest part of the ocean. Twenty-nine years before that, Jacques's father, Auguste Piccard, took a balloon nearly 10,000 feet higher than anyone had ever been before. The Piccards say they aren't daredevils, and they don't take unnecessary risks. But they like being the first, and they work hard, pushing the technology around them to the edges of the world.
In the early 20th century, as today, meteorologists studied the atmosphere with unmanned balloons. But physicist Auguste Piccard thought he could do better by ascending to the stratosphere to run his experiments on cosmic rays. Even back then, getting up there was relatively easy; people had been flying in hydrogen balloons since the 18th century. The problem was surviving where the air is too thin for breathing. So Auguste invented a 7-foot, spherical pressurized gondola that would be comfortable even when the pressure outside fell to one tenth of that on the ground.
On a windy morning in May 1931, in Augsburg, Germany, Auguste and his assistant, Paul Kipfer, floated up 9 miles in half an hour. But then they got stuck; the rope to let gas out of the balloon for the descent had tangled. They drifted all day, waiting for evening when the hydrogen would cool, allowing them to come down. People on the ground feared they were dead. Jacques Piccard, then 8 years old, and his mother were waiting at home in Brussels. "I was terribly afraid," he says. But Auguste and Kipfer landed after dark on an Austrian glacier. They spent a cold night wrapped in the deflated balloon and hiked out in the morning.
Deep dreams. After this success, Auguste persuaded the Belgian government to fund his long-standing dream of building a deep-sea submersible. In the 1940s, he built the first bathyscaph, modeled on a hydrogen balloon with a huge float made of thin steel and filled with lighter-than-water gasoline. In the early 1950s, Auguste decided to build his next bathyscaph in Trieste, a port on the border of Italy and Slovenia. Jacques, then working as an economist, helped out, first as a driver and interpreter (his father didn't speak Italian) but later as a full collaborator.
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