He was one of only two men to answer the call, and he got the job. “It was like the first two airplanes in the world-who are you going to get to fly them?” Walsh remembers. So it put out a call for volunteers to all submarine crews on the west coast of the United States. The Navy realized that it didn’t have any bathyscaphe pilots-unsurprisingly, since only two of the experimental vehicles existed in the world. Piccard and his father designed the vehicle together and sold it to the U.S. The crew cabin, a cramped steel sphere, was suspended from a massive tank holding about 130 000 liters of gasoline-which, with less density than water, would provide the buoyancy necessary to lift the craft from the chasm. They made the trip in a vehicle called a bathyscaphe, which looked something like an underwater dirigible. To date, those two men are the only human beings who have laid eyes on the Mariana Trench seafloor-and in an ironic twist, they didn’t see much of anything. Navy lieutenant and a submariner when he made the journey down with Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard in 1960. IEEE Spectrum recently interviewed Don Walsh, who was a U.S. Currently vying to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench are following in the path of two trailblazers who took the plunge in a peculiar underwater vehicle 52 years ago.
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