On this day, the first tourist underwater dive took place

The underwater world has always interested mankind - and the first "passenger" (not to be confused with professional - for example, pearl divers) dives several meters deep date back to time immemorial.

Only professionals or adventurers dived deeper. In 1892, the Italian Balsamello descended in a bathysphere to 165 meters, and in 1949 a record was set for this type of underwater apparatus (a spherical chamber lowered into the water on a cable), amounting to 1375 meters.

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Then began the era of bathyscaphes, which, unlike the bathysphere, were autonomous underwater apparatuses controlled from the inside. The inventor of the bathyscaphe was Auguste Piccard, a scientist with an appearance as if from the illustrations of Jules Verne's novels and similar to his heroes in his character - in addition to the bathyscaphe, he also created a stratospheric balloon for rising to the upper layers of the atmosphere.

However, when the bathyscaphe "Trieste" plunged to the greatest possible depth on Earth, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, Auguste Piccard was already almost 70 years old, so his son Jacques Piccard was in the apparatus together with Lieutenant Don Walsh (Piccard sold the apparatus to the US Navy).

And let them say that physiognomy is a "pseudoscience", but it was Jacques, who, unlike his father, had the appearance of a Hollywood movie actor (see the title photo), who began the era of tourist underwater diving. Exactly 60 years ago, on February 27, 1964, the mesoscaphe "Auguste Piccard", named after Jacques' late father, was launched, which made more than 1,000 dives in Lake Geneva to a depth of 100 meters.

The total number of its passengers during this time was 33 thousand, but at first Piccard himself was removed from management because they were afraid that the inventor could not objectively assess the safety of his brainchild, and only experienced submarine officers participated in the first dives.

Thus, the era of tourist underwater diving, which after some time became deep-sea, was launched, and which is now, at least temporarily suspended after the death of passengers of the deep-sea submarine "Titan".

Photo: Wikipedia