In summer 1958, 27-year-old Navy Staff Lt. Don Walsh was assigned to the submarine tender Nereus, part of Submarine Flotilla 1 at the sub base on Point Loma. It was a safe, steady desk job, but less than exciting.
Six months later, Walsh found himself as the officer in charge (OIC) of what he referred to as “the strangest craft in the Navy,” the bathyscaph Trieste. How did that happen? He volunteered.
The bathyscaph was a deep submergence vehicle, or DSV, invented by Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard. It was no ordinary submarine. In fact, Trieste had been further described as a deep-diving dirigible. (Quite appropriate, as Piccard had previously broken all human aerial altitude records in a hydrogen balloon with a specially designed pressurized, spherical gondola. In May 1931, he and associate Charles Kipfer ascended nearly 10 miles into the upper atmosphere and became the first humans to visit the stratosphere.)
Like a hot air balloon filled with heated air, lighter than the surrounding atmosphere, the bathyscaph’s flotation tanks were filled with a lighter-than-saltwater liquid gas, in this case aviation fuel. To sink the buoyant vessel, Trieste also had two large ballast hoppers filled with iron shot — literally tons of it.
Trieste was less than maneuverable, as Walsh would later say: “It could not fight, run or dodge. All it could do was go straight down.”
Jacques Piccard, Trieste’s pilot and son of the inventor, had been testing the bathyscaph near the bay of Naples in the Tyrrhenian Sea with limited funding and (soon to be terminated) by the Italian Navy in 1957. U.S. scientists from Point Loma’s Naval Electronics Lab (NEL) and Office of Naval Research (ONR) became interested in the possible value of Trieste as a research platform.
Several test dives resulted in very favorable opinions of the vessel’s potential, and Trieste was purchased from the Piccards by the U.S. Navy for slightly more than $200,000.
Trieste was taken apart and shipped to San Diego. Jacques Piccard and Trieste’s mechanic Giuseppe Buono, both of whom had been with Trieste for the near decade of its existence, came with the bathyscaph and were hired by ONR as civilian contractors. Submarine Lt. Larry Shumaker became assistant OIC for NEL’s Trieste program manager and lead scientist, Andy Rechnitzer.
The small team soon acquired the name Project Nekton, a general term for swimming aquatic critters (such as fish) that the team felt was an ironic or, at best, ambitious appellation for a craft that barely propelled itself at all and mainly sank.
But that was what the bathyscaph had been designed for. Not only was its mission to go where no man had gone before and search out strange new life forms, but in the bargain, set a world record that could never be sured.
For the purposes of context, the times and triumphs of the Trieste, the late ’50s and early ’60s, were in the heat of the Cold War and within the launch window of the Space Race. The United States had been shocked by the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik in October 1957. A month later, Sputnik 2 had carried Laika the space dog into the stratosphere.
Washington reeled. Could Russia’s German scientists be that far ahead of our German scientists?
In 1958, President Eisenhower established the civilian National Aeronautics and Space istration (NASA). That year the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, was successfully launched and the first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus, crossed under the North Pole.
Trieste made its historic descent into the depths of the Mariana Trench in January 1960. Three months later, the CIA’s U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union and pilot Francis Gary Powers was taken into custody and jailed in Moscow.
In April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Patsy Cline’s big crossover hit “I Fall to Pieces” debuted on the country charts, and in Miss Tulloch’s second-grade classroom, one of us learned that if you flipped the numerals “1961” upside down it still read 1961! Those were heady days indeed.
Submarines of the period ran at a maximum depth of around 300 feet. Don Walsh recalled that the first dive he made in Trieste was to some 4,000 feet. Trieste was rated to go to a depth of 20,000 feet, but Jacques Piccard felt the bathyscaph could go much deeper.
The ambitious goal of Project Nekton was to go to the very deepest known depression in the ocean floor, the so-called Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam in the western Pacific.
While not without flaws, the technology of Trieste’s system was proving quite reliable. The team just needed the go-ahead from Navy brass, and after considerable reluctance, they got the approval in fall 1959. There was to be no advance publicity, however, which was fine by the Project Nekton team.
Writing in the Marine Technology Society Journal in winter 2009 (a wonderful 50th-anniversary edition commemorating The Deep Dive), guest co-editor Brock Rosenthal reported that determining depths of bodies of water in earlier times had been mostly need-to-know, 10-foot-pole stuff: “Throughout most of history, mankind had no idea what depths the ocean contained. In a very literal sense, they were unfathomable.”
Co-editor Kevin Hardy, a longtime Scripps engineer and marine historian, provided me with a copy of the MTS Journal and many other references and answered my dozens of questions.
In October 1959, Trieste was sent by ship to Guam and the Nekton team flew out there to set up operations at the U.S. Navy base at Apra Harbor. By the end of 1959, the team had completed eight test dives out of Guam. The deepest of those, by Rechnitzer and Jacques Piccard, had been to a depth of 18,500 feet, setting a world depth record by nearly 6,000 feet.
The Deep Dive was to begin early (0800 hours) the morning of Jan. 23, 1960. The weather was bright and breezy with 6- to 7-foot seas. As the Navy had no such vessel as a bathyscaph tender (and never would), the destroyer escort Lewis was commissioned to accompany Trieste, which was towed the 200-plus miles out to the target zone by the Navy tugboat Wandank. Though this jaunt took only a couple of days at a fairly safe 5 knots, it was a bit of a bumpy ride for the bathyscaph.
Walsh and Piccard would make the descent to Challenger Deep. It should be mentioned that the observation sphere (gondola/cabin/enger chamber) attached to the underside of Trieste was not terribly large: 38 inches square by 5 feet 8 inches in height. Piccard was 6-foot-7.
Walsh was rowed out to Trieste in the Lewis’ whaleboat and Piccard in a rubber boat from the Wandank. Walsh recalled that just getting onto the whaleboat, pitching 10 to 15 feet along the side of the Lewis, was the hairiest thing he did that day.
Both aquanauts were thoroughly soaked by the time they scuttled down the ladder into Trieste’s observation sphere.
After all hatches were completely secured, air chambers in the hull were flooded with seawater, adding a couple more tons of weight to start the descent of the bathyscaph.
From some 300 to 650 feet in depth, the craft encountered the layer known as the thermocline, where the water becomes much denser as the temperature drops rapidly. Some of the gas was released to restore negative buoyancy and return the bathyscaph to its descent.
Writing his of the adventure in Life magazine, Walsh reported that “it had taken more than 20 minutes to fight through the 250-foot thermocline. By contrast, we needed only 12 minutes to go from the 1,000-foot to the 2,000-foot level.
“At about 600 feet we encountered a zone of deepening twilight where colors faded off into gray. By 1,000 feet the light had gone completely. We turned out the lights in the sphere to watch for the luminescent creatures that are sometimes visible at this level. We saw very few.”
Project Nekton had specially developed an underwater telephone that the crew was able to use to communicate with the Wandank to a depth of 15,000 feet. Below that level, they were only able to communicate by low-frequency tones that carried much farther than voice communications.
“In our code,” Walsh ed, “all even-numbered signals are for good news: Two means all is well, four means we are on the bottom, six means we are on the way up. The bad messages came in odd numbers.” But they never had to use the odd-numbered tones.
Walsh related that as they sank “through the clear water near the bottom, we had a tremendous piece of luck. Peering through the tiny porthole, Jacques spotted a fish. It appeared to be browsing, searching for food along the ocean floor. It looked like a sole or a flounder, flat with eyes on the side of its head. It was about a foot long. Our sudden appearance in his domain, with our great light casting illumination such as he had never seen before, did not seem to bother him at all.”
“At 1 p.m. we sank gently onto the soft floor. A great cloud of silt rose around us. We had found the bottom at 37,800 feet — 1,600 feet deeper than the deepest soundings ever made and 4,200 feet deeper than the rough soundings made on the Lewis had led us to expect.”
Trieste had found the bottom of Challenger Deep at 6,300 fathoms — about 7 miles deep.
The crew decided to cut its time on the bottom to 20 minutes and began dumping the iron ballast to cause the craft to rise. The return trip to the surface took approximately 3½ hours.
The men were very cold and tired, but their main concern was whether they would be able to exit the sphere upon return to the surface or be stuck inside until Trieste was towed back to Guam. Luck was on their side.
“We seemed to have arrived on the surface in the middle of a carnival,” Walsh recalled. “Two Navy jet photo planes blasted by us a few feet above the conning tower. An Air Force search-and-rescue C-54 made several low es at us. Off to the west, the Lewis was bearing down on us and right behind her came the Wandank, breaking all speed records for tugs. She looked like a 30-knot destroyer heading for a fire. She looked great; so did everything else.”
Black Star photo bureau photographer John Launois was aboard the Wandank and captured some of those great images commemorating the event, one of which became the cover of Life on Feb. 15, 1960.
Once the dive had been certified as successful, the Navy ordered Walsh, Piccard, Rechnitzer and Shumaker back to D.C. and sent a Navy transport plane to Guam to round them up. On its second morning in Washington, the Nekton team was picked up in a big black limo and taken to the White House to meet and be presented with awards by President Eisenhower.
Trieste was retired by the Navy in 1963, replaced by two bathyscaphs, both known as Trieste II. They served the Navy until 1984.
A smaller, more maneuverable DSV design developed by Project Nekton eventually became the Alvin class DSV, two of which — the Turtle (DSV3) and the Sea Cliff (DSV4) — were operated by the Navy’s Submarine Development Group 1 on Point Loma for several decades.
In 2012, filmmaker James Cameron visited the Mariana Trench in a one-man deep submersible, the Deepsea Challenger, which he described as most like a seahorse — tall and slender, maneuverable, but not fast.
We reported on the flounder, but I forgot to mention that Walsh and Piccard also saw a bright red shrimp at or very near the bottom of the sea. What was he doing down there? I find that remarkable.
Eric DuVall is president of the Ocean Beach Historical Society. Many thanks to Kevin Hardy of Global Ocean Design for his help on this story. hip in OBHS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is $25 annually. Visit obhistory.org.
