Mr Walid

On January 23, 1960, US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard climbed into the six-foot steel sphere of the bathyscaphe Trieste and began their descent into the Mariana Trench. The surface was rough. They boarded from a small rubber boat, then dropped through a vertical tube into the pressure sphere. The hatch was bolted shut from the outside. Inside there was barely room for the two men, oxygen tanks, carbon dioxide scrubbers, and instrument panels. They sank for hours. The water outside the window went from blue to gray to absolute black. At about thirty thousand feet, they heard a sharp crack, like a rifle firing inside a metal pipe. The outer Plexiglas window had fractured under the pressure. The inner pane was still holding. The water pressure outside was four tons per square inch. If the hull failed, it would be over instantly. They could have released their iron ballast and headed straight for the surface. Instead they continued down. Their sonar telephone to the support ship failed. They were completely alone. The temperature inside the unheated sphere fell to forty-five degrees. Condensation dripped onto their instruments. They put on dry clothes over their wet ones and held hot water bottles to keep their hands warm. The descent took four hours and forty-eight minutes. At thirty-five thousand eight hundred feet the Trieste touched bottom. A cloud of white silt rose around the window. When it cleared, they saw a flatfish swimming above the ocean floor. They stayed twenty minutes, then released two tons of iron pellets and began the ascent. They reached the surface three hours and fifteen minutes later. For the next fifty-two years, no human returned to the bottom of the trench. Don Walsh later received the Legion of Merit. The Trieste is now in the National Museum of the United States Navy.