Two Men Dropped Toward Earth's Deepest Point in a Steel Ball. A Window Cracked

In January 1960, Jacques Piccard and US Navy lieutenant Don Walsh sealed themselves inside a steel ball about two meters across and sank toward the deepest point on Earth, the Challenger Deep. After about nine kilometers, a window pane cracked with a bang. They kept going. This is the story of the bathyscaphe Trieste: an "underwater balloon" with a float full of gasoline and tons of iron pellets held on by electromagnets; a Krupp steel sphere with walls almost 13 centimeters thick; nearly five hours of sinking; twenty minutes on the bottom at more than a thousand times surface pressure; and the flatfish Piccard said he saw (which most scientists now doubt, for good reason). Then the 52 years before anyone went back, and what James Cameron and Victor Vescovo found when they did. How this video was made: the narration is an AI-generated voice, and every visual is an animated cartoon illustration made for this channel. Nothing here is footage of the real events. Sources: Walsh, "The Bathyscaph Trieste" (1962) and Piccard (1956), as cited by Wikipedia, "Trieste (bathyscaphe)" US Navy, Naval History and Heritage Command, H-Gram 041-6, "Trieste and the First Dive to Deepest Part of the Oceans, January 1960" Office of Naval Research, "Lucky Day: Navy Celebrates 60th Anniversary of Deepest Ocean Dive" (2020) University of Delaware College of Marine Studies, "To the Depths in Trieste" (Extreme 2004) Wikipedia, "Challenger Deep" (dive records, 2019 pressure reading, HMS Challenger 1875 sounding) NOAA Ocean Service, "How deep is the ocean?" Yancey et al., PNAS 111:4461-4465 (2014), doi:10.1073/pnas.1322003111 Jamieson & Yancey, Biological Bulletin (2012), doi:10.1086/BBLv222n3p171 University of Western Australia / Jamieson (2023), deepest fish filmed at 8,336 m #deepsea #marianatrench #oceanhistory