Auguste Piccard

Born Jan. 28, 1884, in Lutry, Vaud; died Mar. 25, 1962, in Lausanne. Swiss physicist. Designer of stratosphere balloons and bathyscaphes.

In 1931 and 1932, Piccard carried out flights in stratosphere balloons of his own design for the purpose of studying cosmic rays; he reached an altitude of 16,370 m. In 1948 and 1953, using bathyscaphes he had designed himself, he descended to depths as great as 3,160 m in the Tyrrhenian Sea.