Auguste Antoine Piccard was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer known for his record-breaking hydrogen balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth's upper atmosphere and became the first person to enter the Stratosphere. Piccard was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean's depths.
Auguste Piccard in 1932
Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer, wearing improvised crash helmets, September 1930
The FNRS III at the Tour Royale in Toulon.
A bathyscaphe is a free-diving, self-propelled deep-sea submersible, consisting of a crew cabin similar to a Bathysphere, but suspended below a float rather than from a surface cable, as in the classic Bathysphere design.
Bathyscaphe Trieste before its only dive into the Mariana Trench
The Trieste in 1958