At 16,000 metres above the earth in an aluminium gondola suspended under a hydrogen balloon, the sky curves away beneath you, a deep blue-black. At 11,000 metres below the sea in a reinforced bathyscape, black is all there is. In a solar-powered flight of 43,000 km around the world, the blue ocean stretches out to infinity. No one pioneer was the first to experience all these marvels, but one family is: the high flying Piccard family from Lausanne, Switzerland.
Exploration and daring in the name of science seem to be in the family blood. Auguste Piccard, a physicist born in 1884, was with his partner Paul Kipfer the first person to ascend to 16,000 metres at a time when passenger planes like the Ford Trimotor flew at less than 2,000. They went up to the stratosphere to measure solar radiation and ultimately provide confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Sealed with Kiper and 200 kg of instruments in an aluminium ball inspired by beer barrels, the pair witnessed the dark blue, almost black skies, plugged an oxygen-depleting hole with Vaseline and fibres, and were forced to slurp drops of condensation when the temperature inside hit 40 degrees Celsius. They survived crashing down into the snowy Alps and staggered away to meet the rescue company that was convinced they were already dead.
The brilliant and eccentric Auguste was tall, gangly and balding, carried a slide rule and wore two Swiss watches at all times. No wonder that he was cartoonist Hergé’s inspiration for Professor Calculus, the mid-series addition to The Adventures of Tintin comics who would take the young reporter to the moon 20 years before reality finally caught up. In Red Rackham’s Treasure, his 1943 debut outing, Calculus (named Tournesol in the original French) also took Tintin to the bottom of the sea. To accomplish this particular feat in reality, it took Auguste Piccard only 10 years to catch up. In 1953 he dove with his bathyscape – a high pressure-resistant submersible – down to a record breaking 3,150 metres below the Mediterranean. This time, his partner was his son, Jacques.
Jacques wouldn’t stop there. He sold the Piccard family bathyscape, the Trieste, to the US Navy, and with Navy funding, in 1960 he and partner Don Walsh travelled far deeper than anything depicted in Tintin: the floor of the Mariana Trench, the world’s deepest known point, nearly 11,000 metres down in the Pacific Ocean. According to a 2022 New Yorker profile, at a time when the US government was considering using the bottom of the trench to store its nuclear waste, the explorers – Jacques was an increasingly passionate environmentalist – went down with the hope of finding life on the bottom. And find it they did. Though they had no scientific instruments to record it, when they emerged they reported having seen a flatfish slowly flapping about in the seafloor muck. But did they really? Scientists have since disputed that anything could live at those depths, but they had uncontestably descended to record depths, and their report was enough to convince the world to keep the trench free of toxic waste.
Back in Europe, Jacques’s son, Bertrand, was looking away from the depths and up to the heavens. Despite an early fear of heights, as a teenager he began taking to the skies in a hang glider, eventually becoming a European hang-gliding acrobatics champion. Having opted for a career as a psychiatrist, he was fascinated by how people can control their anxieties, their fears – even control our sense of time. He employed techniques, including hypnosis, to help him and his copilot Brian Jones keep cool heads as they made the first successful non-stop around-the-world balloon flight. Launched from Château d’Oex, in Switzerland, Bertrand’s circumnavigation had been imagined by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days back in 1872 but never actually accomplished until the year 1999 – in a total of less than 20 days.
Having inherited his father’s environmental conscience, Bertrand was bothered by his record balloon flight’s dependence on fossil fuels, which is why he vowed to make another such journey powered by renewable energy. With Solar Impulse 2, a solar-powered carbon-fibre plane that was as big as an Airbus but as light as a family car, Bertrand and fellow pilot André Borschberg took turns flying from one stop to the next, completing the journey on 24 April, 2016.
Why is this visionary Swiss family driven to such extremes? Perhaps, the Piccards might respond, why not? As Auguste once recounted, when people warned him against flying into the stratosphere back in 1930, “the single objection that they were able to make to me was that up till then no one had ever done it”. Driving the point home decades later, grandson Betrand explained that telling the family something is impossible is “exactly why we try to do it”. From the stratosphere to the sea bottom to around the world on a sunlight-powered plane, what will this high flying family get up to next?