Going the Deepest

January 23, 1960 - This day was the first time that humans went to the deepest place on earth, the Challenger Deep. At more than 35,000 feet down in the western Pacific, this mind-boggling ditch at the bottom of the Mariana Trench was reached by two men in a 50-ton bathyscaphe called the Trieste.

It took Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh almost 5 hours to reach the ocean floor, and during the descent one of the Plexiglas window panes shattered, which had be extremely unnerving. The explorers spent about twenty minutes at the bottom where they claimed to observe some fish swimming around, but that account is disputed. What they probably saw were sea cucumbers, which are basically deep-sea slugs.

In an interesting side note, the vessel the men were in was designed by Piccard’s father, Auguste Piccard, who thirty years earlier was one of the first men to reach the stratosphere in a hydrogen balloon. Legend has it that Gene Rodenberry named Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard after the Piccard family.