HMS Challenger

The trench is crescent-shaped, roughly 2,550 kilometres long, about 69 kilometres wide, and its deepest point, a slot-shaped depression called Challenger Deep, reaches 10,935 metres below the surface, plus or minus six metres.

The name comes from HMS Challenger, a British Royal Navy corvette that conducted a pioneering global oceanographic expedition between 1872 and 1876.

On 23 March 1875, The Challenger's crew lowered a sounding line into the trench and recorded a depth of 8,184 metres, the deepest measurement that had ever been made at sea.

The technology was a weighted rope.

That's close.

Challenger, HMS Ch- Challenger, HMS Challenger was the British Navy ship that in the 1870s was the first to sound the Marianas Trench.

Oh.

Well, I didn't, I didn't know that.

Properly, it's the Marianas Trench.

It's named after the Marianas Islands that are right next door to it.

And it was HMS Challenger in 1873 that dropped a plumb line to a depth of 26,000 or 28,000 feet, which was as much as they had line of, and, and they found no bottom.

And they reported this as the deepest place in the world.