Trieste

Y- yeah, I'm, I'm kind of shaking right now.

[laughs] Okay, so according to this, the Mariana Trench and its deepest point were first explored and charted by the Trieste and the Deep Sea Challenger, and that mission left Southern California in October 1959 for Guam.

Okay, and we know Grandpa was living in SoCal at the time and that he worked in Guam.

Yeah, and in 1960, the Trieste literally touched down at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, and the Challenger Deep is, like, the deepest point in the ocean, like, like, on Earth, the deepest point.

Jesus.

Uh, o- okay, it says here it's 35,800 feet deep.

That's not a place humans are supposed to be.

No, and not our grandpa at all.

Nope, nope.

This is, uh, this was a specially designed Bathyscaphe that's called the Trieste.

And if you look at it, it looks kind of submariney, but the part that you think of as a submarine is actually just a tank that was designed to hold gasoline.

They used gasoline as a non-compressible substance that was still positively buoyant.

A- again, about 1,100 atmospheres.

And to put that into perspective, I d- I tried to calculate the relative pressures that are exerted on one of these submarines that goes down.

I described the Trieste, which made the first dive to the Marianas Trench.

And so the men themselves stay in a, a steel sphere, now a titanium sphere, but it was a steel sphere for the Trieste.