ramriot t1_islufmh wrote on October 16, 2022 at 11:10 PM

Reply to comment by bolanrox in TIL that Swiss Balloonist, Auguste Piccard, was the inspiration for both Professor Calculus, in the Tintin comics, and that Gene Roddenberry named Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek after him. by es_price

Plus not only did Auguste go to the stratosphere in a pressurised gondola, crash on a glacier & have to survive a night up there until rescued.

But he also designed the bathyscaphe Trieste to explore the deepest parts of the ocean & his grand-nephew took it with us navy personnel to the bottom of challenger deep.

Plus one grandson of the family was with another pilot the 1st people to successfully circumnavigate the globe in a balloon.

You have to admit that any family that can boast the highest, deepest & farthest unpowered exploration is a family worth being a descendant of.

Darmok47 t1_ismq8rn wrote on October 17, 2022 at 3:15 AM

Kind of funny that the branch Jean-Luc Picard came from were Luddites who didn't believe in using 24th century technology like replicators (or, tragically, fire supression systems).

Rosthouse t1_isnj7hl wrote on October 17, 2022 at 9:07 AM

Bertrand Picard was the first to cirumnavigate the globe in a ballon (together with Brian Jones). In 2016 he finished the circumnavigation again in a solar powered plane.

His father, Jacques Picard (Son of August Picard) was actually the one diving to the challenger deep. There's a funny story that he used a swiss flag as his seat cushion, to later be able to claim that the swiss flag went deeper than the american flag.

Afterwards Jacques desigend the Mésoscaphe Auguste Piccard, which was the first submersible for tourists and was used at the National Exhibition 1964 in Lausanne.

gidneyandcloyd t1_istozx6 wrote on October 18, 2022 at 5:01 PM

The family name is Piccard, not Picard. Nice article about them in the October 10, 2022 The New Yorker.

Spiderbanana t1_ism6vlv wrote on October 17, 2022 at 12:45 AM

You forgot the part where same grandson circumnavigated the globe in a solar aircraft (well, technically be didn't since he didn't flew all the stages, but the airplane did)