Piccard completed a total of 27 trips to great heights in which he continued to carry out experiments, but in 1937, having conquered the heavens, he decided to plunge into the watery depths. The adventurers were hailed as heroes, which may have prompted them, despite all their mishaps, to make new ascents. Piccard professor and his assistant Charles Kipfer hours before to reach the stratosphere. “The story of their adventure surpasses fiction,” Popular Science magazine wrote in an article in August 1931. 17 hours later, when they had already been taken for dead, they appeared on the Gurgl glacier in the Austrian Alps at 1,950 metres above sea level. As their oxygen tanks ran low, they floated aimlessly over Germany, Austria, and Italy. When the observations were completed, the explorers attempted to descend, but without success. “It seemed a flat disk with upturned edge,” he said. Piccard calibrated the cosmic rays (much more powerful there than on the surface of the Earth) and became the first person to observe the curvature of our planet. First person to observe the curvature of the EarthĮverything that could go wrong during the flight did go wrong, though it all worked out fine in the end. His balloon had taken off accidentally and during the ascent they realized that the aluminum capsule with which they had to climb thousands of metres had a mercury leak. This professor of physics in Brussels had been studying cosmic rays for a decade when he found himself flying between the chimneys of Augsburg (Germany). Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Auguste Piccard (Janu– March 24, 1962) designed and then had a beer cask factory build a pressurized capsule propelled by a hydrogen balloon. The Swiss physicist and inventor Auguste Piccard. In an episode that perfectly defines the personality of this versatile scientist, Piccard decided that to test his theory that these rays originated in the stratosphere, he would go there to do the experiments. The reason for this adventure was strictly scientific: Piccard wanted to observe cosmic rays and support the theory of relativity of Einstein, whom he had known for years. They ended up achieving their goal, reaching a record height of 15,971 metres in the first pressurized cabin in history. Inside were the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his assistant Charles Kipfer with a clear objective in mind-to reach the stratosphere. Instead of a basket, it was attached to an airtight capsule of black and silver aluminum. A huge yellow balloon reached the sky on May 27, 1931.
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