Piccard Balloon Reaches the Stratosphere
In 1931, the Swiss-born physicist Auguste Piccard rose in a sealed, pressurized balloon gondola to roughly 15,800 meters above the Earth, becoming the first person to enter the stratosphere. The flight showed that humans could survive at altitudes where the air is too thin to breathe, and it laid groundwork for both high-altitude science and the later development of pressurized aircraft and spacecraft.
Piccard, a professor at the University of Brussels, was interested in cosmic rays, the energetic radiation reaching Earth from space. Their nature and origin were hotly debated in the 1920s and 1930s, and the best way to study them was to get above most of the atmosphere, which absorbs much of the radiation. Earlier balloonists had reached great heights, but they suffered from cold, low oxygen, and decompression, and some had died. Open baskets and oxygen masks could take a person only so far. Piccard's solution was to borrow an idea from the deep sea and the submarine: enclose the crew in a airtight metal capsule that kept a livable pressure inside.
His gondola was a sphere of lightweight aluminum alloy, about two meters across, hung beneath a very large hydrogen balloon. The balloon was deliberately only partly inflated at launch, because the gas expands as the air thins and the envelope swells to its full size at altitude. Funding came largely from the Belgian national research fund. Piccard flew with his assistant Paul Kipfer, lifting off from Augsburg, Germany, in May 1931. Accounts of the flight describe problems, including a failed valve and a gondola that grew uncomfortably warm, and the pair drifted for hours before landing on a glacier in the Austrian Alps near Obergurgl.
In August 1932, Piccard made a second ascent, this time with Max Cosyns, launching from Switzerland and reaching a still greater height of about 16,200 meters. Their instruments gathered data on cosmic rays and the upper atmosphere, though the scientific results were modest compared with the publicity the flights attracted. The question of cosmic rays was eventually clarified through many other experiments.
The legacy of the flights lies largely in engineering and in public imagination. Pressurized cabins became standard in high-flying aircraft, and the stratospheric balloon became a tool for research that continued through the Cold War and into the space age. Piccard also turned to the depths, designing the bathyscaphe, a deep-diving vessel, and his son Jacques later descended into the Mariana Trench in 1960. Piccard's name is often cited as an inspiration for the fictional Captain Jean-Luc Picard, though that link is informal rather than documented fact.