Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Bathyscaphe
/ˈbæθɪskeɪf/noun
A free-diving deep-sea submersible with a pressure sphere hung beneath a buoyancy float.
The Greek roots
βαθύς
bathýs
deep
σκάφος
skáphos
hull, hollowed vessel
Literally: “deep boat”
The story of the word
Auguste Piccard, who had already ridden a balloon into the stratosphere, built its inverse for the sea: a tank of petrol for buoyancy with a steel sphere slung underneath and no cable to the surface. He named it deep boat. In January 1960 his son Jacques and Don Walsh took the bathyscaphe Trieste to the floor of the Challenger Deep, close to eleven kilometres down, and nobody returned to that spot for fifty-two years.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1940s
Same family
bathyspherebathymetryscaphoid
In a sentence
The bathyscaphe dropped iron shot to rise, so the ascent could not be undone once it started.