The Piccard Twins

Two curious brothers

Auguste and Jean Piccard were identical twins born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1884. Their father was a chemistry professor, and both boys grew up fascinated by science. Auguste became a physicist and Jean a chemist, and for much of their lives they looked so alike that friends had trouble telling them apart.

The tall, thin twins with round glasses and wild hair became one of the most recognisable pairs in science. The cartoonist Herge said Auguste inspired the absent-minded Professor Calculus in the Tintin stories.

The twins studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Into the stratosphere

In 1931 Auguste and his assistant Paul Kipfer rose from Augsburg, Germany, in a sealed aluminium gondola hanging under a huge hydrogen balloon. They reached about 15,800 metres, becoming the first people to enter the stratosphere and see the dark blue sky above most of the atmosphere. Auguste wanted to study cosmic rays, and his pressurised cabin pointed the way to modern aircraft cabins.

Jean moved to the United States and in 1934 flew a stratosphere balloon from Dearborn, Michigan, with his wife Jeannette as pilot. Jeannette became the first woman to reach the stratosphere, and the couple later helped develop new balloon materials used in research.

Jean later taught at the University of Minnesota, and the balloon work he and Jeannette did there helped launch modern high-altitude scientific ballooning.

Down into the deep

Auguste then turned the balloon idea upside down. He designed the bathyscaphe, a deep-diving vessel that hangs a pressure sphere beneath a float filled with petrol, which is lighter than water and does not compress. His bathyscaphe Trieste, built with his son Jacques, made record dives in the 1950s, and in 1960 Jacques rode it to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean.

So a single family explored from the stratosphere to the deepest sea.

A family of explorers

The Piccard story kept going. Auguste's grandson Bertrand Piccard flew around the world non-stop in a balloon in 1999 with Brian Jones, and in 2016 completed a round-the-world flight in Solar Impulse 2, a plane powered only by sunlight, with Andre Borschberg.

The Piccard twins show what two curious minds can do when they share an obsession. They worked on different problems in different countries, yet both kept pushing upward, and their family kept exploring for a century.

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