Ten Miles Up in a Silver Ball

In May 1931, a Swiss physicist and his assistant sealed themselves inside an aluminium sphere, let a hydrogen balloon carry them into the stratosphere, and came down on a glacier with the whole world watching.

American readers who opened the August 1931 issue of Popular Science Monthly met a story that sounded like a pulp serial: two men in a sealed metal ball, hanging under a balloon nearly ten miles above Europe, looking down at a sky that had turned almost black. It was not fiction. Ten weeks earlier, on 27 May 1931, Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard and his assistant Paul Kipfer had lifted off from Augsburg, Germany, and climbed to 15,781 metres (51,775 feet), an altitude ratified by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), the world air sports federation, under record file number 10634.² That is roughly 9.8 miles, and no human being had ever been there and come back to say so.

The professor who could not leave the sky alone

Auguste Piccard was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1884, one half of a set of twins (his brother Jean-Félix became a chemist). He studied at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) and in 1922 became a professor of physics at the Free University of Brussels, the same year his son Jacques was born.¹

His obsession was cosmic radiation, the high-energy particles that rain down on Earth from space. Measuring them far above the thick lower atmosphere was meant to supply experimental evidence for the theories of Albert Einstein, whom Piccard knew from the Solvay physics conferences and who, like him, was an ETH graduate.² The trouble was getting there. An open basket at that altitude would kill its passengers through thin air and brutal cold long before any useful data came back.

A sealed sphere, a Belgian cheque

So in 1930 Piccard designed something new: a spherical, pressurised aluminium gondola that kept the air inside at a breathable pressure, letting the crew rise to great altitude without wearing pressure suits.¹ The money came from Belgium’s Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), the National Fund for Scientific Research, and the balloon carried its initials painted large across the envelope.¹³

The idea of a sealed, self-contained cabin sounds obvious today because every airliner you have ever boarded is a descendant of it. In 1931 it was a gamble that two men were willing to bet their lives on.

The sealed cabin you nap in at 35,000 feet started life as a metal ball built so a physicist could chase cosmic rays.

Up into the dark blue

Once aloft, Piccard and Kipfer did what they had come to do. They gathered substantial data on the upper atmosphere and took measurements of cosmic rays from a vantage point no laboratory on the ground could match.¹ The Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne, which keeps a model of the FNRS balloon in its collection, credits Piccard as the first person to venture into the stratosphere.³

Getting up, it turned out, was the easy part.

Coming down on a glacier

The balloon did not come down where anyone planned. It drifted over the Alps and finished its flight with an emergency landing on the Gurgler Ferner, a glacier above the tiny mountain village of Obergurgl in the Austrian Tyrol, on the same day it launched. News of the crew’s rescue travelled through newspapers around the world.⁴

For Obergurgl, the accident was a stroke of fortune. Local tourism promoters in the 1930s printed brochures with the landing site marked by a cross on a photograph of the glacier, near the Karlsruher Hütte at about 2,600 metres, and leaned into the fame while advertising ski touring in the Ötztal Alps.⁵ The village’s own tourism office still describes the former mountain farming community as transformed since the day the balloon came down, and today hikers can follow a “Piccard hike” across the glacier to the landing site.⁶ A memorial to the landing has stood in the village since 1989.⁴

Higher, then deeper

Piccard went back up. On 18 August 1932 he launched from Dübendorf, Switzerland, with Max Cosyns and pushed the record to 16,201 metres (53,153 feet).² After his twenty-seventh and final flight in 1937 he gave up ballooning for a different childhood dream: the bottom of the sea.⁷

The logic was the same in reverse. A cabin built to keep pressure in could be redesigned to keep pressure out, and that insight became the bathyscaphe FNRS-2, which made unmanned dives in 1948.¹ In 1953 the next vessel, the Trieste, carried Auguste and Jacques to 3,150 metres off the coast of Italy.⁷ In 1960 Jacques took the Trieste to 10,916 metres in the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in the ocean.⁹

A family that keeps going to the edges

The story still has not ended. Auguste’s grandson Bertrand Piccard flew a balloon non-stop around the world in 1999, then circled the planet again in 2016 aboard Solar Impulse 2, an aircraft powered only by sunlight.⁸ And if Auguste’s face looks oddly familiar, there is a reason: Belgian cartoonist Hergé based Professor Calculus (Tournesol in the original French) of the Tintin books on him, explaining that he shrank the professor down because the real Piccard was too tall to fit in the comic panels.⁷

Ninety-five years on, the lesson of that May morning in Augsburg is less about altitude than about attitude. Build the thing that keeps you alive, go somewhere nobody has gone, write down what you find, and come home, even if home turns out to be a glacier in Austria.