VOYAGES BEYOND · 23 JAN 1960 · THE CHALLENGER DEEP
The lamp at the bottom of the world
On 23 January 1960 two men in a steel sphere reached the deepest point on Earth, and then the age turned its back on the sea and reached for the Moon instead. This is the timeline where the century chose to go down.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
23 JAN 1960 · THE BOTTOM
On 23 January 1960 two men rode a steel sphere to the deepest point on Earth. Jacques Piccard, a Swiss engineer, and Don Walsh, a United States Navy lieutenant, took the bathyscaphe Trieste down into the Challenger Deep. It is a slot in the Pacific's Mariana Trench, nearly eleven kilometers below the waves. The fall took almost five hours. Past nine thousand meters a window pane cracked and shook the whole hull, and they went on down. They rested twenty minutes on the pale ooze at the floor of the world, switched on a lamp, and looked out. The Navy had bought the Trieste in part to learn whether the trench might serve as a grave for radioactive waste, in water presumed empty of life.
In the timeline recorded here, the world does not look away from the pale fish in the lamp beam. A whole century turns downward to follow it.
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