Jacques Piccard, 86 | Deep-sea explorer

Jacques Piccard, 86, a scientist and underwater explorer who plunged deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, died Saturday at his Lake Geneva home in Switzerland.

Exploration was a tradition in the Piccard family. Jacques' physicist father, Auguste, was the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere, and his son, Bertrand, was the first man to fly a balloon nonstop around the world.

Jacques Piccard helped his father invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel that allows humans to descend to great depths.

On Jan. 23, 1960, Mr. Piccard and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh took the vessel into the Pacific's Mariana Trench and dived to a depth of 35,800 feet - nearly seven miles below sea level. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.

"By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole," Mr. Piccard said of the dive. "We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."

After the dive, Mr. Piccard continued to research the deep seas and worked for NASA.

He also built four mid-depth submarines - or mesoscaphes - including the first tourist submarine. During the Swiss National Exhibition in 1964, he took 33,000 passengers into the depths of Lake Geneva. He continued taking high school children into the lake well into his 70s. - AP