towable bathyscaphe. In other words, we had come back to the con- 

 cept I had had in mind in 1938 and which I had given up, as I have 

 said above, because it was much too expensive. Immediately upon my 

 return from Dakar I had worked over the details and I have in my 

 possession a project representing a bathyscaphe of this type which I 

 drew up in Brussels in July 1949, that is to say, long before I had 

 entered the arsenal at Toulon (see Fig. 6). 



The characteristics of the Trieste will be seen immediately from this 

 plan: cylindrical float tapering at back and front, entrance chamber, 

 cabin attached to the float by four steel clamps, etc.; the mechanism 

 allowing the cabin hatchway to be set in place was modified later. I 

 had, besides, given a photostat of this plan to Captain Cousteau and 

 to M. Francis-Boeuf. From the moment it has been decided to design 

 the bathyscaphe so that it can be towed, its general form is ipso facto 

 determined. 



On my suggestion the French Navy adopted numerous devices 

 installed on the FNRS ^: release of the ballast-shot by magnetic 

 valve, control valve, trail-rope, screws, lateral lighting of the field of 

 vision by projectors, and many other things. The fact that we left 

 with the French Navy the Draeger apparatus and the Haenni (Swiss) 

 pressure gauges, etc., is secondary; but I insist on one point: the cabin 

 of the FNRS 2 constitutes the main part of the FNRS 3. Now it is 

 I who first drew the plans : I had then a perfect right to reproduce this 

 sphere and incorporate it in the Trieste. Its weight fixes the dimensions 

 to be given to a bathyscaphe. 



This is enough, it seems to me, to explain the similarities between 

 the FNRS 3 and the Trieste. Constructed on the same initial principle, 

 neither of them is a copy of the other. Just as is shown by the published 

 photographs (for example, Plate V of this book) the float of the FNRS 3 

 very much resembles the hull of a real ship, while I retained the float 

 of cylindrical form as in the plan of 1949, it being more solid, lighter 

 and less costly. In spite of that, and on account of the internal bilge 

 keel, it behaved very well on the high seas. Certain details will be found, 

 naturally, in both machines, as, for example, the tower, or the upper 

 hatch of the entrance chamber. They are normal practice in submarines 

 and, the two bathyscaphes having been constructed with the col- 

 laboration of submarine engineers, these similiarities in no way 

 prove that one of the two machines was copied from the other. A 

 biologist could say here that a cat's eye was not copied from a 



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