The deep-diving record went back to France last week. At 10:09 one morning, on the Atlantic 160 miles off Dakar, the French navy's bathyscaphe FNRS 3* submerged. Three hours later she settled on the bottom, 4,050 meters (13,287 ft.) down, beating Professor Auguste Piccard's record (TIME, Oct. 12) by 900 meters.
The FNRS 3, designed and built by the French navy at Toulon, is much like Piccard's Italian-built bathyscaphe, the Trieste. Her submarine-shaped hull, filled with gasoline (lighter than water) supports a sphere two meters in diameter with stainless-steel walls 3.5 in. thick....
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