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Jacques Piccard, who died on Saturday [11/1/08] aged 86, was a deep-sea explorer, inventor and marine designer, and went deeper into the ocean than any other man.

The feat for which Piccard became best known was performed on January 23 1960, when Piccard and Lt Don Walsh, of the US Navy, travelled nearly seven miles to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, in the Pacific's Marianas Trench. The craft they used was a "bathyscaphe", which Piccard had built with his father, the physicist Auguste Piccard. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.

The bathyscaphe was a deep-sea ship with a cigar-shaped hull above a small, spherical cabin, and travelled using the principles of buoyancy and ballast.

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