Auguste Antoine Piccard (28 January 1884 – 24 March 1962) was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer, known for his record-breaking helium-filled balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Auguste was also known for his invention of the first bathyscaphe, FNRS-2, with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean's depths.

Biography Piccard and his twin brother Jean Felix Piccard were born in Basel, Switzerland on 28 January 1884.Showing an intense interest in science as a child, he attended the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, and became a professor of physics in Brussels at the Free University of Brussels in 1922, the same year his son Jacques Piccard was born.

In 1930, an interest in ballooning, and a curiosity about the upper atmosphere led him to design a spherical, pressurized aluminum gondola that would allow ascent to a great altitude without requiring a pressure suit.

On 27 May 1931, Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer took off from Augsburg, Germany, and reached a record altitude of 15,781 m (51,775 ft) (9.8 miles).

On 18 August 1932, launched from Dübendorf, Switzerland, Piccard and Max Cosyns made a second record-breaking ascent to 16,201 m (53,153 ft).

By 1937, he had designed the bathyscaphe, a small steel gondola built to withstand great external pressure.

Resuming work in 1945, he completed the bubble-shaped cockpit that maintained normal air pressure for a person inside the capsule even as the water pressure outside increased to over 46 MPa (6,700 psi).

This craft was named FNRS-2 and made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 before being given to the French Navy in 1950.

There, it was redesigned, and in 1954, it took a man safely down 4,176 m (13,701 ft).

Will Gregory's opera, Piccard in Space, premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 31 March 2011.

In 2016, the exploits of Piccard and his son Jacques were featured in a US television commercial for Hennessy cognac.