Bathyscaphe Trieste
Trieste is a Swiss-designed, Italian-built deep-diving research bathyscaphe, which with its crew of two reached a record maximum depth of about , in the deepest known part of the Earth's oceans, the Challenger Deep, in the Mariana Trench near Guam in the Pacific. On 23 January 1960, Jacques Piccard (son of the boat's designer Auguste Piccard) and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh achieved the goal of Project Nekton.
Diving watch
The design and actual availability of divers' watches certified for more than is not explicable solely by practical diving needs.
The diving depth record for off-shore (saturation) diving was achieved in 1988 by a team of professional divers of the Comex S.A., industrial deep-sea diving company performing pipe line connection exercises at a depth of of seawater (msw/fsw) in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Hydra 8 programme. In 1992, a Comex diver achieved a record of of seawater in an on-shore hyperbaric chamber as part of the Hydra 10 programme. A hydrogen-helium-oxygen gas mixture was used as breathing gas. The watches used during this scientific record dives were Rolex Sea-Dwellers with a depth rating and these feats were used in advertising.
The complexity, medical problems and physiological limits such as those imposed by high pressure nervous syndrome and accompanying high costs of professional saturation diving to extreme depths and the development of deep water atmospheric diving suits and remotely operated underwater vehicles in offshore oilfield drilling and production effectively nixed the need for ever deeper non-atmospheric manned intervention in the ocean.