History | |
---|---|
Switzerland | |
Name | F.-A. Forel |
Namesake | François-Alphonse Forel |
Builder | Giovanola Frères SA |
Launched | December 1978 |
Out of service | 2005 |
Status | La Maison de la Rivière |
General characteristics | |
Type | Submersible |
Displacement | 11 t (11 long tons; 12 short tons) |
Length | 7.54 m (24.7 ft) |
Beam | 2.12 m (7.0 ft) |
Height | 2.30 m (7.5 ft) |
Propulsion | electric motors, batteries |
Speed | 4 km/h (2.5 mph) |
Crew | 3 |
Armament | None |
The F.-A. Forel was a manned underwater submersible built in 1978 by Jacques Piccard. Built at the Giovanola fabrication plant in Monthey and launched in Ouchy (Lausanne), it was one of the four submarines that have explored the depths of Lake Geneva, along with the Auguste Piccard and the two Mirs.
It is named after the Swiss Limnologist FA Forel.
The F.-A. Forel achieved a total of 3,600 dives with more than 6,000 passengers between 1979 and 2005. Many of them were done in Lake Geneva, although the submersible visited many other lakes such as Lake Neuchâtel, Lake Constance, Lake Zurich, Lake Lucerne, Lake Maggiore, Lake Bracciano and Lake Lugano. It also visited the Strait of Messina where it reached a depth of 560 metres. Although most of the missions were scientific, the submersible was also used for legal inquiries, industrial observations and tourism.
The ship is currently on display at La Maison de la Rivière in Tolochenaz. [1]
Trieste is a Swiss-designed, Italian-built deep-diving research bathyscaphe which reached a record depth of about 10,911 metres (35,797 ft) in the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench near Guam in the Pacific. On 23 January 1960, Jacques Piccard and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh achieved the goal of Project Nekton. It was the first crewed vessel to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
Auguste Antoine Piccard was a Swiss physicist, inventor and explorer known for his record-breaking hydrogen balloon flights, with which he studied the Earth's upper atmosphere. Piccard 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.
Lake Geneva is a deep lake on the north side of the Alps, shared between Switzerland and France. It is one of the largest lakes in Western Europe and the largest on the course of the Rhône. Sixty per cent of the lake belongs to Switzerland and forty per cent to France.
François-Alphonse Forel was a Swiss physician and scientist who pioneered the study of lakes, and is thus considered the founder, and the Father of limnology. Limnology is the study of bodies of fresh water and their biological, chemical, and physical features.
A bathyscaphe is a free-diving self-propelled deep-sea submersible, consisting of a crew cabin similar to a bathysphere, but suspended below a float rather than from a surface cable, as in the classic bathysphere design.
Forel is a municipality in the Swiss canton of Vaud, located in the district of Lavaux-Oron.
Jacques Piccard was a Swiss oceanographer and engineer, known for having developed underwater submarines for studying ocean currents. In the Challenger Deep, he and Lt. Don Walsh of the United States Navy were the first people to explore the deepest known part of the world's ocean, and the deepest known location on the surface of Earth's crust, the Mariana Trench, located in the western North Pacific Ocean.
Giovanola Frères SA was a prominent steel manufacturing company based in Monthey, Switzerland. It was known for building electrical power stations, water storage tanks, pipelines, boilers, highway bridges, submarines, ski lifts and many other steel products. The company started out as a small metal forging shop, founded by Joseph Giovanola in 1888. Joseph Sr. died in 1904, and the company was taken over by his sons, the eldest of which, Joseph Jr., was just 17 years of age. By 1930 the company had grown to the point that it required a new factory which was constructed in Monthey.
The Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine Bridge–Tunnel is a highway bridge–tunnel running over and beneath the Saint Lawrence River. It connects the Montreal borough of Mercier–Hochelaga-Maisonneuve with the south shore of the river at Longueuil, Quebec.
Mir were a self-propelled class of deep-submergence vehicle. The project was initially developed by the USSR Academy of Sciences along with Design Bureau Lazurith. Later two vehicles were ordered from Finland. The Mir-1 and Mir-2, delivered in 1987, were designed and built by the Finnish company Rauma-Repola's Oceanics subsidiary. The project was carried out under the supervision of constructors and engineers of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology.
Minerve was a diesel–electric submarine in the French Navy, launched in 1961. The vessel was one of 11 of the Daphné class. In January 1968, Minerve was lost with all hands in bad weather while returning to her home port of Toulon.
The FNRS-2 was the first bathyscaphe. It was created by Auguste Piccard. Work started in 1937 but was interrupted by World War II. The deep-diving submarine was finished in 1948. The bathyscaphe was named after the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS), the funding organization for the venture. FNRS also funded the FNRS-1 which was a balloon that set a world altitude record, also built by Piccard. The FNRS-2 set world diving records, besting those of the bathyspheres, as no unwieldy cable was required for diving. It was in turn bested by a more refined version of itself, the bathyscaphe Trieste.
The arrondissement of Pontarlier is an arrondissement of France in the Doubs department in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region. It has 149 communes. Its population is 112,913 (2016), and its area is 2,050.5 km2 (791.7 sq mi).
Messery is a commune in the Haute-Savoie department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France.
Rivière-à-Pierre is a municipality of the Portneuf Regional County Municipality, in the administrative region of the Capitale-Nationale. This area of the Laurentian Mountains is part of the Batiscanie and has more than 200 lakes. The village of Rivière-à-Pierre was developed on each side of the river that bears its name. Rivière-à-Pierre is the second largest municipality in the Portneuf RCM in terms of area.
Vendémiaire was a Pluviôse-class submarine built for the French Navy in the late 1900s. She was sunk with all hands when she was rammed by the pre-dreadnought battleship Saint Louis on 8 June 1912 while on maneuvers off the Casquets in the English Channel.
The France–Switzerland border is 572 km (355 mi) long. Its current path is mostly the product of the Congress of Vienna of 1815, with the accession of Geneva, Neuchâtel and Valais to the Swiss Confederation, but it has since been modified in detail, the last time being in 2002. Although most of the border, marked with border stones, is unguarded, several checkpoints remain staffed, most notably on busy roads.
The Hôtel des Trois Couronnes is a hotel in Vevey, Switzerland. It was built in 1842 on the ruins of the "Belles Truches" castle, built in 1376 (1). This building once destroyed left the place to a hotel built by Philippe Franel and inaugurated on May 3, 1842 (3) under the name "Hôtel Monnet" (3), the name of its owner back then. Gabriel Monnet named it "Trois Couronnes" because he owned an inn of the same name, also situated on Vevey's Rue du Simplon (4).
The Rouge-Matawin Wildlife Reserve is a Quebec Wildlife Reserve located to the north of Mont-Tremblant National Park, in Quebec, Canada.
The canton of Frasne is an administrative division of the Doubs department, eastern France. It was created at the French canton reorganisation which came into effect in March 2015. Its seat is in Frasne.
Coordinates: Earth 46°29′35″N06°28′46″E / 46.49306°N 6.47944°E