He pioneered plastic and Mylar balloons. In 1962, he set a new altitude record for a second-class free flight balloon, climbing to 17,000 feet. On 13 April 1963, he and Ed Yost were the first people to cross the English Channel in a Hot Air Balloon. He also promoted ballooning as a sport and designed balloons to that end, through his company Piccard Balloons.
Don held a number of patents for balloon manufacture.
He took 1st place in the US National Hot Air Balloon Race in Reno Nevada in 1965.
Don was World Renown as a Balloonist.
Family Biography:
Information taken from Wikipedia and from research I did on the family.
Auguste Piccard (Don's Uncle)
Auguste Antoine Piccard (28 January 1884 – 24 March 1962) was a Swiss physicist, balloonist, hydronaut, explorer and inventor. known for his record-breaking helium filled balloon flights, with which he studied Earth's upper atmosphere and cosmic rays, and for his invention of the first bathyscope FNRS-2 with which he made a number of unmanned dives in 1948 to explore the ocean's depths.
Jean Felix Piccard(Don's Father)
(January 28, 1884 in Basel Switzerland – January 28, 1963 inMinneapolis Minnesota , also known as Jean Piccard, was a Swiss-born American chemist, engineer, professor and high-altitude balloonist. He invented clustered high-altitude balloons, and with his wife Jeannette, the plastic balloon. Piccard's inventions and co-inventions are used in balloon flight, aircraft and spacecraft.Jean Piccard was the co-pilot for his wife Jeannette on the third and final voyage of the Century of Progress. The largest balloon in the world was conceived for him to fly at the World's Fair in 1933 but was flown there by US Navy pilots who were licensed. After this flight he created the liquid oxygen converter when the liquid failed to vaporize on descent after the cabin doors were open.[4 Piccard developed a frost-free window, that was used on this flight and later by the Navy and Air Force in the B-24 Liberator orB-26 Marauder. He used blasting caps and TNT for releasing the balloon at launch and for remote release of external ballast from inside the sealed cabin. This was the first use of pyrotechnics for remote-controlled actuating devices in aircraft, an unpopular, revolutionary idea at the time. Later his student Robert R. Gilruth, who became the director of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, approved and used them in spacecraft.
Jeannette Ridlon Piccard (Don's mother)
(January 5, 1895 – May 17, 1981) was an American high-altitude balloonist She held the women's altitude record for nearly three decades, and according to several contemporaneous accounts was regarded as the first woman in space.
She was the first licensed female balloon pilot in the U.S., and the first woman to fly to the stratosphere. Accompanied by her husband,Jean—a member of the Piccard family of balloonists and the twin brother of Auguste Piccard—she reached a height of 10.9 miles (17.5 km) during a record-breaking flight over Lake Erie on October 23, 1934, retaining control of the balloon for the entire flight. After her husband's death in 1963, she worked as a consultant to the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center for several years, talking to the public about NASA's work, and was posthumously inducted into the International Space Hall of Famein 1998.
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