Nytimes, By: DIANE CARDWELL, 05/01/2013

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — When Bertrand Piccard was growing up in Switzerland, heady discussions about the boundless potential for human endeavor were standard fare.

His grandfather, a physicist and friend of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, had invented a special capsule so he and a partner could be first to reach the stratosphere in a balloon. His father, an engineer, helped design the submarine that made him and an American naval officer the first to plunge undersea to the earth’s crust.

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