'The Piccards' 2016 FE Hennessy Commercial

"The Piccards", the fourth installment of the brand’s award-winning Wild Rabbit advertising campaign. 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. His son, Jacques Piccard In the Challenger Deep, along with 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.
On May 27, 1931 Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer floated from Augsburg, Germany, and reached a record altitude of 15,781 meters or 51,775' which is 9.8 miles sky high in the stratosphere. (FAI Record File Number 10634) During this flight, Piccard and Kipfer became the first human beings to enter the stratosphere, and were able to gather substantial data on the upper atmosphere, as well as measure cosmic rays. Their achievement was documented in this Popular Science Monthly article. An anonymous writer for the official website of Auguste's grandson, Bertrand Piccard, claims that grandfather was the first to witness the shape of the earth with his own eyes. From article: "Through portholes, the observers saw the earth through copper-colored, then bluish, haze. It seemed a flat disk with upturned edges. At the ten-mile level the sky appeared a deep, dark blue."