soucoupe

English edit

Etymology edit

From French soucoupe, ellipsis of soucoupe plongeante (“diving saucer”).

Noun edit

soucoupe (plural soucoupes)

A type of small submarine designed to hold two people.
- 1964, Westways, volume 56, Automobile Club of Southern California, page 21, column 2:
  Dr. Francis P. Shepard, Professor of Submarine Geology, who has been studying the canyons from the surface for thirty years, remarked: “I learned more in my three dives in the soucoupe.”
- 1965, Oceanus, volume 12, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:
  In the meantime suspended underwater cameras and deep submersibles, both the bathyscaphs ‘Trieste’ and ‘Archimede’ and the soucoupe of Cousteau have been employed extensively in attempts to identify various scattering layers.
- 1984, Zdeněk Kukal, Atlantis in the Light of Modern Research, Elsevier Science Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 48:
  The soucoupes are easily manageable and movable. Their crews can stop them anywhere and even collect samples from the sea floor. The soucoupe uses two water jets to move horizontally.
- 1986, Harold E. Edgerton, Sonar Images, Prentice-Hall, →ISBN, page 54:
  An excellent TV movie was made, including a visit to the wreck in his underwater soucoupe. A passenger in the soucoupe was Sheila MacBeth Mitchell of Edinburgh, Scotland, who was an 18-year-old nurse aboard the Britannic at the time of its sinking.
- 1990, Submersible Vehicle Systems Design, Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, →ISBN, page 54, column 2:
  The 1950’s also saw the development of underwater systems by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, including his soucoupe (diving saucer), Denice, which was one of the first shallow-diving submersibles to be used in the United States during the mid-1960’s (Fig. 9). The soucoupe could take two people to depths of 300 m (1000 ft).