balloon. No sight of it anywhere. Tysdell was three miles away, hidden
by clouds. Nevertheless she lifted her voice and sent forth a loud cry,
calling his name. Immediately the answer came, quite distinct. She
explained their peril, and asked Tysdell if he could come to them. He
said he would try, and questioned her where they were and what
wind-currents had borne them. Carlotta told Tysdell to what height he
must drop (she knew her own height by the barometer), and in a very few
minutes, being able to rise and fall as he pleased, he was near the two
other air-sailors, and got his balloon down by the lake-side in time to
help them ashore when they struck, as presently they did. The basket
splashed the water, then skipped along the surface under the drag of the
balloon, and was caught finally in the arms of a tree that reached out
from the bank. And the only harm done was the spoiling of Miss Aerial's
best frock!
Here was a case of conversation carried on easily between two balloons a
mile or so above the earth and three miles apart. But other experiments
made by Mme. Carlotta show that talking between balloons may go on over
much greater distances, a reach of nearly eight miles having been
accomplished on one occasion near Ogdensburg, New York. The explanation
of this phenomenon is perfectly simple. Each balloon, while it is
speaking, acts as a huge megaphone for the other, and each balloon,
while it is listening, acts as a huge sounding-board for the other; and
the tighter the balloons are kept under pressure of gas, the easier it
is to make these great silken horns (for such they are) throw forth and
receive the messages. It should be noted that this facility for voice
transmission does not exist at great heights because of the rarefied
air. At a mile above earth, however, this difficulty is not presented,
and it may be that a superior kind of wireless telegraphy will be
introduced some day by the use of talking balloons. Why not?
III
SOMETHING ABOUT EXPLOSIVE BALLOONS AND THE WONDERS OF HYDROGEN
ONE day the professor told me about some rainfall experiments with
balloons that he conducted years ago for the government. There was a
theory to be tested that loud explosions at a height will make the
clouds pour down water, and some gentlemen in the Department of
Agriculture were anxious to set off as loud an explosion as possible,
say a thousand feet up in the air. Professor Myers received this
commission, and proceeded at once to Washington with a gas-balloon
twelve feet in diameter.
"Don't you think that balloon is rather small?" asked one of the
gentlemen.
"No," said Myers; "I should call it rather large."
The other man shook his head. "I'm afraid it won't make noise enough to
test our theory."
"Well," said the professor (I can see his eyes twinkling), "if this
balloon doesn't make noise enough we'll get a bigger one."
They took the balloon some miles out of Washington (the professor
insisted on this), filled it with a terribly explosive mixture of oxygen
and hydrogen, and sent it up about a quarter of a mile, with an
anchor-rope holding it and a wire hanging down to a little hand-dynamo
or blasting-machine. As they made ready to turn this dynamo, Professor
Myers lay flat on his back, eyes glued to the balloon, confident but
curious. The handle turned, a spark jumped at the other end, and the
ball of silk seemed to swell enormously and then vanish with a flash of
a thousand shivers of silk. On this came the sound--a smashing and
tearing blast louder than any thunder-crash or roar of cannon. It
flattened men to the ground, killed hundreds of little fish in a stream
near by (bursting their air-bladders), knocked over a bowling-alley like
a house of cards, frightened cattle, and brought down rain in torrents
within eight minutes. The Agricultural gentlemen were more than
satisfied, and adopted the professor's system for extended rainfall
experiments--only these (for obvious reasons) were removed to the lonely
and arid plains of distant Texas.
"It wasn't much fun living down there," said the professor; "but we got
rain whenever we wanted it."
"What would happen," I inquired, "if a very large balloon filled with
this explosive mixture were set off over a crowded city?"
The professor shook his head in his awed contemplation of this
possibility. "It would work fearful destruction. If large enough (and
there is no difficulty in obtaining such a size), it would wipe out of
existence whole blocks of houses and the people in them. It would
destroy an army."
In the course of our talks I discovered a mystic side, very unexpected,
in the professor's nature. He used to speak of hydrogen, for instance,
with a certain almost reverence, as if it were something endowed with
life and consciousness, a powerful spirit, one would say, not merely a
commonplace product of chemistry, a gas from a retort.
[Illustration: A BALLOON-PICNIC AT THE AERONAUTS' HOME.]
"I have often wondered," he said one day, "as my basket has swept me
along, what there is in this silken bag above me that lifts me thus
over mountains and cities. I look up into the balloon through the open
mouth, and I see nothing; I hear nothing; I smell nothing. None of my
senses answer any call; yet somehow, strangely, in a way I can't
explain, I _perceive_ a presence. It would not be at all the same to me
were the balloon filled with air, though it would be the same to all my
senses. Again and again I have noted this thing, that hydrogen makes
itself known to men when they are near it."
He paused a moment as if to observe my attitude, to see if it were one
of scoffing. I made no remark, but begged him to go on.
"After all," he continued, "even the books allow to hydrogen properties
that are very amazing. It is the lightest of all things; it passes
through and beyond all things; it is the nearest approach we know of to
absolute nothing. Who can say that it is not related to the land of
nothing, to--" He hesitated.
"You mean?" said I.
"I don't know what I mean. I only wonder. Take this case that happened
at Ogdensburg, New York, during an ascension we made there. We had
filled the balloon with hydrogen, and were just ready to start when the
valve-cords that hang down inside the bag from the valve at the top
became twisted and drew up out of reach from the basket. In vain I tried
to get them free by poking at them with sticks and long-handled things;
the cords would not come down, and of course no sane man would make an
ascension with his balloon-valve beyond control. There was nothing for
it but to get inside that great gas-bag and undo the tangle with my
hands. So I called fifteen or twenty men to catch hold of the netting
and pull the struggling balloon down over me until I could reach the
cords. Then I--"
"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "Were you standing inside the balloon so
that you had to breathe hydrogen?"
The professor smiled. "I stood inside the balloon, but I breathed
nothing; I held my breath, which is one of the things I have practised.
Before I went inside I told my wife to note the time by her watch, and
if I did not come out before one hundred and twenty seconds had passed
to have the men drag me out. You see, I knew I could hold my breath one
hundred and twenty seconds, but no longer.
"Well, we carried out the plan, and I freed the cords in less than my
limit of time; then came the uncanny part of it--at least, it seemed so
to me. I had read that hydrogen will not transmit sound, but had never
tested it. It is true I had at various times taken hydrogen into my
lungs, but never had I tried to speak in hydrogen. Now was my chance,
and, with all my remaining breath I shouted as loud as I could inside
that balloon. Think of it; there were my wife and the men a few feet
distant, with only the thinnest tissue of silk between us, and a gas
that was like nothing. Yet my cry, that would have reached perhaps half
a mile in air, could not penetrate that little void. To those outside
the balloon it was as if I had not opened my lips. They heard nothing,
not even a whisper. I believe you might fire a cannon inside a bag of
hydrogen, and no faintest rustle of the discharge would reach your ears.
So, you see, a world of hydrogen would be a voiceless world."
"Did you say you have breathed hydrogen?" I asked.
"Yes; I have breathed it up to the danger-point. I know all the
sensations. There is first a mild exhilaration, then a sense of
sickening and head-throbbing, and finally a delicious languor that leads
into stupor. When you get there it is time to stop. In making
ascensions we have to be very careful not to breathe too much gas from
the balloon-neck which hangs open over the basket. More than one
aeronaut has been gradually overcome without realizing that he was in
danger."
The professor went on to tell of other singular things about this subtle
gas, notably that, speaking within limits, the higher you want a balloon
to rise, the _less_ hydrogen you must put in it. If you fill a balloon
full of hydrogen it will rise to no great height (and is very apt to
burst), since the gas has no space to expand in, and the way to keep a
balloon rising is to make it expand more and more as it goes up, each
foot of added volume displacing a foot of the air-ocean and to that
extent adding buoyancy.
"General Hazen and I," said the professor, "once planned that some day,
when we got an appropriation, we would go up in a balloon having a
capacity of, say, forty thousand cubic feet, but carrying at the ground
only ten thousand cubic feet of hydrogen--in other words, in a shrunken,
quarter-filled balloon. Of course as we rose and the air became rarefied
this hydrogen would expand against the decreasing air-pressure, and at a
height of two miles our original ten thousand feet of gas might have
swelled to twenty thousand feet, at five miles to thirty thousand feet,
and so on. The last ten thousand feet of expansion would have brought us
to no one knows what height, but certainly, we calculated, to the
greatest height ever reached by a balloonist."
He explained that the balloon record of seven miles claimed for
Glaischer and Coxwell, the English aeronauts, is not reliable, since the
barometer used in that famous ascension (it was made at Wolverhampton,
England, in 1862) could not register above five miles, and what was
accomplished beyond that height is matter of pure conjecture and must be
less than might be done by the Hazen-Myers plan, since Glaischer's
balloon (by a serious oversight) was started on its flight nearly full
of hydrogen, instead of nearly empty.
"Oh," exclaimed the professor, with regretful look, "why don't some of
our very rich men think of these things!"
IV
THE STORY OF A BOY WHO RAN AWAY IN A BIG BALLOON
ONE of the professor's hobbies is that gas-balloons are better and safer
than the hot-air kind, although the latter cost less to operate. Your
hot-air balloon goes up with a rush, but comes down again as soon as it
cools; and in the coming down lies the danger. A gas-balloon, on the
other hand, stays up as long as you keep gas in it, and the professor's
secret of varnishing holds gas like a trap.
As to the ordinary use of hot-air balloons for parachute dropping, the
professor has only condemnation. A parachute, says he, is a sin and a
disgrace--a thing to be prohibited by law. The parachute kills more
people every year (the professor still is talking) than many a battle,
and kills them in unpleasant ways: drops them on live electric wires,
which shock them to death; drops them in lakes, where they are drowned,
or in the ocean, where they are eaten by sharks; drops them in trees,
where they catch by their coat-collars and choke to death; drops them on
sharp railings, which spear them through; drops them--but the
professor's list (backed by statistics, be it said) is too long and
gruesome. It is only fair to add that I have a friend, Leo Stevens, a
professional aeronaut, who has made thousands of drops from hot-air
balloons and claims that nothing is safer than a parachute, and says he
can steer one in its downward sailing so as to avoid dangerous
landing-places, although he does admit numerous hair-breadth escapes, as
when he dropped from a parachute two miles out at sea, this at Long
Branch in 1898, and was only saved by his life-preserver and the courage
of some fishermen, or again when De Ive, his partner in ballooning
ventures, dropped with him on one occasion from a big balloon (one
parachute was suspended on either side), and landed in Lake Canandaigua
and was drowned. "Oh, there's no doubt a man takes chances on a
parachute," said Stevens, "but I like it."
There is a singular thing about parachutes, Stevens contends, not
sufficiently considered by Professor Myers in his experiments. The
professor, with his usual thoroughness, has tested all shapes and kinds
of parachutes by dropping them from a captive balloon with a sand-bag
hitched on instead of a man. The dropping was done by a fuse which would
burn the supporting rope and at a given moment set the parachute free,
just as a man under the parachute would cut it free. And in a large
number of cases the parachute did not open in time to save the sand-bag
man from destruction on the ground.
"That proves," argues the professor, "that parachutes are extremely
dangerous."
"Nothing of the sort," answers Leo Stevens; "it only proves that there
is a big difference between a sand-bag man and a real man. The sand-bag
is dead weight, and the man is live weight. A parachute will open for
the one where it won't open for the other."
"Why will it," queries the professor, "if the man and the sand-bag weigh
the same?"
[Illustration: "STEVENS CAME DOWN ONCE WITH A PARACHUTE TWO MILES OUT IN
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN--AND WAS PROMPTLY RESCUED."]
"I don't know why, but it will," Stevens insists. "If what you say
were true I'd be dead long ago, and my wife, and all my assistants."
I well remember my first visit to aeronaut Stevens at his little balloon
establishment on Third Avenue, a rambling, go-as-you-please attic, with
things strewn about anyhow, lengths of balloon-cloth hanging from
rafters for the varnish to dry, crinkly yellow segments of balloons
heaped near a sewing-machine that was stitching them into spheres, rows
of hot-air balloons from past seasons ranged along on shelves in tight
bundles, models of flying-machines, all kinds of parachutes, including
one in red, white, and blue, made to take up a dog, and in various dusty
corners photographs of Leo Stevens walking a tight rope, Leo Stevens
rising to the clouds over waving multitudes, Leo Stevens (and his big
umbrella) soaring down to earth from the height of twenty steeples,
swinging with dancing-master grace from the bar of his trapeze. I liked
this place for the good-natured faces of "Kid" Benjamin, who was
scooping cold salmon out of a can when I came in, and a young lady with
long eyelashes, who was running the machine.
Leo Stevens was out, said this young lady; he was seeing some patent
lawyers about his new air-ship, but she was Mrs. Stevens, and could she
do anything for me? I asked various questions, and she answered them
from a wide practical knowledge. She had made dozens of balloons and
parachutes--yes, and used them, too. It was "Kid" Benjamin who offered
this latter information, remarking that she was "grand on a parachute."
Mrs. Stevens smiled, and explained that she had never made an ascension
in her life until the previous summer, and then only because her husband
was in a fix through the failure of another woman to appear. A balloon
race had been advertised between two lady aeronauts, and when the time
came one of them, Miss Nina Madison, was missing. Rather than have the
thing a failure and a big crowd disappointed, Mrs. Stevens agreed to go
up. She would take Miss Nina's place and race the professional. And she
did it, and she won the race.
"You see," she said, "I didn't feel nervous as another woman might,
because I'd been living with balloons for years. Besides they hitched me
fast to the parachute ropes so I couldn't have fallen if I'd wanted to.
It was lovely going up; everybody said we made a beautiful ascension,
and the two balloons kept so close together that the other lady and I
were talking all the way. At last, when we were up about three thousand
feet, she called out that my balloon was settling and for me to cut. But
I called back: 'Cut yourself,' and, sure enough, she did in a minute,
and I watched her parachute open out and sink and get smaller and
smaller, until she reached the ground. A few minutes later, when I saw
my balloon had really settled, I cut, too. H-o-o-o, what a sensation!
You know those awful dreams where you fall and fall? Well, it's just
like that for two or three seconds, until your parachute fills wide and
springs you up against the ropes. Then you sail down, down, with a
lovely easy motion until you get close to the ground. But look out for
the landing. Once I struck in a treetop. And you're liable to come down
on houses or anything."
"You're liable to come down in the middle of a lake," put in "Kid"
Benjamin.
"Do you go up?" said I to the "Kid," whose hands and face showed black
smears from painting balloon-cloth. He was certainly not over eighteen.
"Do I?" he answered, with a grin. "I made more'n twenty ascensions and
drops last summer."
"He's the one," said Mrs. Stevens, "who carried that boy up hanging from
the parachute ropes. Don't you remember? At Coney Island? The boy was
helping hold the balloon, and when she started his foot got caught."
"And he went up hanging by his foot?"
The "Kid" nodded. "Yep, stuck fast in the rigging by one shoe. As I sat
on the trapeze bar there was that boy forty feet above me kicking and
yelling. Say, you'd never guess what he was yelling about."
"I suppose he was afraid?"
The "Kid" shook his head. "No, sir; he didn't seem to mind the eight
hundred feet we'd gone up, not a bit. What worried him was sixty cents
in pennies and nickels that had spilled out of his pants pockets while
he was upside down."
Then the "Kid" explained how he postponed his parachute drop on this
occasion and got down safely, boy and all, by letting the balloon cool
off and gradually settle to the ground.
"Isn't a parachute pretty long when it hangs down?" I asked.
"Certainly. It's thirty-five feet from where she hitches on t' the
balloon to where you sit on the bar. That's length o' ropes and length
o' cloth both."
"Then, how can you cut her loose from 'way down on the bar?"
"I'll tell you," put in Mrs. Stevens. "You just pull a tape that hangs
down inside the parachute from a cutaway-block at the parachute head.
The holding-rope passes through that block, and there's a knife-blade in
the block over the rope. The tape pulls the knife-blade down, and away
you go. It's one of my husband's inventions." She was plainly very
proud of her husband.
Presently entered Leo Stevens himself, a surprisingly young man for such
a veteran, scarcely over thirty, the explanation being that he began
ballooning as a mere child. Before he was ten he had gained some mastery
of slack-wire feats, and at thirteen he was known over the country as
Prince Leo, a marvel of the air, in black and gold, making the fortune
of some gentlemen who exploited him.
His arrival recalled the object of my visit, which was to get from him
some practical ideas for balloon and parachute experiments on a small
scale, the sort of thing boys might undertake in their own backyards;
and, on learning this, Stevens caught my idea at once. He knew just what
I wanted, and was glad to help me. He liked boys himself, and we settled
down forthwith to a consideration of segments and materials and
dimensions and, after a little planning and measuring, he had the
problem solved.
"A hot-air balloon is the easiest and cheapest for boys to make," said
Stevens, "and it goes up with more of a rush than a gas balloon. So
we'll tell them how to make a hot-air balloon. I remember a boys'
balloon picnic that I got up one summer at Chautauqua Lake while I was
making ascensions there. What fun those boys did have! We sent up a
kitten in a strawberry basket, strapped fast, you know, so she couldn't
fall out, and the basket hung from the parachute by a time fuse that
burned loose about a thousand feet up, and down came the whole thing,
parachute, kitten, and all, sailing beautifully and landing as easily as
you please. It never hurt the kitten at all. But the balloon drifted
nearly a mile away across a swamp and stuck in a big tree. What a time
those boys had chasing it and climbing after it and slopping home with
it after dark through the swamp, with lanterns and torches! I suppose
they got well spanked, a good many of them, but boys don't mind."
"How big was this balloon?"
[Illustration]
"About eleven feet high, inflated; that's a good size. I mean eleven
feet high inflated, but the segments must be cut out eighteen feet long
to allow for the curve. See," and he made a sketch of a single segment.
"There must be fourteen segments like this, each one eighteen feet long
and two feet wide at the widest part, then tapering to a point at one
end, the top, and to a width of five inches at the other end, the mouth,
which must be left open. These segments are made from ordinary sheets of
tissue paper, first pasted into long sheets (use ordinary starch paste)
and then cut out after the pattern. Then the fourteen segments must be
pasted together lengthwise along the edges, and they will form a balloon
with enough lifting power to take up a parachute and small passenger,
say a kitten or a puppy."
"We must tell them how to fill this balloon with hot air," I suggested.
"That's so," said Stevens. "Well, it's very simple. They must dig a
trench, in the yard or somewhere, five feet long and one foot deep, with
a hole dug at one end for a fire. Then they must cover over the trench
with pieces of tin and spread dirt over that, and boards over all; this
is for a good draught. Then they must make a fire in the hole at one end
of the trench out of barrel-staves or anything that will give a hot
flame, and toward the last they might throw on a little kerosene.
That's exactly the way we make our fires for big ascensions.
"At the other end of the trench they must fix a length of stove-pipe
sticking straight up out of the draught-hole into the mouth of the
balloon and four or five boys must stand around on fences and boxes to
hold the side of the balloon away from the fire which will shoot high
above the chimney. Many a big hot-air balloon has been burned up that
way on a windy day, and in our ascensions we have dozens of ropes sewn
all over the balloon sides; we call them wind guys, so that men can pull
the cloth away from the fire while it's filling. Say, talking about boys
getting spanked, I must tell you a story."
The story was from his own boyish experience--how he made his first trip
to the clouds at the age of twelve, and set a whole city talking. This
was the city of Cleveland, Ohio, where on a certain Sunday afternoon
there was to be a balloon ascension at the great pleasure park. Young
Stevens, of course, was present, wild with excitement, for balloons had
been in his thoughts and dreams ever since he could remember. He pressed
forward through the crowd and, with bulging eyes, watched the aeronaut
arrange his barrels and pipes for the hydrogen-making, danced with
delight as the great bag swelled and struggled, and finally was bitter
in disappointment when the police appeared suddenly with orders to
prevent the ascension, because the day was Sunday.
Then, while the balloonist was protesting and pleading, Stevens formed
his plan. He would go up himself instead of the man. There was the
balloon all ready, held by a single rope. There was the basket swinging
impatiently, empty, and he more impatient than the basket. Quickly he
turned to a boy who was with him. "Say, I'll tell you what. You get a
knife and cut that rope, and I'll go up." But the boy demurred. Anyhow,
he had no knife. So away dashed Stevens, and returned in a jiffy with a
knife, taken from his father's shop. It was a sharp one.
"There," panted the boy. "Now, cut her quick, soon as I climb in."
The people about were so occupied with the parley growing warm between
balloonist and police that few paid attention when a little shaver in
knickerbockers crept close to the basket and then slipped over its side.
But the next minute nine thousand people paid considerable attention and
shouted their surprise and delight as the eager balloon suddenly shot
skyward, a small white face peering down and trying not to look
frightened. The knife had done its work, and the subject of dispute,
abruptly removed, was presently soaring half a mile above the city,
drifting with the wind.