EXPLORATION OF THE ATMOSPHERE
DISCOVERIES AS VALUABLE TO THE FUTURE AS THOSE MADE BY COLUMBUS
An entire new world is coming within the range of man’s vision. Its
possibilities for adding to the health and happiness of mankind are
almost limitless. The geographic poles have been conquered and the
jungles of Africa traversed; and deep borings have been made into the
bowels of the earth until heat has arrested further progress. The
further exploration of both regions is of the utmost importance to
the coming age. It is not at all visionary to assume that the heat of
the earth’s interior in near time will furnish the power necessary to
do the drudgery of mankind, give warmth and light to habitations, and
operate transportation systems; and the New World Above offers pure,
electrified, and highly stimulating air into which helium-inflated
dirigible balloons will sail, and in which they will remain not only
days but weeks or longer, with their multitudes of people.
While the use of kites and balloons in sending automatic
meteorological instruments far aloft has revealed more of the wonders
of this hitherto uncharted wilderness of cold and partial or total
darkness than the general public is aware of, only the outer fringes
of the mysterious regions above the clouds and the storms have been
penetrated.
When the manufacture of helium, a noncombustible gas almost as light
as hydrogen, becomes more general, as seems imminent in the United
States, the dirigible balloon may successfully compete with the
railroads in the carrying of long-distance passengers. The recent
loss of over forty lives in England by the collapse of the dirigible
ZR2 probably was largely if not entirely due to the explosion and
fire of the hydrogen gas with which the ship was inflated.
A decade ago, in a number of Chautauqua lectures, the writer
invariably was greeted with looks of incredulity when he prophesied
that within ten years travelers of the air would take breakfast at
the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and afternoon tea on the banks
of the Thames. And yet the ocean already has been crossed by an
aëroplane in continuous flight, and in the near future it is highly
probable that aërial navigation will be safer than travel by rail
or automobile. The hitherto inaccessible parts of the earth will
be sailed over and closely scrutinized, while travelers enjoy the
comforts that heretofore have been associated with Pullman service.
In 1862 the English meteorologist Glashier ascended in a balloon to
about the same height as that attained by Major R. W. Schroeder,
U. S. A., who achieved a more difficult feat when he flew in an
aëroplane to over 36,000 feet. And at Dayton, Ohio, celebrated as the
home of the Wright brothers, on September 28, 1921, Lieutenant John
A. Macready, U. S. A., reached the unprecedented height of 40,800
feet. These are the extreme altitudes to which human beings ever have
attained, but they are only the beginning of explorations into a vast
and largely unknown and extremely cold region,—one in which darkness
increases with elevation until at the outer limits of the atmosphere
no illumination whatever exists.
The high eastward wind and 69° below zero encountered by Schroeder
are conditions that already had been revealed by the work done
at the research station of the Weather Bureau, at Mount Weather,
Virginia, and at other stations in this country and in Europe, by
the sending up of instruments unaccompanied by observers. Under
the direction of the writer the Weather Bureau liberated numerous
small hydrogen gas balloons in the Rocky Mountain region, to which
were attached automatic instruments registering the temperature,
pressure, and the hygrometric conditions. As they came eastward
in the atmospheric drift that always prevails above the storms in
the middle latitudes they attained to great altitudes, one balloon
reaching 19.1 miles, the greatest altitude ever reached at that time
by the appliances of man. Ultimately the balloons would explode as
they expanded under the influence of decreasing air pressure and the
case of instruments would descend slowly under a parachute designed
to open at the right moment. The barometer traced a line on a paper
cylinder revolving by clock works, as did the thermometer. The
thermogram gave the temperature that corresponded with the varying
elevation shown by the tracing of the barogram.
In 1898, twelve hundred observations were made with kites by the
observers of the Weather Bureau at seventeen stations selected
by the writer, during the six warm months from May to October. It
was surprising to find the temperature often losing as much as
fifteen degrees with the first thousand feet ascent during middays
of extremely hot periods. The average decrease in temperature per
thousand feet elevation for all stations for all times, and at all
elevations up to 5280, was 4°.
For over five years kites were used nearly every day in the year at
Mount Weather to carry instruments aloft to heights ranging from
two to four and one half miles, and at times to keep the apparatus
up during all hours of the day, so that a comparison could be made
of the difference between day and night temperatures. There is but
little difference between midday and midnight at only a few thousand
feet above the earth.
Few are aware that the rectangular kite of the weather man was the
forerunner of the aëroplane of the aviator. In 1903, while directing
wireless experiments in the sending of messages at Roanoke Island,
North Carolina, the writer saw the Wright brothers, or their
representatives, lying flat upon the lower planes of what appeared
to be Weather Bureau kites and gliding in the air from the top of
the sand dunes. This was the beginning of real flight by man.
The ingenuity of the Wrights transformed the weather man’s kite,
strengthened it, took out the ends, hitched on a rudder, and when the
petrol engine had developed sufficient power with a given weight,
installed it, and flew.
In the future the meteorologist and the aviator will be closely
associated. With a sufficient number of weather observations made by
aviators simultaneously and well distributed over the United States
it will be possible to construct a daily weather map on some high
level—say the three-mile level—similar to the map now based upon
sea level. The pressure, temperature, wind direction, clouds, and
rainfall would be recorded and charted for the upper region clear
across the continent. Three miles is about halfway to the top of
cyclonic storms and probably in the region of greatest activity. More
accurate forecasts would be possible by the study of this additional
weather chart. This coöperation of the bird man and the weather man
in studying the geography of the new air world will mark an epoch in
meteorological science as far-reaching in its consequences as were
the discovery of the barometer by Torricelli and the uncovering of
the principles of the thermometer by Galileo, the former of which
was not known until more than twenty-three years after the landing
of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Thus swiftly does the mind of man
to-day explore the hidden recesses of nature’s mysteries, and with
each conquest carry itself to a higher realm of existence.
In the not distant future, more storm warnings may be issued by the
Weather Bureau for ships of the air than for those of the sea, for
the navigation of the air must play an increasing and important part
in the coming activities of the world. Science is becoming so skilled
in the harnessing of the forces of nature to man’s desires and in
the development of mechanical appliances, that it is reasonable to
anticipate the possibility that long-distance travel over land or
ocean ultimately will be almost entirely confined to the air.
As the result of the explorations of the atmosphere made by the
institution at Mount Weather there was ready for our fighting air men
at the front, immediately on our entry into the World War, a fund of
useful information concerning a region that but a short time before
was entirely uncharted. The instruments carried by the exploring
kites and balloons had keen scientific eyes and they recorded on
clock-timed cylinders what they saw. Thus did the air pilot know
much about the direction and the force of the wind that he would
encounter as he rose, the altitude where he would pass above clouds,
the degree of cold that he would encounter, etc. He was told that the
temperature would fall about one degree for each three hundred feet
of his ascent until he reached the top of the storm stratum at six
or seven miles, and that if he could reach that altitude he would
observe a most wonderful phenomenon: the temperature no longer would
fall with gain in altitude; he would enter a cold but an equally
heated stratum, without finding any temperatures lower than were
encountered upon entering the region, which is always about seventy
degrees below zero.
If the aërial explorer could stop his ship and keep it at an altitude
of about one and one half miles for twenty-four hours he would be
startled to find that the coolest time of the period was during the
daytime, not during the night, as he had expected to find it.
In the future the traveler in the upper reaches of the atmosphere
will carry oxygen and make the kind of air that he wishes to breathe,
and he will properly protect himself against the cold of his new
world, which he will find deficient in dust motes and doubtless
entirely wanting in the bacteria of putrefaction and of disease.
There will be no clouds to obscure his vision; no rain or snow. He
will not often ascend above the region where there are not some dust
motes to scatter and diffuse a part of the solar rays and give him at
least a partial illumination.
Few persons are familiar with the simple problems of the air which
have such important bearing on the distribution of man into realms
above those he has been accustomed to occupy. They do not know
that the northwest wind brings physical energy and mental buoyancy
because it has a downward component of motion that draws air from
above, where it is free of impurities, and where high electrification
has changed a considerable quantity of its oxygen into ozone, in
which condition it remains but a short time after reaching the
lower potential near the earth’s surface. More people die under the
influence of the south wind than under the influence of the north
wind, because the south winds hug the surface of the earth and become
laden with impurities and are lacking in electrical stimulation. When
inventive man becomes more familiar with the ocean on the bottom of
which he has heretofore lived, he will not wait for the north wind to
bring down to him the beneficial conditions that always exist higher
up; he will go after them and remain aloft as long as he desires to
do so.
The further development of the dirigible balloon and the aëroplane
are among the most important duties that the engineer of the future
owes to civilization; and the meteorologist must establish the
climatology of the vast untracked regions above the highest mountain
peaks, for here man will largely disport himself in the time to come.
The writer agrees with the opinion of Major William R. Blair,
formerly of his staff when he was the head of the U. S. Weather
Bureau, but since the beginning of the World War the chief
meteorological assistant of the Chief Signal Officer of the U. S.
Army when he says:
“With reference to air travel in the future: the present stage
of aircraft development seems to indicate that long non-stop
traffic, both freight and passenger, in the air will be by means
of lighter-than-air craft (balloons). These craft have much
larger carrying capacity than any airplanes now designed and
will travel across the continent over several prepared routes,
stopping only at important centers on these routes to discharge
and take up passengers and freight. It is believed that airplanes
(heavier-than-air craft) will ply between these important centers
and the outlying country about them, thus acting as feeders to
the main route, over which the monstrous dirigibles will operate.
Most transoceanic as well as transcontinental air traffic will
probably be carried on in these large dirigible balloons.”
Lieutenant Colonel Henry B. Hersey, who served through the World War
in the Aëronautical Service of the Signal Corps, U. S. A., and who
also was associated with the writer in the management of the Weather
Bureau, says:
“The fields of the dirigible and the air plane are separate and
there is no conflict between the two. For light loads, great
speed, and quick manœuvering, the airplane is supreme. For heavy
loads, long distance, ability to remain in the air for great
periods of time, the dirigible is the only air craft that can
fulfill the requirements. Dirigibles will soon be in use which
can start from Europe, sail over New York, and drop enough
poison gas to kill thousands and make practically the whole city
uninhabitable.”