Up In The Air

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[Illustration: UP IN A BALLOON.]

We have already taken a journey under the earth, and now, if you like, we will try a trip in the air. Anything for a novelty. We have lived on the surface of the earth ever since we were born.

We will make our ascent in a balloon. It has been thought by some folks, that there were easier methods of ascending into the air than by a cumbrous balloon, but their inventions never became popular.

For instance, look at the picture of a flying-man.

This gentleman had an idea that he could fly by the aid of this ingenious machinery. You will see that his wings are arranged so that they are moved by his legs, and also by cords attached to his arms. The umbrella over his head is not intended to ward off the rain or the sun, but is to act as a sort of parachute, to keep him from falling while he is making his strokes. The basket, which hangs down low enough to be out of the way of his feet, is filled with provisions, which he expects to need in the course of his journey.

That journey lasted exactly as long as it took him to fall from the top of a high rock to the ground below.

But we are not going to trust ourselves to any such _harem-scarem_ contrivance as this. We are going up in a regular balloon.

We all know how balloons are made, and this one of ours is like most others. It is a great globular bag, made of strips of silk sewn together, and varnished with a certain composition which renders the balloon air-tight. The car in which we will travel is made of wicker-work, for that is both light and strong, and it is suspended from a net-work of strong cord which covers the whole balloon. It would not do, you know, to attach a cord to any particular part of the silk, for that would tear it. In the top of the balloon is a valve, and a cord from it comes down into the car. This valve is to be pulled open when we wish to come down towards the earth. The gas then escapes, and of course the balloon descends. In the car are bags of sand, and these are to be emptied out when we think we are too heavy for the balloon, and are either coming down too fast or are not as high as we wish to go. Relieved of the weight of a bag, the balloon rises.

Sand is used because it can be emptied out and will not injure anybody in its descent. It would be rather dangerous, if ballooning were a common thing, for the aeronauts to throw out stones and old iron, such as are used for the ballast of a ship. If you ever feel a shower of sand coming down upon you through the air, look up, and you will probably see a balloon--that is, if you do not get some of the sand in your eyes.

The gas with which our balloon is to be filled is hydrogen gas; but I think we will not use the pure hydrogen, for it is troublesome and expensive to produce. We will get permission of the city gas authorities to take gas from one of their pipes.

That will carry us up very well indeed. When the balloon is nearly full--we never fill it entirely, for the gas expands when it rises into lighter air, and the balloon would explode if we did not leave room for this expansion--it is almost as round as a ball, and swells out proudly, struggling and pulling at the ropes which confine it to the ground.

Now we have but to attach the car, get in, and cut loose. But we are going to be very careful on this trip, and so we will attach a parachute to the balloon. I hope we may not use it, but it may save us in case of an accident. This is the manner in which the parachute will hang from the bottom of the car.

It resembles, you see, a closed umbrella without a handle, and it has cords at the bottom, to which a car is attached. If we wish to come down by means of this contrivance, we must descend from the car of the balloon to that of the parachute, and then we must unfasten the rope which attaches us to the balloon. We shall then drop like a shot; but as soon as the air gets under our parachute it will spread open, and our descent will immediately begin to be much more gradual, and if nothing unusual occurs to us, we shall come gently to the ground. This picture shows the manner in which we would come down in a parachute.

This man's balloon has probably burst, for we see it is tumbling down, and it will no doubt reach the ground before him.

When all is ready and we are properly seated in the car, with our instruments and extra clothes and ballast, and some provisions, we will give the word to "let her go."

There!

Did you see that?

The earth dropped right down. And it is dropping, but more slowly, yet.

That is the sensation persons generally experience when they first go up in a balloon. Not being used to rising in the air, they think at first that they are stationary, and that the earth and all the people and houses on it are falling below them.

Now, then, we are off! Look down and see how everything gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller. As we pass over a river, we can look down to its very bottom; and if we were not so high we could see the fishes swimming about. The houses soon begin to look like toy-cottages, and the trees like bushes, and the creeks and rivers like silvery bands. The people now appear as black spots; we can just see some of them moving about; but if they were to shout very loud we might hear them, for sound travels upward to a great distance.

[Illustration: MOONLIGHT ABOVE THE CLOUDS.]

Soon everything begins to be mixed up below us. We can hardly tell the woods from the fields; all seem pretty much alike. And now we think it is getting foggy; we can see nothing at all beneath us, and when we look up and around us we can see nothing but fog.

We are in the clouds! Yes, these are the clouds. There is nothing very beautiful about them--they are only masses of vapor. But how thick that vapor is! Now, when we look up, we cannot even see the balloon above us. We are sitting in our little basket-work car, and that is all we know! We are shut out from the whole world, closed up in a cloud!

But this foggy atmosphere is becoming thinner, and we soon shoot out of it! Now we can see clearly around us. Where are the clouds? Look! there they are, spread out like a great bed below us.

How they glisten and sparkle in the bright sunlight!

Is not this glorious, to ride above the clouds, in what seems to us illimitable space! The earth is only a few miles below us, it is true, but up and around us space _is_ illimitable.

But we shall penetrate space no longer in an upward direction. It is time we were going back to the world. We are all very cold, and the eyes and ears of some of us are becoming painful. More than that, our balloon is getting too large. The gas within it is expanding, on account of the rarity of the air.

We shall pull the rope of the valve.

Now we are descending. We are in the clouds, and before we think much about it we are out of them. We see the earth beneath us, like a great circular plain, with the centre a little elevated. Now we see the rivers; the forests begin to define themselves; we can distinguish houses, and we know that we are falling very rapidly. It is time to throw out ballast. We do so, and we descend more slowly.

Now we are not much higher than the tops of the trees. People are running towards us. Out with another bag of sand! We rise a little. Now we throw out the anchor. It drags along the ground for some distance, as the wind carries us over a field, and then it catches in a fence. And now the people run up and pull us to the ground, and the most dangerous part of our expedition is over.

For it is comparatively safe to go up in a balloon, but the descent is often very hazardous indeed.

On the preceding page is a picture of a balloon which did not come down so pleasantly as ours.

With nine persons in it, it was driven over the ground by a tremendous wind; the anchors were broken; the car was bumped against the ground ever so many times; and the balloon dashed into trees, breaking off their branches; it came near running into a railroad train; it struck and carried away part of a telegraph line, and at last became tangled up in a forest, and stopped. Several of the persons in it had their limbs broken, and it is a wonder they were not all killed.

The balloon in which we ascended was a very plain, common-sense affair; but when aerial ascents were first undertaken the balloons were very fancifully decorated.

For instance, Bagnolet's balloon and that of Le Flesselles, of which we have given you pictures, are much handsomer than anything we have at present. But they were not any more serviceable for all their ornamentation, and they differed from ours in still another way--they were "hot-air balloons."

Other balloons were furnished with all sorts of fans, rudders, etc., for the purpose of steering them, or accelerating their motion up or down.

On the next page is one of that kind.

This balloon ascended from Dijon, France, in 1784, but the steering-apparatus did not prove to be of much use.

There were other balloons devised by the early aeronauts, which were still stranger than that one which arose from Dijon. The _Minerva_, the picture of which you can examine at your leisure, was invented by a Mr. Robertson, in the beginning of this century. He wished to make a grand aerial voyage of several months, with a company of about sixty persons, and therefore he had to have a very large balloon. To procure this he desired the co-operation of the scientific men throughout Europe, and sent plans and descriptions of his projected balloon to all the learned societies.

This great ship of the air was to be a regular little town, as you may see. The balloon was to be one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and was to carry a large ship, on which the passengers would be safe if they descended in the water, even if it were the middle of the ocean.

Everything was to be provided for the safety and convenience of the passengers. Around the upper part of the balloon you will see a platform, with sentries and tents. These soldiers were to be called the "air-marines." There is a small balloon--about the common size--which could be sent off like a small boat whenever occasion required. If any one got tired of the expedition, and wanted to go home, there was a parachute by which he might descend. On the deck of the ship, near the stern, was to be a little church; small houses hung from below, reached by ladders of silk, which were to be used as medicine-rooms, gymnasiums, etc.; and under the ship would hang a great hogshead, as big as a house, which would contain provisions and stores, and keep them tight and dry. There was also a kitchen; and a cannon, with which to fire off salutes, besides a number of guns, which you see projecting from the port-holes of the ship. These, I suppose, were to be used against all enemies or pirates of the air, sea, or land.

I cannot enumerate all the appendages of this wonderful balloon--you see there are telescopes, sails, great speaking-trumpets, anchors, etc.; but I will merely remark that it was never constructed.

One of the safest, and sometimes the most profitable, methods of using a balloon, is that shown in the picture, "Safe Ballooning." Here a battle is going on, and the individuals in the balloon, safely watching the progress of events and the movements of the enemy, transmit their observations to the army with which they are connected. Of course the men on the ground manage a balloon of this sort, and pull it around to any point that they please, lowering it by the ropes when the observations are concluded. Balloons are often used in warfare in this manner.

But during the late siege of Paris, balloons became more useful than they have ever been since their invention. A great many aeronauts left the besieged city, floated safely over the Prussian army, and descended in friendly localities. Some of these balloons were captured, but they generally accomplished their purposes, and were of great service to the French. On one occasion, however, a balloon from Paris was driven by adverse winds to the ocean, and its occupants were drowned.

It has not been one hundred years since the balloon was invented by the brothers Montgolfier, of France. They used heated air instead of gas, and their balloons were of course inferior to those of the present day. But we have not improved very much upon the original balloon, and what progress will eventually be made in aerial navigation it is difficult to prophesy. But there are persons who believe that in time air-ships will make regular trips in all directions, like our present steamboats and railroad-trains.

If this is ever the case, I hope we may all be living to see it.

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