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.
A BALLOON-PICNIC AT THE AËRONAUTS' 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 aëronaut 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 aëronauts, 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!"