It had been discovered that certain natural gases issuing from the ground in the United States contained limited quantities of helium. The question was whether we could extract this helium in sufficient quantities to make its use practical. The Signal Corps, the Navy, and the Bureau of Mines combined in a cooperative plan to develop a practical helium production. By adopting a method of obtaining the helium from liquefied gas produced in the processes of the Linde Air Products Co. and the Air Reduction Co., and also by the Norton process, we attained astonishing success in this enterprise.
On the day the armistice was signed we had at the docks ready for loading on board ships 147,000 cubic feet of helium. At its prewar value this gas would have been worth about $250,000,000. On November 11, 1918, we were building plants which would produce helium at the rate of 50,000 cubic feet per day, and the cost of obtaining it had dropped from $1,700 per cubic foot to approximately 10 cents.
None of this gas was actually used in the war, but its production by our chemists was hailed as the greatest step ever taken in the development of ballooning. It now seems to have opened a new era in lighter-than-air navigation. In war helium will nullify the incendiary bullet which destroyed so many balloons and airships. In peace it brings the possibilities of new types of construction of dirigible airships, since its use eliminates entirely all of the frightful dangers from lightning, static electricity, or sparks and flames from gasoline engines or any other source.
The Army and Navy cooperated in the production of balloons. The Army furnished the balloon cloth to the Navy. Navy balloons had two automatic safety valves for the expanding gas, one on each side of the balloon a third of the way back from the nose and just above the equator; while the Army held to the French and British idea of a single valve in the nose itself. The Navy adopted a Caquot-type balloon which rides at an angle of about 25° to the horizontal and is somewhat smaller than the Army model. The Navy used these balloons as spotters for submarines and mines. They were towed on cables from the decks of war ships, and were connected with the ships by telephone.
The use of parachutes with balloons is a comparatively recent development, the man who first successfully descended to earth in a parachute being not only still active and enthusiastic over aerial development, but being in fact the chief inspector of all United States Army balloons and parachutes. This is Maj. Thomas S. Baldwin, known the world over as Capt. "Tom" Baldwin, hero of innumerable aerial exploits of all kinds under all conditions and in all parts of the world, and at present chief of the United States Army balloon inspection. The Yankee balloon observer in France went up to his observation post in the security of knowing that the equipment on which his life depended had been O. K.'d by men who knew the business from beginning to end.
The parachute as it is known at the county fair and the parachute used in the recent war were far apart in type, the latter embodying all the improvements that the world's aeronautical experts could add to it. The need for parachutes developed when hostile aviators began shooting down the sausages. At first the one-man parachute was used exclusively, the men in the basket leaping overboard the instant their balloon was fired over their heads. Any delay on their part would be fatal, since the entire bag would be consumed in 15 or 20 seconds and the observer would then be unable to leap out of the falling basket. When the individual parachutes were used, the maps and records in the balloon basket were usually lost.
To overcome these difficulties, the designers invented the basket parachute. This was considerably larger than the individual parachute, and to operate it the balloonists pulled a cord which cut the basket away from the balloon entirely. The spreading parachute overhead then floated the basket, with the men themselves and all else it contained, safely and quickly to the ground.
Although hundreds and even thousands of parachute jumps occurred during the war, there were few fatalities from this cause. During all the time our forces were at the front only one of our men was killed as the direct result of a parachute drop. In that particular instance the burning balloon fell on top of the open parachute, setting it on fire and allowing the observer to fall unprotected the rest of the distance to the ground. One of our observers was known to make four jumps from his balloon on the same busy day, and another leaped thrice in four hours. In the Argonne offensive 30 balloon jumps were made by our men.
As to the safety of our parachute equipment, the only complaint from the Yankee balloonists at the front was that they were too safe. The man who is escaping from a German airplane nose-diving at him with a machine gun spitting fire is in a hurry and does not wish to be detained by a parachute which floats him too slowly to the earth.
In the rigging of each kite balloon there are about 2,000 feet of rope of different sorts. There was a shortage of proper cordage in the United States at first, and the French thought they could furnish this rigging to us. But this attempt proved to be unsuccessful, and we were forced to develop a cordage manufacture in this country of high quality and great quantity. We did this so swiftly that there was no serious delay to the balloon production.