The new air world

by Willis L. Moore

Fig. 1.—Winter and Summer Vertical Temperature Gradients, in degrees Centigrade and Fahrenheit.

Scientific and inventive genius is becoming so skillful in harnessing the forces of nature to man’s desires that it is reasonable to anticipate that within a quarter of a century or less human beings will be nearly as numerous in the air as insects, they will remain aloft longer, and sail to vastly greater distances and to higher altitudes. In time dirigible ships may sail for days and possibly for weeks in the pure air aloft, carrying millions of passengers.

At a Height of One and One Half Miles. There is little difference in the temperatures of day and night, except that the coolest time of the twenty-four hours is during daytime and not at night, as would be most naturally supposed. This is important information to an aviator or to the pilot of a balloon.

At an Altitude of One Thousand Feet. In free air at the hottest time in midsummer’s heat, the air is found to be as much as fifteen degrees lower than that at the ground. Almost within arm’s length of the streets of great inland cities there is a cool and healthful atmosphere when humanity is sweltering and dying from heat below. Some youth who is reading this may develop the genius that will lift up whole city blocks into this cool and healthful region. Open steel work below, the first level at one or two thousand feet above the hot streets, express elevators to carry passengers, and the climate of the cool mountain air is accessible to those who now live in discomfort at low populous centers. Man is just beginning to disport himself in the hitherto trackless wilderness of the air. Certain it is that the hanging gardens of Babylon will be outdone in the Twentieth Century and the eyrie of the eagle left far below by those who will live a part of their time in elevated structures having bases resting upon the earth; or who will fly to great distances aloft and remain at whatever altitude furnishes them the most pleasant and beneficial conditions, and that they may thus remain not only for days but for weeks without returning to the surface of the earth.

Only during recent years have we realized how thin is the stratum of air next to the earth which has sufficient heat and moisture for the inception, growth, and maturity of animal and vegetable life. The raising of the instrument shelter at the New York station of the U. S. Weather Bureau from an elevation of one hundred and fifty feet above the street to an altitude of three hundred feet has caused an apparent lowering of the mean annual temperature of two and one half degrees.

Air is so elastic and its density diminishes so rapidly with elevation that nearly one half of the weight of the entire mass of the atmosphere lies below the level of the top of Pike’s Peak, which has a height of a little less than three miles above sea level. It presses with a weight of about fifteen pounds per square inch of surface, and its pressure is exerted in all directions, upward as well as downward. An ordinary man sustains a pressure of over one ton on each square foot of his surface, but as the air penetrates all portions of his body and exercises a pressure outward as well as inward he feels no inconvenience. If his body could be so tightly sealed that no air could enter and if then the air of the interior should be removed with a pump, his body instantly would be crushed to a shapeless pulp.

A cubic foot of atmospheric air weighs one and one third ounces. Water is 773 times, and mercury ten thousand times, as dense as air. But air is a more ponderable substance than many suppose; an ordinary lecture hall forty by fifty feet and thirty feet from floor to ceiling contains two and one half tons of air at freezing temperature. It would contain less at a higher temperature, because heat expands its volume; it would contain more at a lower temperature, because cold contracts its volume.

Everything Evolved from the Air. Air is so common that we seldom stop to consider the magnitude of the force it exerts or the grandeur wrought by this invisible architect of nature. In the great cycle of world building—birth from the nebulæ, growth, maturity, decay, disintegration, death, and then possibly back again to the nebulæ—the atmosphere, be it light and tenuous as at present, or be it filled with the hot vapors of earth and metal, is the vehicle and the medium of the builder, transporting and transmuting, in mysterious ways and to wondrous forms, the materials of planets. Its work as a builder may be further illustrated by showing that the body of man itself returns not to the earth earthy, as we have been taught, but largely to the air whence it came. Decomposition is but the liberation of the aëriform gases of which it is mainly composed; the residue is but a handful that goes back to mother earth. Let us take the dried corn plant; weigh it, then burn it in a closed vessel so that none of the ashes can blow away. Continue the burning until the ashes are perfectly white and it will be found that the weight of the ashes is only about one twentieth of the weight of the great stalk, ear, and foliage we began with. What has become of all the rest? The fire has destroyed it, you say. No, we can destroy nothing. Remember that; we can destroy nothing that the Creator has made, neither matter nor force. The fire has simply changed the form of the plant; the nineteen twentieths that have disappeared have gone back to the air whence they came.

Thus we see that the body of man, the cereal and fruit that furnish him food, the structure that gives him shelter, aye, the many things that please the eye: the landscape, the beautiful flowers, the green fields, the babbling brooks, even the rose blush on the maiden’s cheek,[2]—really come from this wonderful fluid surrounding the earth, and well may it be said that the queen of life rides upon the crest of the wind.