CHAPTER III
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.