The Warner weekly sun. (Warner, Brown Co., Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1885, 1883-12-07
I'D llNN A BALLOON.


OF Horror.
"I have not been in q balloon for tea
years, and the very sight Of one almost
makes me sick" He was a little dried
an fellow, in q great shaggy coat ana
oWeer felt hat, and he spoke to little
group who were watching the maneuVerS
ofProE. Warner with his balloon at the
Exposition recently. He was a quicN'
nervous little man, aud, although MS
language was refined, his slight French
accent proclaimed his nationality. Inc
crowd gathered closer and closer TO the
the little man, and ceased to watch the
big mass of rolling canvas that was NIL
ing with gas so slowly,
II was an aeronaut from my childhood.
NV father was the confidential friend I
Dr.. Josscn, the great French a%eronaut,
and had me in a balloon before | could
=sls. EAoa'. k2ow hc~ many ascen-
siops I have made. [ have been up 80
often that l used to ieei as easy
ave miles above the Garth
"a il we're walking on sollu
ground. VAS twenty-five years Ola
IwbcD the Franco Prussian wal broke
nut. and vas then in Paris. My tather
had list died and lett me q few thouE-
and francs. and I was spending 1t as
foolishly "a most boys do who have new
or been used to money and who sud
denly come into a little fortune. IN
stead Of fl hitting for my country l was
aouandering my fathers h~ard-earnec
francs in the cafes Of Paris. 1 got up
one morning and they told me Paris
was surrounded, that We would have TO
starve or surrender. The several at
tennis that had been made to break
through the lines had failed, and the
CITY was fuH of gloomy faces and SAD
hearts. Then l happened to remember
what my father had SAID about the
means by which Gen. JOuTdOn gained
his knowledge Of the position OF the
Austrians at the battle Of tleurus IN
1894, and how the French had used
them successfully at the sieges OF Man
benge, CharlerOl, Mannheim and Ehren-
hreistein. Why not use them now?
at was toward the end Of September,
1870. that | went to Gambetta, the lead
er of our provisional government. and
laid the matter before him. tie made
immediate inquiries among scientific
men of the p~raCticabillitv o. the scheme,
and found that it would work. We
started two balloon factories. | had
charge of one in S.. Denis. In a month
we made over forty balloons. We used
to make the envelope of calico, var
nished on the outside with a mixture of
Iinseed oil and oxide of lead, while the
network, car and other arrangements
were after the ordinary fashion. All
the balloons that I superintendent had a
capacity of 10, 0 cubic feet of gas. We
used to have them manned by sailors,
and they were mainly used to carry
from Paris to MarseiIles, to
Evreux, to Tunis and other points. 1t
grew to be quite a common mode
Of sending letters during the long
months of the siege. Most Of the tai
used TO have with them carrier
pigeons. Letters would be sent
back into Paris in this
way; the contents of the letter would be
photographed. This would reduce its
size to within an area of one or two
square inches Of the thinuest kind of pa
per. This paper would be inclOsed in a
quill ard fastened to the central tail
feather of the pigeon. The enemy be-
gan 70 open fire on our balloons at last,
and several of them were lost or fell in
TO the hands Of the Germans. To avoid
this we used 10 sent them out in the
and the government forbid the
use of iight3 to kept the enemy from see
ing the balloon. l had been busy In the
for a month or more, when it
sudd snly occurred to me that | would
like to take a trip myself. / made all the
arrangements, and on tue night of the
18th of November | got into the City of
Paris capacity $4,000 cubic feet, with
$50 pounds oil letters for Evruex. | left
about 3 o'clock. The air was cold and
] took one of the workmen with
me, a quiet, modest little fellow named
Lefebre, who lived at Eyreux and want
ed to get out of Paris. This wind was in
the right direction and we had
ne difficulty in getting off.
In a few minutes the
city lay far below me. / could see the
lights cleaning like serpent,
eyes out OF the abyssinai darkness. All
about me the air wa 10 black that |
could almost feel it like a visible palpa-
BILE reality. Dark masses of clouds, tRat
/ Guessed to be twenty thousand feet in
thickness. lay like an ebon wall above
mo on all sides. The stiffness was
something dreadful. / had been up a
thousand times before, but in daylight,
never under such circumstances. /
passed oyer the enemy's camps till /
the last Of their camp fires fade
way in the night.
"You can never tell by the motion of
the car how fast you ara going. / have
been swept along by a whirlwind and a
glass full or water by my side
q drop. 1t is only by compare
that you know you are moving.
Some instinct told me that night that we
we're being driven forward with fearful
velocity. We tried to keep up a Coz
versation, but the awful sublimity of
the occasion and thu vague fears that
filed as both kept us from talking. |
had an idea that we were about four
Males above the earth's sur
face. For the first time
/ began TO think of the immeasurable
= AurAn 49, -. NEUTRALITY-SUSPICIOUS.