The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-11-09
BALLoONING AT NIGHT.

| 4 AOonllC LanQSCape oSeIl cAoih ANU | Experiences of Some English Aero nauts-Echoes From the Earth,
 A correspondent formed one Of MT. | Spencers party in balloon ascent ' from the Crystal Palace last Wednes- | day night. His experiences are inter-
 esting, At one thousand feet nigh,
 he writes, i've were over some subur-
 ban railway station, and the sight of train rushing along curved cutting
 was one not to be forgotten It was like comet with fiery gold head and
 a silver tail The moonlight on the
 trail of smoke made it look like the rap | ids of a river in moonlight rushing mass of silver water the engine was
 glow of fiery red. You was no train. At 9:53 the smell of gas told us we were
 rising, and we commenced the work of l testing echoes, I may here remark | that there are two grave objections to
 balloon trayeling-the one is that you cannot smoke, and the other that you
 perpetually smell gas
 Tn testing acoustically, I am afraid we did not succeed in gaining any air echo though one at thousand feet we went up in all to nearly three thou sand feet--was suspected. Echoes dis | tinct we had in plenty, but they un- | doubtedly came from the balloon above
 us, and none-except perhaps, the one l dubious one I have referred to-from | the empyrean. Echoes from the earth showed the air to be very variable in it's | carrying power. For long distance, | travelling at height of a thousand feet | the air remained singularly opaque l acoustically and not trace of echoes | could be caught; but later, at twenty l four hundred feet, they became and re- | mained very loud. Again, twenty-five
 minutes later and three hundred feet
 lower, they had become distinctly fec
 bIe The resonator which MT. Bacon a
 member of the party, has constantly
 used, showed the same striking acous-
 tic variaton and the murmur of earth
 carried up to us on the night breeze
 proved to be principally of grave tones. 1 MT. Bacon had with him an exqui- 1 sitely sensitive air thermometer which | showed remarkably the variations in | temperature during the steady ascent l of the balloon. The temperature rose l rapidly up to about five hundred feet l at which elevation we encountered a l colder stratum Soaring through this I NE fbs6 iiuliutCo lCett dSdlu | into warmer air Then through a sec | ond and a third shallow cold stratum; but at one thousand feet we had en- tered an equable region. for an ascent l of sixteen or seventeen hundred feet 1 higher gave us no practical change in | the conditions, and as acoustic eyperi- ments were to be principal part of the nights work. we kept below an alti- 1 tude of three thousand feet. At the
 higher attitudes there was no water va | DOT noticeable in the spectrum, and the | conspicuous telluric lines Mr. Bacon
 had detected in his previous nights ex- l periments had disappeared.
 l .'The brilliancy of the moon was very | markedly increased as we flew higher, | and lunar details easily seen with field- | glasses from earth became difficult to l gaze at. Seen through good glasses, in- | deed, the moon was simply dazzlngly
 and tryingly brilliant As bent to the Davy lamp we carried to read the ane- roid to MT. Bacon--Mr. Spencer could
 read it by the moonlight--it recorded
 eighteen hundred feet and a clock be-
 low could be heard distinctly striking ten. At two thousand feet it was mar velous to note the clean-cut shadow of
 the balloon which the moon gave. As
 we threw out sand it's shadow could be
 seen dropping from the balloon, first in
 q broad stream, then as it disintegrated
 and the particles separated widening
 into nebulous shade to disappear alto
 gether as it dropped earthward. l have
 never known what moonlight can be till
 last night. Every roadway hedge and
 rivulet stood out as clear as if we were
 looking down on large scale map.
 ''I have already alluded to the acous- l tic experiments that were made, and | these proved amusing, as we'll as in- l structiye At twelve hundred feet we
 were getting splendid ground echoes
 from both voice and trumpet and at
 this height, passing over one village we
 created quite an excitement. Our hail
 of What is the name of this placer
 was heard and answered, but we could
 not catch the name, except that 1t end-
 ed in row or road Not at every vil-
 lage did we get word from the human
 denizens, but we never failed to rouse
 the dogs If a 'hullo' didn't do it, the
 trumpets never failed Over Eynesford
 at six hundred feet, the time being
 10:45, we got news of our whereabouts.
 Where are you off to?' shouted the
 men who gave us the name, to which
 our answer was: TO find the Rouge
 mont gold fields At twentyfour hun
 dred feet so clear was the night that
 you could see the postcards we threw
 out fiutter down, down, almost to the
 ground. At that height also the ground
 echoes came up quite clear, if some
 what faint, and dogs barking might al- most have been in ones next-door | neighbor'g garden