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.

Few are aware that the rectangular kite of the weather man was the forerunner of the aëroplane of the aviator. In 1903, while directing wireless experiments in the sending of messages at Roanoke Island, North Carolina, the writer saw the Wright brothers, or their representatives, lying flat upon the lower planes of what appeared to be Weather Bureau kites and gliding in the air from the top of the sand dunes. This was the beginning of real flight by man. The ingenuity of the Wrights transformed the weather man’s kite, strengthened it, took out the ends, hitched on a rudder, and when the petrol engine had developed sufficient power with a given weight, installed it, and flew.

In the future the meteorologist and the aviator will be closely associated. With a sufficient number of weather observations made by aviators simultaneously and well distributed over the United States it will be possible to construct a daily weather map on some high level—say the three-mile level—similar to the map now based upon sea level. The pressure, temperature, wind direction, clouds, and rainfall would be recorded and charted for the upper region clear across the continent. Three miles is about halfway to the top of cyclonic storms and probably in the region of greatest activity. More accurate forecasts would be possible by the study of this additional weather chart. This coöperation of the bird man and the weather man in studying the geography of the new air world will mark an epoch in meteorological science as far-reaching in its consequences as were the discovery of the barometer by Torricelli and the uncovering of the principles of the thermometer by Galileo, the former of which was not known until more than twenty-three years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. Thus swiftly does the mind of man to-day explore the hidden recesses of nature’s mysteries, and with each conquest carry itself to a higher realm of existence.

In the not distant future, more storm warnings may be issued by the Weather Bureau for ships of the air than for those of the sea, for the navigation of the air must play an increasing and important part in the coming activities of the world. Science is becoming so skilled in the harnessing of the forces of nature to man’s desires and in the development of mechanical appliances, that it is reasonable to anticipate the possibility that long-distance travel over land or ocean ultimately will be almost entirely confined to the air.

As the result of the explorations of the atmosphere made by the institution at Mount Weather there was ready for our fighting air men at the front, immediately on our entry into the World War, a fund of useful information concerning a region that but a short time before was entirely uncharted. The instruments carried by the exploring kites and balloons had keen scientific eyes and they recorded on clock-timed cylinders what they saw. Thus did the air pilot know much about the direction and the force of the wind that he would encounter as he rose, the altitude where he would pass above clouds, the degree of cold that he would encounter, etc. He was told that the temperature would fall about one degree for each three hundred feet of his ascent until he reached the top of the storm stratum at six or seven miles, and that if he could reach that altitude he would observe a most wonderful phenomenon: the temperature no longer would fall with gain in altitude; he would enter a cold but an equally heated stratum, without finding any temperatures lower than were encountered upon entering the region, which is always about seventy degrees below zero.

If the aërial explorer could stop his ship and keep it at an altitude of about one and one half miles for twenty-four hours he would be startled to find that the coolest time of the period was during the daytime, not during the night, as he had expected to find it.

In the future the traveler in the upper reaches of the atmosphere will carry oxygen and make the kind of air that he wishes to breathe, and he will properly protect himself against the cold of his new world, which he will find deficient in dust motes and doubtless entirely wanting in the bacteria of putrefaction and of disease. There will be no clouds to obscure his vision; no rain or snow. He will not often ascend above the region where there are not some dust motes to scatter and diffuse a part of the solar rays and give him at least a partial illumination.

Few persons are familiar with the simple problems of the air which have such important bearing on the distribution of man into realms above those he has been accustomed to occupy. They do not know that the northwest wind brings physical energy and mental buoyancy because it has a downward component of motion that draws air from above, where it is free of impurities, and where high electrification has changed a considerable quantity of its oxygen into ozone, in which condition it remains but a short time after reaching the lower potential near the earth’s surface. More people die under the influence of the south wind than under the influence of the north wind, because the south winds hug the surface of the earth and become laden with impurities and are lacking in electrical stimulation. When inventive man becomes more familiar with the ocean on the bottom of which he has heretofore lived, he will not wait for the north wind to bring down to him the beneficial conditions that always exist higher up; he will go after them and remain aloft as long as he desires to do so.

The further development of the dirigible balloon and the aëroplane are among the most important duties that the engineer of the future owes to civilization; and the meteorologist must establish the climatology of the vast untracked regions above the highest mountain peaks, for here man will largely disport himself in the time to come.

The writer agrees with the opinion of Major William R. Blair, formerly of his staff when he was the head of the U. S. Weather Bureau, but since the beginning of the World War the chief meteorological assistant of the Chief Signal Officer of the U. S. Army when he says:

Lieutenant Colonel Henry B. Hersey, who served through the World War in the Aëronautical Service of the Signal Corps, U. S. A., and who also was associated with the writer in the management of the Weather Bureau, says: