Abstract
THE military balloon experiments at Woolwich have been so far successful, that last week an aëronaut was lifted some 700 feet, to a height, therefore, sufficient for reconnoitring purposes. There is nothing of novelty in this, as a matter of aërial navigation, although it is the first instance, we believe, of any one in this country being raised from the earth by the agency of pure hydrogen, but it is, nevertheless, something to have achieved in the circumstances under which Capt. Templar has been working. Everybody knows that hydrogen is gifted with extraordinary lifting power, just as every chemist is aware that the gas may be produced in the way Capt. Templar produced it, namely, by passing a jet of steam over iron turnings. But the problem under solution was not to send up a hydrogen balloon so much as to discover whether the thing could be done in a haphazard fashion, and with such simple means as an army in the field would be provided with. It is one thing to make hydrogen in the laboratory, arid another to make a sufficient supply of it just whenever the commander of an army may order a balloon reconnaissance to be made.
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THE BALLOON EXPERIMENTS AT WOOLWICH . Nature 18, 620 (1878). https://doi.org/10.1038/018620b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/018620b0