Careers of Danger and Daring

I NEVER knew a man who has been so many things (and been them all fairly well) as has Carl Myers of Frankfort, New York. They call him "Professor" Myers ever since he took to ballooning, years ago; but they might call him Dr. Myers, for he has studied medicine, or Wrestler Myers, for he is skilled in all tricks of assault and defense, Japanese and others, or Banker Myers, for he spent years in financial dealings, or Printer Myers, for he still sets up his own type, or Telegrapher Myers, or Lecturer Myers, or Carpenter Myers, or Photographer Myers.

All these callings (and some others) Myers has pursued with eagerness and success, only making a change when driven to it by his thirst for varied knowledge and his guiding principle, "I refuse to let this world bore me." To-day the professor is sixty years old (a thin, wiry, sharp-eyed little man), yet I suspect some boys of sixteen who read these pages feel older than he does. You ought to hear him laugh! or tell about the air-ship that has carried him over thirteen States! or describe his "balloon farm" at Frankfort! I don't know when I have enjoyed myself more than during three days Professor Myers spent with me some time ago.

Suppose we begin with the balloon farm, which is certainly a queer place. It is a joke in the neighborhood that the professor plants his balloon crop in the spring, gathers it in the fall, and stores it away through the winter. Certain it is that in summer-time the visitor (and visitors come in swarms) sees fields marked off in rows with stakes and cross-poles, on which balloon-cloth by hundreds of yards seems to be growing (really, it is drying); and other fields, that look like an Eskimo village, with houses of crinkly yellowish stuff (really, half-inflated balloons); and groups of men boiling varnish in great kettles which are always getting on fire and may explode; and other men working nimbly at the knitting of nets; and others experimenting with parachutes; and the professor paddling away at the height of three thousand feet for his afternoon "skycycle" sail; and Mme. Carlotta, the celebrated aëronaut (also the professor's wife), making an ascension now and then from the front lawn in a chosen one of her twenty-odd balloons.

And in winter, should you explore the upper rooms of the house, you would find all the balloons tucked away snugly in cocoons, as it were, fast asleep, ranged along the attic floor, each under its net, each ticketed with a record of its work, marked for good or bad conduct after it has been tested by master or mistress.

For weeks at a time in the experiment season a captive balloon hovers above the Frankfort farm, say twelve hundred feet up, and the tricks they play with that balloon would draw all the boys in the country, if their parents would let them go. Three guy-ropes hold the balloon steady like legs of an enormous tripod, and straight down from the netting a fourth rope hangs free. Now, imagine swinging on a rope twelve hundred feet long! They do that often for tests of flying-machines or aëroplanes – swing off the housetop, and sail away in a long, slow curve, just clearing the ground, and land on top of a windmill at the far side of the grounds. That's a swing worth talking about! And fancy a man hitched fast to this rope by shoulder-straps, and as he swings flapping a pair of great wings made of feathers and silk, and trying to steer with a ridiculous spreading tail of the same materials. The professor had a visit from such a man, who had spent years and a fortune in contriving this flying device, which, alas! would never fly.

Professor Myers, like most aëronauts, insists that traveling by balloon, for one who understands it, is no more perilous, but rather less so, than ordinary travel by rail or trolley or motor carriage. He points out that for thirty-odd years he and his wife have led a most active aëronaut existence, have done all things that are done in balloons, besides some new ones, and got no harm from it – some substantial good rather, notably an aërial torpedo (operated by electricity from the ground), which flies swiftly in any desired direction, its silken fans and aluminum propeller under perfect control from a switchboard; also the "skycycle" balloon, which lifts the aëronaut in a suspended saddle and allows him, by the help of sail propeller and flapping aëroplanes (these driven by hands and feet), to make a gain on the wind, when going with it, of ten or twelve miles an hour. On this "skycycle" Professor Myers has paddled hundreds of miles, not trying to go against the wind, but selecting currents from the many available ones that favor his purpose. "What is the use," says he, "of fighting the wind when you can make the wind fight for you? People who take trains or boats wait for a certain hour or a certain tide, in the same way we wait for a certain wind current, and there is never long to wait, for the wind blows in totally different directions at different altitudes."

"Can you know with precision," I asked, "about these varying currents?"

"We can know a good deal by studying the clouds and by observations with kites and other instruments. And we would soon know much more if experimenters would work on these lines of conquering nature by yielding to her rather than opposing her."

In my talks with Professor Myers, of which there were many, we went first into the spectacular side of ballooning, the more obviously interesting part, stories of hair-breadth escapes and thrilling adventure, of the fair lady who assumed marriage vows sailing aloft over Herkimer County, of Carlotta's recent trip, ninety miles in sixty minutes with natural gas in the bag, of the English aëronaut who leaped from his car to death in the sea that a comrade might be saved through the lessened weight, of two lovesick Frenchmen who duelled with pistols from rival balloons, while all Paris gaped in wonder from the earth and shuddered when one silken bag, pierced by a well-aimed shot, dashed down to death with principal and second. And many more of that kind which, I must say, leave one far from convinced on the non-danger point.

Then the professor dwelt upon various odd things about balloons – this, for instance, that the rapid rise of an air-ship makes an aëronaut suffer the same pain and pressure on his ear-drums that a diver knows, only now the air presses from inside the head outward. And relief from this pain is found, as the diver finds it, by repeatedly opening the mouth and swallowing.

And he spoke of the strangest illusions of sight. The balloon is always standing still to the person in it, while the earth rushes madly along, forty, sixty, ninety miles an hour. As you shoot up the first half mile the ground beneath you seems to drop away into a deepening bowl, while the horizon sweeps up like a loosened spring. Then presently this illusion passes, and you see everything flat. There are no hills any more, nor villages; no towers nor steep descents, only a level surface, marked charmingly in color, sometimes in wonderful mosaics, and strangely in light and shade. At the height of two miles nothing is familiar; you might as well be looking at the moon, for all you can recognize. Roads become yellowish lines; rivers brownish lines (and the water vanishes); a mountain-range becomes a shaded strip, with less shade on one edge (where the sun is) than on the other; a forest becomes a patch of color; a town another patch. There is scarcely any difference between water and land, and you see to the bottom of a lake, so that the configuration of its bed in valley and hill are apparent through the color and the shading. This singular disappearance of water bodies, for it amounts to almost that, has an evident importance.

"I'll tell you what we did on Lake Ontario," said the professor, "as a result of observations I made there from a balloon. In sailing over the lake on one occasion I remarked a number of small shaded spots which puzzled me. I could not imagine what they were. Finally, with the help of powerful field-glasses, I made them out to be wrecks sunk at various depths, and I realized that Lake Ontario, and indeed all the great lakes, abound in vessels which have gone down during centuries and never been recovered. No one can estimate the treasure which lies there waiting for some one to reclaim it. And I saw that it is a perfectly simple matter to locate these wrecks from a balloon, and to prove this I organized a modest wrecking expedition, and indicated to the diver where he was to go down. Down he went at that point, and found the wreck I had seen, and we pumped good coal out of her by hundreds of tons. What I did then on a small scale might be done on a large scale by any one willing to undertake it."

Of course I asked the professor why it is that an aëronaut can see down into a lake better than, say, an observer in a boat, and he explained that there is a great gain in intensity of terrestrial illumination when the viewpoint is at a height, because the sun's rays converge toward the earth, the sun being so many times larger, and therefore (this is his theory) a man lifted above the earth gets many more solar rays reflected to him from a given area than he would get if nearer to that area. In a word, it is a matter of optics and angles, but, the professor declares, most assuredly a fact.

(Photographed from a balloon.)

Never before these talks did I realize how busy an aëronaut is, how much there is to do in a balloon. Besides attending to valve-cords and ballast there is the barometer to keep your eyes on, for by it alone can you know your altitude. Around moves the needle slowly as you rise, slowly as you fall, one point for a thousand feet. Rising or falling, you know the worst or the best there. Sometimes the needle sticks, the barometer will not work, and you must cast overside pieces of tissue-paper to see by their rise or fall if you are going up or down. By your senses alone you cannot tell whether you are rising or falling, or your distance from the earth. That is most deceiving. Then you must have your watch ready to reckon your speed, so many thousand feet up or down in so many seconds, and your map spread out (nailed to a board, and that lashed fast), to tell where you are, and your compass out to fix the north and south points, for a balloon twists slowly all the time, twists one way going up and the other way coming down. Nobody knows just why this is, unless it be the unequal drawing of the seams as the fabric swells and shrinks.

"I always keep the mouth of my balloon within easy reach," said the professor, "and play with it as an engineer does with his throttle-valve. Sometimes I even tie it shut when I am sailing, but that is dangerous."

"Why dangerous?"

"Because the balloon might ascend suddenly, and the expanding gas burst it."

"Can you see up into the balloon," I asked, "through the mouth?"

"Of course you can, and a beautiful sight it is. You look up through a round window, twenty inches or so in diameter, into the great bag, swelled out fifty or sixty feet in diameter, and perfectly tight, so that every line and veining of the net shows plainly through the silk in exquisite tracery, and wherever the sun strikes it you see a spread of gold and amber melting away in changing colors to the shaded parts. The balloon seems to be perfectly empty, perfectly still, yet it swings you upward and upward like a live thing. You get to feel that your balloon is alive."

"Does it make any noise?"

"Usually not. Now and then there is a creaking of the basket or a rustle of fabric, as you pass from one wind current to another, but as you drift along there is perfect stillness. I know nothing like the peace of a balloon sweeping in a storm. You feel like a disembodied spirit. You have no weight, no bonds; you fly faster than the swiftest express train. More than once Carlotta has raced a train going fifty miles an hour and beaten it."

"Is there danger to a balloon in a thunderstorm?"

"Apparently not, but it is terrifying to be in one. You seem to be at the very point where the lightning starts and the thunder-crash is born. All about you are roarings and blinding flashes, and it rains up on you and down on you, and in on you from all sides. While I never heard of a free balloon being struck by lightning, it is a common thing for operators on the ground even in fair weather to get shocks of atmospheric electricity down the anchor ropes of captive balloons."

Our talk drifted on, and the professor told of exciting times reporting the great yacht races from captive balloons (with reporters turning seasick in the plunging basket), and remarkable phenomena observed from balloons and double colored shadows of balloons (called parhelions) cast on clouds, and wonderful light effects, as when a marveling aëronaut looks down upon a sea of silver clouds bathed in sunshine and through black clefts sees a snowstorm raging underneath.

I was surprised to learn that at very great altitudes, say above three miles, the voice almost fails to serve, or, rather, the rarefied air loses in great part its power of voice transmission, so that in the vast silent spaces of the sky one aëronaut must literally shout to another in the same basket to make himself heard. One would say that the great, calm heavens resent the chattering intrusion of noisy little men.

II

WHICH TREATS OF EXPERIMENTS IN STEERING BALLOONS

IN all their experiments at the farm, Professor Myers and Mme. Carlotta have worked on individual lines, he striving of late years to perfect his skycycle (which is simply a balloon of torpedo shape with a rigging of propellers and fans underneath), while she has been content to gain skill in steering a balloon of ordinary shape by merely moving her body and utilizing varying air-currents, for the wind blows in different directions as you ascend.

It is remarkable how the position of an aëronaut's body may alter a balloon's movements. It is possible, for instance, to make a balloon ascend or descend, without touching valve or ballast, by a simple change of position. Stand with your legs apart, straddling from edge to edge of the basket, and by throwing your weight first on one foot and then on the other you will give a polliwog movement to the big bag above you, and it will go wriggling upward head-first some hundreds of feet. Or if you would make it descend (all this the professor explained to me), stand with your feet together in the middle of the basket, and, catching the balloon-neck at both sides, stretch your arms wide apart so that the fabric forms a chisel-edge, then sway your hips forward as far as you can, then back as far as you can, and keep doing this. Now the wriggling process is reversed; and this time the basket goes first, "tail wagging the dog," and the balloon descends.

This ability to rise or fall at will allows Mme. Carlotta to pass easily from one train of clouds to another, and, by long study of these cross-moving aërial trains, she is able to pick out the one she wants for a certain destination with almost the precision of a foot-passenger selecting his particular street-car or changing from one to another. And in descending she has learned to steer forward or back, to left or right, by tipping the basket foot-board in the direction she wishes to take. The balloon follows the lowest edge of the foot-board as a ship follows her rudder.

An almost incredible instance of the skill attained by Carlotta in these experiments was furnished some dozen years ago at Ottawa, where she made an ascension never forgotten by the people of that city. It was a grand occasion in honor of Queen Victoria's gift of the Crystal Palace to her loyal subjects, and Canada had rarely seen such a gathering. Twenty-five thousand people, as was estimated, were packed inside the Exposition grounds to see the aëronaut rise to the clouds. And there at the appointed time stood Carlotta on a raised platform, with the multitude about her, waiting for the balloon. She wore a short skirt over a gymnasium suit, and made an attractive picture with her fine figure and golden-bronze hair. So thought various city dignitaries, who chatted with her admiringly while the crowd surged about them.

Meantime Professor Myers was anxiously watching the manœuvers of some Indians hired by a committee to tow the balloon from gas-works two miles distant, where it had been filled. This was rather against the professor's judgment, for the Rideau River, flowing by the grounds, offered an obstacle that could be overcome only with the help of canoes and tow-lines; and to paddle a big balloon across a river, a fresh-filled, hard-tugging balloon, is not a thing to be undertaken lightly. And in spite of all their skill these Indians found themselves presently lifted into the air, canoes and all (oh, they were badly frightened Indians!), not quite clear of the water, but high enough to make it doubtful if they would ever reach shore, and highly interesting to the crowd which pressed down to the river, even into the river, in well-meant efforts to help, and dragged the balloon up the bank and along toward the platform with such eagerness that they tore great rents in it that let out the gas in volumes.

In an instant, as happens in crowds, the balloon became the center of a struggling mass of people, who slowly pressed in from all sides to see what the matter was. Now, when twenty-five thousand people are all pressing slowly toward one point, it is apt to fare ill with those at that point; and had not Carlotta acted on a flash of inspiration there would surely have been disaster in that merciless crush. She looked over the shouting, swaying multitude, and in a second saw the danger – saw women held helpless and fainting in that jam of bodies; saw one way, and only one, to save the situation, and took that way. Stepping off the platform, she ran lightly and swiftly over heads and shoulders, packed solid, and came to the balloon. Such was the people's fright that they scarcely felt her pass.

"You can't go up," cried her husband; "the balloon is a wreck."

"I must go up," she answered; "if I don't these people will be crushed to death."

"There's a hole in her big enough to drive a team through," he protested; but already she was in the basket, and a great cheer arose.