Careers of Danger and Daring Part 9

Before I went inside I told my wife to note the time by her watch, and if I did not come out before one hundred and twenty seconds had pa.s.sed to have the men drag me out. You see, I knew I could hold my breath one hundred and twenty seconds, but no longer.

"Well, we carried out the plan, and I freed the cords in less than my limit of time; then came the uncanny part of it--at least, it seemed so to me. I had read that hydrogen will not transmit sound, but had never tested it. It is true I had at various times taken hydrogen into my lungs, but never had I tried to speak in hydrogen. Now was my chance, and, with all my remaining breath I shouted as loud as I could inside that balloon. Think of it; there were my wife and the men a few feet distant, with only the thinnest tissue of silk between us, and a gas that was like nothing. Yet my cry, that would have reached perhaps half a mile in air, could not penetrate that little void. To those outside the balloon it was as if I had not opened my lips. They heard nothing, not even a whisper. I believe you might fire a cannon inside a bag of hydrogen, and no faintest rustle of the discharge would reach your ears.

So, you see, a world of hydrogen would be a voiceless world."

"Did you say you have breathed hydrogen?" I asked.

"Yes; I have breathed it up to the danger-point. I know all the sensations. There is first a mild exhilaration, then a sense of sickening and head-throbbing, and finally a delicious languor that leads into stupor. When you get there it is time to stop. In making ascensions we have to be very careful not to breathe too much gas from the balloon-neck which hangs open over the basket. More than one aeronaut has been gradually overcome without realizing that he was in danger."

The professor went on to tell of other singular things about this subtle gas, notably that, speaking within limits, the higher you want a balloon to rise, the _less_ hydrogen you must put in it. If you fill a balloon full of hydrogen it will rise to no great height (and is very apt to burst), since the gas has no s.p.a.ce to expand in, and the way to keep a balloon rising is to make it expand more and more as it goes up, each foot of added volume displacing a foot of the air-ocean and to that extent adding buoyancy.

"General Hazen and I," said the professor, "once planned that some day, when we got an appropriation, we would go up in a balloon having a capacity of, say, forty thousand cubic feet, but carrying at the ground only ten thousand cubic feet of hydrogen--in other words, in a shrunken, quarter-filled balloon. Of course as we rose and the air became rarefied this hydrogen would expand against the decreasing air-pressure, and at a height of two miles our original ten thousand feet of gas might have swelled to twenty thousand feet, at five miles to thirty thousand feet, and so on. The last ten thousand feet of expansion would have brought us to no one knows what height, but certainly, we calculated, to the greatest height ever reached by a balloonist."

He explained that the balloon record of seven miles claimed for Glaischer and c.o.xwell, the English aeronauts, is not reliable, since the barometer used in that famous ascension (it was made at Wolverhampton, England, in 1862) could not register above five miles, and what was accomplished beyond that height is matter of pure conjecture and must be less than might be done by the Hazen-Myers plan, since Glaischer's balloon (by a serious oversight) was started on its flight nearly full of hydrogen, instead of nearly empty.

"Oh," exclaimed the professor, with regretful look, "why don't some of our very rich men think of these things!"

IV

THE STORY OF A BOY WHO RAN AWAY IN A BIG BALLOON

ONE of the professor's hobbies is that gas-balloons are better and safer than the hot-air kind, although the latter cost less to operate. Your hot-air balloon goes up with a rush, but comes down again as soon as it cools; and in the coming down lies the danger. A gas-balloon, on the other hand, stays up as long as you keep gas in it, and the professor's secret of varnishing holds gas like a trap.

As to the ordinary use of hot-air balloons for parachute dropping, the professor has only condemnation. A parachute, says he, is a sin and a disgrace--a thing to be prohibited by law. The parachute kills more people every year (the professor still is talking) than many a battle, and kills them in unpleasant ways: drops them on live electric wires, which shock them to death; drops them in lakes, where they are drowned, or in the ocean, where they are eaten by sharks; drops them in trees, where they catch by their coat-collars and choke to death; drops them on sharp railings, which spear them through; drops them--but the professor's list (backed by statistics, be it said) is too long and gruesome. It is only fair to add that I have a friend, Leo Stevens, a professional aeronaut, who has made thousands of drops from hot-air balloons and claims that nothing is safer than a parachute, and says he can steer one in its downward sailing so as to avoid dangerous landing-places, although he does admit numerous hair-breadth escapes, as when he dropped from a parachute two miles out at sea, this at Long Branch in 1898, and was only saved by his life-preserver and the courage of some fishermen, or again when De Ive, his partner in ballooning ventures, dropped with him on one occasion from a big balloon (one parachute was suspended on either side), and landed in Lake Canandaigua and was drowned. "Oh, there's no doubt a man takes chances on a parachute," said Stevens, "but I like it."

There is a singular thing about parachutes, Stevens contends, not sufficiently considered by Professor Myers in his experiments. The professor, with his usual thoroughness, has tested all shapes and kinds of parachutes by dropping them from a captive balloon with a sand-bag hitched on instead of a man. The dropping was done by a fuse which would burn the supporting rope and at a given moment set the parachute free, just as a man under the parachute would cut it free. And in a large number of cases the parachute did not open in time to save the sand-bag man from destruction on the ground.

"That proves," argues the professor, "that parachutes are extremely dangerous."

"Nothing of the sort," answers Leo Stevens; "it only proves that there is a big difference between a sand-bag man and a real man. The sand-bag is dead weight, and the man is live weight. A parachute will open for the one where it won't open for the other."

"Why will it," queries the professor, "if the man and the sand-bag weigh the same?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "STEVENS CAME DOWN ONCE WITH A PARACHUTE TWO MILES OUT IN THE ATLANTIC OCEAN--AND WAS PROMPTLY RESCUED."]

"I don't know why, but it will," Stevens insists. "If what you say were true I'd be dead long ago, and my wife, and all my a.s.sistants."

I well remember my first visit to aeronaut Stevens at his little balloon establishment on Third Avenue, a rambling, go-as-you-please attic, with things strewn about anyhow, lengths of balloon-cloth hanging from rafters for the varnish to dry, crinkly yellow segments of balloons heaped near a sewing-machine that was st.i.tching them into spheres, rows of hot-air balloons from past seasons ranged along on shelves in tight bundles, models of flying-machines, all kinds of parachutes, including one in red, white, and blue, made to take up a dog, and in various dusty corners photographs of Leo Stevens walking a tight rope, Leo Stevens rising to the clouds over waving mult.i.tudes, Leo Stevens (and his big umbrella) soaring down to earth from the height of twenty steeples, swinging with dancing-master grace from the bar of his trapeze. I liked this place for the good-natured faces of "Kid" Benjamin, who was scooping cold salmon out of a can when I came in, and a young lady with long eyelashes, who was running the machine.

Leo Stevens was out, said this young lady; he was seeing some patent lawyers about his new air-ship, but she was Mrs. Stevens, and could she do anything for me? I asked various questions, and she answered them from a wide practical knowledge. She had made dozens of balloons and parachutes--yes, and used them, too. It was "Kid" Benjamin who offered this latter information, remarking that she was "grand on a parachute."

Mrs. Stevens smiled, and explained that she had never made an ascension in her life until the previous summer, and then only because her husband was in a fix through the failure of another woman to appear. A balloon race had been advertised between two lady aeronauts, and when the time came one of them, Miss Nina Madison, was missing. Rather than have the thing a failure and a big crowd disappointed, Mrs. Stevens agreed to go up. She would take Miss Nina's place and race the professional. And she did it, and she won the race.

"You see," she said, "I didn't feel nervous as another woman might, because I'd been living with balloons for years. Besides they hitched me fast to the parachute ropes so I couldn't have fallen if I'd wanted to.

It was lovely going up; everybody said we made a beautiful ascension, and the two balloons kept so close together that the other lady and I were talking all the way. At last, when we were up about three thousand feet, she called out that my balloon was settling and for me to cut. But I called back: 'Cut yourself,' and, sure enough, she did in a minute, and I watched her parachute open out and sink and get smaller and smaller, until she reached the ground. A few minutes later, when I saw my balloon had really settled, I cut, too. H-o-o-o, what a sensation!

You know those awful dreams where you fall and fall? Well, it's just like that for two or three seconds, until your parachute fills wide and springs you up against the ropes. Then you sail down, down, with a lovely easy motion until you get close to the ground. But look out for the landing. Once I struck in a treetop. And you're liable to come down on houses or anything."

"You're liable to come down in the middle of a lake," put in "Kid"

Benjamin.

"Do you go up?" said I to the "Kid," whose hands and face showed black smears from painting balloon-cloth. He was certainly not over eighteen.

"Do I?" he answered, with a grin. "I made more'n twenty ascensions and drops last summer."

"He's the one," said Mrs. Stevens, "who carried that boy up hanging from the parachute ropes. Don't you remember? At Coney Island? The boy was helping hold the balloon, and when she started his foot got caught."

"And he went up hanging by his foot?"

The "Kid" nodded. "Yep, stuck fast in the rigging by one shoe. As I sat on the trapeze bar there was that boy forty feet above me kicking and yelling. Say, you'd never guess what he was yelling about."

"I suppose he was afraid?"

The "Kid" shook his head. "No, sir; he didn't seem to mind the eight hundred feet we'd gone up, not a bit. What worried him was sixty cents in pennies and nickels that had spilled out of his pants pockets while he was upside down."

Then the "Kid" explained how he postponed his parachute drop on this occasion and got down safely, boy and all, by letting the balloon cool off and gradually settle to the ground.

"Isn't a parachute pretty long when it hangs down?" I asked.

"Certainly. It's thirty-five feet from where she hitches on t' the balloon to where you sit on the bar. That's length o' ropes and length o' cloth both."

"Then, how can you cut her loose from 'way down on the bar?"

"I'll tell you," put in Mrs. Stevens. "You just pull a tape that hangs down inside the parachute from a cutaway-block at the parachute head.

The holding-rope pa.s.ses through that block, and there's a knife-blade in the block over the rope. The tape pulls the knife-blade down, and away you go. It's one of my husband's inventions." She was plainly very proud of her husband.

Presently entered Leo Stevens himself, a surprisingly young man for such a veteran, scarcely over thirty, the explanation being that he began ballooning as a mere child. Before he was ten he had gained some mastery of slack-wire feats, and at thirteen he was known over the country as Prince Leo, a marvel of the air, in black and gold, making the fortune of some gentlemen who exploited him.

His arrival recalled the object of my visit, which was to get from him some practical ideas for balloon and parachute experiments on a small scale, the sort of thing boys might undertake in their own backyards; and, on learning this, Stevens caught my idea at once. He knew just what I wanted, and was glad to help me. He liked boys himself, and we settled down forthwith to a consideration of segments and materials and dimensions and, after a little planning and measuring, he had the problem solved.

"A hot-air balloon is the easiest and cheapest for boys to make," said Stevens, "and it goes up with more of a rush than a gas balloon. So we'll tell them how to make a hot-air balloon. I remember a boys'

balloon picnic that I got up one summer at Chautauqua Lake while I was making ascensions there. What fun those boys did have! We sent up a kitten in a strawberry basket, strapped fast, you know, so she couldn't fall out, and the basket hung from the parachute by a time fuse that burned loose about a thousand feet up, and down came the whole thing, parachute, kitten, and all, sailing beautifully and landing as easily as you please. It never hurt the kitten at all. But the balloon drifted nearly a mile away across a swamp and stuck in a big tree. What a time those boys had chasing it and climbing after it and slopping home with it after dark through the swamp, with lanterns and torches! I suppose they got well spanked, a good many of them, but boys don't mind."

"How big was this balloon?"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"About eleven feet high, inflated; that's a good size. I mean eleven feet high inflated, but the segments must be cut out eighteen feet long to allow for the curve. See," and he made a sketch of a single segment.

"There must be fourteen segments like this, each one eighteen feet long and two feet wide at the widest part, then tapering to a point at one end, the top, and to a width of five inches at the other end, the mouth, which must be left open. These segments are made from ordinary sheets of tissue paper, first pasted into long sheets (use ordinary starch paste) and then cut out after the pattern. Then the fourteen segments must be pasted together lengthwise along the edges, and they will form a balloon with enough lifting power to take up a parachute and small pa.s.senger, say a kitten or a puppy."

"We must tell them how to fill this balloon with hot air," I suggested.

"That's so," said Stevens. "Well, it's very simple. They must dig a trench, in the yard or somewhere, five feet long and one foot deep, with a hole dug at one end for a fire. Then they must cover over the trench with pieces of tin and spread dirt over that, and boards over all; this is for a good draught. Then they must make a fire in the hole at one end of the trench out of barrel-staves or anything that will give a hot flame, and toward the last they might throw on a little kerosene.

That's exactly the way we make our fires for big ascensions.

"At the other end of the trench they must fix a length of stove-pipe sticking straight up out of the draught-hole into the mouth of the balloon and four or five boys must stand around on fences and boxes to hold the side of the balloon away from the fire which will shoot high above the chimney. Many a big hot-air balloon has been burned up that way on a windy day, and in our ascensions we have dozens of ropes sewn all over the balloon sides; we call them wind guys, so that men can pull the cloth away from the fire while it's filling. Say, talking about boys getting spanked, I must tell you a story."