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Lowe's American Civil War Observation Balloons -Fiddlersgreen.net paper model
Lowe's balloon section in the American Civil War When the nineteenth century dawned, John Wise was the dominating figure in American ballooning circles; he will be remembered chiefly for his scheme to cross the Atlantic in a balloon.  His only equal in the New World at that time
was his constant rival, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, who was twenty-five
years younger. Lowe made his first balloon ascent on 17 July 1858
and, like Wise, soon became obsessed with the notion of crossing
the Atlantic in a balloon and lost no time in endeavoring to carry
out this plan. By 1859 he had raised sufficient money in New York
to enable him to proceed with the building of a very large balloon,
first named City of New York and later Great Western. It was of
no less than 724,000 cu.ft capacity, with a diameter of 104 ft,
and was more than 200 ft tall. It was thus the largest balloon
built up to that time. As Wise had planned to do with his balloon
Atlantic, Lowe also carried a lifeboat below the enclosed gondola.
Professor Joseph Henry, a recognised scientist of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., who had also acted as adviser to Wise, suggested now that Lowe also should make a long cross-country balloon trip before he attempted again to cross the Atlantic by air. Lowe followed this advice and left immediately for Cincinnati with his balloon Enterprise of 20,130 cu.ft which he used for exhibition purposes. After waiting some time for fair weather he finally set out in April 1861 on a long trip across Virginia and, when finally landing in South Carolina, he had covered a distance of some 620 miles. Unexpected strong winds blowing from the north had forced him down at Pea Ridge near the town of Unionville (now Union). During Lowe's balloon ascent the Civil War between the Northern and Confederate States had started, and he was imprisoned as a suspected Yankee spy, but soon released again after satisfying the suspicious Southerners that his balloon trip had served scientific purposes only. His return trip proved difficult and Lowe completely abandoned his long-distance ballooning plans to present himself instead to President Lincoln in Washington to offer his services. The President appointed Lowe chief of the Army's aeronautical division, under the command of General McClellan, whose forces had taken up their positions on the Potomac river. 
The American Civil War became a testing ground for new weapons and practices, and foreign military observers, not least from Germany, carefully investigated these military developments. One such young German officer on a leave of absence, who was attached to the Federal forces for a while, was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who noted the activities of Lowe and his balloon section. On an exploring trip to the sources of the Mississippi river, von Zeppelin later received his own balloon initiation with an ascent at Minneapolis. After his return to Germany and subsequent retirement from military service, von Zeppelin was eventually to devote all his time and fortune to his idea of a rigid airship and, by sheer personal perseverance, ultimately bring forth a number of impressive Zeppelin dirigibles.
LOTS MORE INFOROMATION ABOUT CIVIL WAR BALLOONING... The United States that was rocked by the outbreak of civil
war in April of 1861 was a nation infatuated with balloon flight.
The exploits of such balloonists as John Wise, John LaMountain
and Thaddeus Lowe had been front-page news for years. Reporters
had written breathtaking accounts of the ordeal endured by Wise
and LaMountain in their stormhounded voyage across Lake Ontario
in 1859; LaMountain had made the headlines again in that year
when he suffered through four days in the Canadian wilderness
after his balloon went astray. Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe, part showman and part serious balloonist, combined a talent for promotion with his aeronautical skills. Born in New Hampshire in 1832, Lowe exhibited a boyhood curiosity about aeronautics, sometimes using kites to send aloft the family cat. By 1854, having worked for a time as an assistant to a traveling magician, Lowe had decided on a career in ballooning. After four years of study he built his first balloon; he soon gained a reputation as an accomplished aeronaut. His well-trumpeted plan to cross the Atlantic by balloon, though it failed, made him a national figure. And his unplanned touchdown in the heart of secessionist South Carolina on a pre-Atlantic test flight in the spring of 1861 left him thinking about how balloons might serve the Union in the growing conflict between North and South. Balloons had never been deployed by an American army, though their use had been suggested-and spurned-at least twice before. In 1840, after United States troops had tried in vain for five years to put down the rebellious Seminole Indians of Florida, an imaginative Army colonel suggested that balloon reconnaissance could help locate hidden enemy encampments. Two years later, when the Florida Indian wars finally drew to a close, the aerial- observation scheme was still tied down by military red tape. Not long after the outbreak of the Mexican War in 1846, John Wise had come up with his own proposal for military aeronautics. Wise's widely publicized plan called for the bombardment from a manned balloon of the powerful fortress of San Juan de U16a in the strategic Mexican port city of Veracruz. One commentator noted that it would be a "very troublesome matter to enlist the volunteers" to lob bombshells from Wise's proposed altitude of 5,000 feet. The proposal failed to get the endorsement of the U.S. War Department. By the time of the Civil War, the high command was generally more receptive to the idea of aeronautics. Nevertheless, the Union Army's balloon operations got off to a chaotic start. The patriotic aeronauts who rushed to volunteer as balloon observers had to make their own arrangements with individual officers; unlike the 18th Century French aerostiers, the American military balloonists retained their civilian status. Their equipment, for the most part, was not well suited to the stresses of tethered flight, and most of the officers and soldiers with whom they served lacked even the most elemental understanding of the special requirements and frailties of balloons.
Only the adroit Thaddeus Lowe was able to thread his way successfully through the administrative minefields of Washington, and even he had his share of problems. Lowe's acquaintance with Secretary Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution and the warm support of Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase landed him a meeting with Abraham Lincoln. The President listened with interest as Lowe outlined a plan for a corps of balloonists who would communicate with the ground by telegraph. The War Department promptly authorized funds to enable Lowe to make a trial ascent from the mall between the Capitol and the unfinished Washington Monument in a balloon named, like the original French war balloon of the 1790s, Enterprise. On June 18, 1861, Lowe and two representatives of the telegraph company rose to an altitude of about 500 feet, from which point they could see for nearly 25 miles in every direction. Lowe dictated a message to President Lincoln: "The city with its girdle of encampments presents a superb scene," he said. "I have pleasure in sending you this first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station."
In late June, Lowe made several tethered ascents from the Union lines outside of Washington, but his position with the Army was complicated somewhat by the continued presence of Wise. The latter had promised to build a balloon for some $200 less than Lowe and thus had received the government's first balloon contract; Lowe, in order to remain in contention as a potential military balloonist, had to content himself with refurbishing the old Enterprise at his own expense. Indeed, during the hectic days of preparation for the first Battle of Bull Run in July, Lowe on one occasion was forced to yield his position at a city gas main while Wise inflated his own balloon with the coal gas that was frequently substituted for hydrogen. Unhappily for the Union cause, Wise's craft was ripped by tree branches on its way to Bull Run and saw no action. (Upbraided by an officer for his failure to take to the air during the Union defeat that ensued, Wise remarked wryly: "The balloon part was just about as good as the fighting part.") Lowe, learning of Wise's undoing, had hurriedly inflated his own balloon, but he was too late: As he rushed toward the scene of battle he was met by a stream of retreating Union soldiers. A few days later Lowe atoned for his tardiness by making a free flight over the Confederate positions near Washington, returning to Union territory on a high altitude air current. It was almost his last trip. Friendly troops, mistaking the approaching Enterprise for a Confederate craft, opened fire on it, and Lowe had to float on until he was out of range. Once back on the ground, he assured anxious Washingtonians that they were in no danger of attack; he also asked the War Department to inform trigger-happy soldiers that all "air vessels seen thus far, and probably that will be seen hereafter, are for Union purposes." Not everyone in the Union high command agreed that balloons could serve a useful purpose. General Winfield Scott, the crusty 75-year-old head of the Army, believed balloons to be "of little use" in military operations, and Scott's objections were all that stood between Lowe and permanent designation as an Army aeronaut. Two days after his nearly tragic free flight in the Enterprise, the young balloonist sought out the commanding general to plead his case. Armed with a handwritten note from the President himself, Lowe went to Scott's Washington headquarters, where an orderly informed him that the general was much too busy to see him. A few hours later he tried again, with the same result. On a third visit he was told that Scott was dining; still later he was advised that the general was asleep. Boiling with indignation, Lowe stormed back to the White House and again appealed to the President for help. Lincoln straightaway donned his stovepipe hat and escorted the frustrated aeronaut to Scott's headquarters, where they were received with promptness and courtesy. One week later Lowe was installed as a regular Union balloonist-at a generous wage of $10 per day-and he was authorized to construct a reconnaissance balloon at the government's expense. While Lowe was persevering in Washington, the theatrical John LaMountain was grabbing most of the early glory in the field. Ascending to 1,400 feet over Fortress Monroe on July 31, he spied out a hidden Confederate camp; three days later he lifted off from the deck of the Union transport Fanny, which thus qualified as the world's first aircraft carrier. LaMountain filed detailed reports after these missions, and drew diagrams showing the enemy's strength and position. "On the left bank of James River about eight or nine miles from Newport News," he said in 6ne dispatch, "is a large encampment of the enemy, from 150 to 200 tents." Along with the balloon's surveillance value to the Union, the mere sight of it bobbing above their encampments unsettled the Confederates. A Northern newspaperman, after interviewing a runaway slave, reported that the Southerners' "rage amounted to a perfect frenzy. Nothing else has occurred which has so much enraged them." Their fury would be short-lived. LaMountain's operations were dependent on his supply of hydrogen gas, which ran out after two weeks. Fortress Monroe's commander, delighted with the aeronaut's work, granted his request to return home to Troy, New York, for a larger balloon and a new gas generator. But when LaMountain reported back to the fort he found a new commander who had little interest in either ballooning or balloonists. Transferred to the Army of the Potomac, which was serving along the stalemated front in northern Virginia, LaMountain made a number of daring free flights. But a chronic inability to share the limelight now put him on an inevitable collision course with Thaddeus Lowe. Lowe had been quietly consolidating his position as the Union's premier aeronaut, an enterprise that was greatly simplified in August by the departure of the frustrated James Allen and John Wise from Army service. He scored a major breakthrough at Fort Corcoran, Virginia, in September when he directed artillery fire from his airborne perch by telegraphing his observations to the gunners below. Lowe's regular reconnaissance flights also diverted the Confederates to time-consuming efforts at camouflage and deception, most notably the construction of dummy artillery pieces, called "Quaker guns," out of logs and stovepipes. Lowe was clearly rendering yeoman service to his country, and his rising star acquired still more luster when he aroused the interest of General George McClellan, who in November of 1861 replaced Scott as comander of the Union forces. The patronage of McClellan, who rode with Lowe on several tethered ascents, brought Lowe what he had wanted all along: the authority to build more -balloons and to recruit a corps of civilian balloonists. Despite this expansion, it soon became plain that the corps was not big enough to hold both Lowe and LaMountain. Lowe regarded LaMountain's well-publicized free flights as showmanship unredeemed by military value; LaMountain in turn resented McClellan's order that he serve under Lowe. A fusillade of name calling ended with LaMountain's dismissal from Army service in February 1862. Lowe, his position secured, took advantage of the winter lull in the fighting to oversee the construction of six new balloons, stitched by sure-fingered seamstresses. The balloons, each supplied with a mobile hydrogen generator of Lowe's design, along with the requisite rigging, telegraph cable and other equipment, were given suitably patriotic names like Constitution, Washington, United States-and ornamented with elaborate decorations. Lowe also assembled a cadre of aeronauts, including the previously disaffected James Allen and an experienced German-born balloonist, John Steiner. In the spring, Lowe was ordered to join McClellan's army as chief aeronaut in its projected march up the James River to the Confederate capital at Richmond. By this time Lowe had strung out his squadron of balloons in a line that stretched from Union-occupied Port Royal, South Carolina, to the Mississippi River. The performance of Lowe's balloons was one of the few cheering developments during McClellan's unsuccessful bid to seize Richmond. Indeed, at the battle of Fair Oaks, on May 31 and June 1, 1862, Lowe's aerial observations probably staved off a crushing Union defeat. The first day of battle found Lowe on board the Washington, hovering high above the front lines and scanning the horizon for signs of enemy movement. He soon spotted a large concentration of Confederate troops massing for the attack. On the ground, some Union commanders judged that the Southern forces were merely staging a feint, but Lowe could clearly see that an all-out assault was on the way; the telegraphed warnings tapped out from his balloon alerted headquarters in time to dispatch reinforcements to hold the line. On the following day, Lowe went aloft in the Washington once more. Seeing that a major engagement was about to begin, he returned quickly to the ground, intending to switch to the larger balloon Intrepid and ascend to higher altitudes, where he would have a better view of the action below. He commandeered a horse and galloped the six miles to his balloon base, but his mobile gas-generating equipment was not up to inflating the Intrepid as rapidly as the needs of battle required. When the balloon was just half-filled, Lowe calculated that it would take at least another hour before it was airworthy-by then, he knew, the Union lines might well be overwhelmed by regiments of advancing Southerners. Desperate now to be aloft, Lowe hustled his telegraph equipment into the gondola of a third balloon, the smaller Constitution, and cast off, only to find that it, too, lacked the lifting power to rise. "I saw the two armies coming nearer and nearer together," Lowe wrote later. "There was no time to be lost." It occurred to him that it might be possible to transfer gas from the inadequate Constitution to the half-filled Intrepid, thus saving an hour that "would be worth a million dollars a minute." The problem was that Lowe had no equipment to make such a transfer-until he spotted a 10-inch cooking pot sitting nearby. Ordering a soldier to cut the bottom from the pot, Lowe used the remaining portion as a crude pipe to connect the two balloons. The Intrepid was quickly inflated with gas transferred from the Constitution; Lowe and his telegraph operator at last rose far above the battle, and soon were "keeping the wires hot with information." At one point during the fighting, Lowe was instructed to dispatch progress reports at 15-minute intervals; these observations were then relayed to Washington and a worried President Lincoln, who was especially gratified when Lowe finally reported that the Confederate forces had turned back toward Richmond. Lowe's fellow balloonists were given few opportunities to perfor such critical missions. John Starkweather, assigned to Port Royal, South Carolina, was reduced to despair by his cold reception. "I have not had any orders from the general," he wrote to Lowe. "You say you are anxious that every member of the Aeronautic Department should render all the valuable service possible. I am anxious to do the same. All I want is the chance." Aeronaut John Steiner met even more resistance Lowe's fellow balloonists were given few opportunities to perform such critical missions. John Starkweather, assigned to Port Royal, South Carolina, was reduced to despair by his cold reception. "I have not had any orders from the general," he wrote to Lowe. "You say you are anxious that every member of the Aeronautic Department should render all the valuable service possible. I am anxious to do the same. All I want is the chance." Aeronaut John Steiner met even more resistance on the Mississippi. The officers, he reported in his precarious English, say thay know nothing about my balloon business and thay even laugh ad me. Give me a paper from Headquarters to show theas blockheads hoo I am." The South, handicapped by a Union blockade that severely limited the availability of necessary material, was never able to mount a serious challenge in the air. A plucky captain named John Randolph Bryan, innocent of any aerial experience, made a few tentative forays in a cotton hot-air balloon in the spring of 1862. But Captain Bryan's aerial adventures were suspended soon after a well-meaning comrade seeking to aid another soldier whose leg had become ensnarled by the balloon's mooring cable-cut the cable and set Bryan adrift on an involuntary free flight. The Confederates next fielded a gas balloon patched together from sheets of different colored silk, giving rise to the charming legend of a "silk dress" balloon fashioned from the clothing of patriotic daughters of the Confederacy. This balloon enjoyed a brief career before it was captured by Union troops when the boat transporting it went aground. The final Confederate entry, another vision in multihued silk, suffered a similar fate: Snatched from the ground by a strong gust, it was deposited in Union territory, where it became a prisoner of war. Lowe's command too became a casualty of the War. The collapse of McClellan's drive on Richmond and a subsequent change in the Union high command in mid-1862 robbed the Union's top balloonist of his most important military champion. The bureaucratic ineptitude that had beset the balloon corps from the beginning-commands that overlapped, transport vehicles that never arrived, paychecks that appeared with galling infrequency -grew steadily worse. Most disheartening of all was the inactivity: Lowe had to wait from June until December before he was once again ordered into action, this time at Fredericksburg. But he played only a minor role in the battle. It was May 1863 before the Army of the Potomac saw serious action again, in the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lowe made several ascents during this engagement and relayed valuable intelligence to General Joseph Hooker's headquarters, but they would be his last flights for the Union. For the proud and ambitious Lowe, the final insult was the appointment of an officer named Cyrus Comstock as his immediate superior. Lowe was accustomed to a certain free-wheeling latitude in his dealings with the military, but Comstock was a traditionalist who insisted that the balloonist operate through proper military channels and reprimanded him when he failed to do so. Then Comstock cut Lowe's pay from $10 to $6 per day and ordered him to dismiss his father, who had been working with the ground crew. On May 7, nearly two years after his triumphant demonstration flight in Washington, Lowe resigned from the Army. In late June, as the Army of the Potomac marched toward Gettysburg, the balloon corps was officially dissolved. Thirty-five years would pass before an American balloon was again used in battle. But the performance of balloons in the Civil War had convinced a number of foreign observers that lighter-than-air vehicles had a definite role to play in modern warfare. Appropriately enough, balloons were next used for military purposes in France, where the first aeronauts had taken to the air in the closing decade of the 18th Century. From the "Aeronauts- The Epic of Flight Information about confederate Observation Balloons: In comparison with the intrepid efforts of the balloonists on the Union side, the Southern armies had little aerial help. As the Northern army of Grant and Sherman advanced from Fort Monroe, the Confederates under General Johnston had one single observation balloon to keep the threat in view. This was not even a gas balloon, but a cotton Montgolfiere, and one that did not carry its fire aloft with it. Instead it was launched above a stove burning an unpromising mixture of pine nuts which had been soaked in turpentine, so its range was severely limited. A young captain on Johnston's staff, named John Randolph Bryan, made a series of tethered flights to keep the Union forces under observation. Once the balloon had been spotted, every appearance called up a hail of fire, so an entire team of artillery horses was kept to haul the balloon down as fast as possible. To avoid enemy gunfire, Bryan made his last flight at night, in bright moonlight, taking off from woodland outside Yorktown, Virginia. All was going well until a soldier became entangled in the balloon cable, and Bryan and the balloon had to be cut free, to drift helplessly across the enemy lines. Fortunately, the rapidly cooling balloon then began drifting back toward the Confederate positions. Less fortunately, the Southern sentries made the usual mistake of thinking any balloon drifting toward them was hostile, and opened fire on it. It drifted slowly across the York River, but managed to reach the friendly bank on the other side before finally collapsing for lack of warm air in the envelope. Bryan's brave but doomed hot-air balloon was replaced by the much more colorful and glamorous "silk dress balloon." This was made from bolts of silk in assorted colors, all varnished with a mixture made by dissolving railway coach springs in naphtha, which led to a romantic fiction that the material had been made available by Southern women donating their silk ball gowns. Unfortunately, it was even less successful than its predecessor. Because the Confederates had no field generators, it had to be inflated at the Richmond Gas Works, in Virginia, and towed to its launching site by lashing it to a locomotive on the York River Railroad. When the fighting moved away from the railroad route in summer 1862, the balloon was lashed to the deck of the Confederate armed steam tug Teaser on the James River On 4 July 1862, the tug ran aground on a sand bar at Turkey Bend, where it was damaged by the Union ironclad Monitor, and the balloon was captured. A second silk balloon followed, and this was inflated at Charleston
Gas Works in West Virginia. But in July 1863 it escaped from its
moorings with no one aboard, drifted across the lines and was
captured by Union soldiers. By then both sides had rather lost
interest in balloons: the South from their lack of success in
operating them, and the North from bureaucratic inertia. Yet less
than a decade later, military balloons would once again come into
their own, in the Franco-Prussian War. (see model of the Paris-siege
escape balloon).
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Chip,