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"WHERE ARE YOU?" I replied in as loud a tone as I could command. "Up here in the tree-top; help me down if you please." He appeared decidedly astonished and asked, "How shall I help you?" I told him to catch the rope that I threw him and try to pull me down a little nearer the ground. He pulled as hard as he could, but could not bring me nearer than ten feet, and my car turning over in the trees, nearly bottom side up, I had to hang in the basket with my head very nearly downwards. I saw that the man was a powerful one, and felt that he could in some way relieve me from my position. He told me to slide head foremost down the rope and he would catch me. I did so, when he threw his arms up and caught me about my shoulders and lifted me to the ground. I did not sustain any injury of any kind. I found that the name of the man who had assisted me was Mr. Charles Sheva, and that I had landed in the Columbia bottom, sixteen miles north from where I started, and that I was within two miles of the Mississippi river. I descended to the earth at 6:20 P.M., and was thirty-seven minutes in making my voyage. The highest altitude that I reached, according to the reading of my barometer, was six thousand feet. The temperature at this point was 59 degrees. The temperature at the earth, when I left it was 68 degrees. The Sheva family hospitably entertained me on Sunday night and Mr. Sheva assisted me next morning to get my balloon OUT OF THE TREES. He also brought me and the Amazon to the city. I could not express my full gratitude to the farmer who had done so much to assist me, and hope that I may meet his like again frequently in my future landings. This voyage was to me a unique act in the drama of aeronautics, and I would not have missed it for anything, though I confess to a mental chill when my balloon showed such a great particularity for hydrostatics rather than aeronautics, when so close to the rivers. I wish to make another ascent in St. Louis and I have opened negotiations to make my twenty-first ascension next Sunday, when I will start early in the day and try the parachute style of descent in plain view of every spectator in the city. Last evening Miss Wise gave an informal reception at the Planters' house to her inquiring friends and acquaintances. [[new article]] BALLOONING. [[handwritten note]] St Louis Daily Times Oct 16 1877 [[/handwritten note]] Miss Wise Returns to the City from Her Voyage Among the Clouds. The Story of the Trip and the Rescue from a Perilous Position. An Interesting Talk with a Veteran Aeronaut. Miss Wise's aerial voyage from the Grand-avenue Base Ball Park last Sunday evening terminated without an accident, and the fair aeronaut and her balloon are now in the city again and ready for another ascension. A TIMES reporter called to see Professor Wise at his room at the Planters' House yesterday afternoon, and while there had the pleasure of meeting his niece, who had just returned to the city with her balloon. Miss Wise is a tall, fine-looking lady, apparently between 25 and 30 years of age. She is one of Professor Wise's pupils, having made numerous ascensions with him since she was EIGHT YEARS OLD. During the past four years she had been a professional aeronaut, and in that time she has made twenty aerial voyages alone. It was her intention Sunday afternoon to explode the balloon after reaching a height of six thousand feet and descend a la parachute, but owing to the high wind she concluded to postpone the promised explosion until another time. It was nearly dark when the ascent was made, but Miss Wise had no fears at all on that account. The balloon rose to A HEIGHT OF SIX THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED FEET, and then took a direction a little east of north. Some twenty minutes after leaving the ball park, the balloon passed over a bend in the Mississippi River, a few miles above Baden. Miss Wise is afraid of water, she says, for she can't swim, and would be in great danger were the balloon to fall in the river. Her airship took a big dip when over the river Sunday evening and she thought for a time that it would descend to the water, but she threw all her three sand bags, only fifty pounds of ballast, and a little basket she had with her, and the balloon rose again and sailed on through the air, leaving the river bend behind. Soon afterwards the balloon basket began to BRUSH THE TREE TOPS and she heard a couple of voices below. She threw out the drag ropes and cried to the men to catch them, but they answered back that the ropes did not reach them, that they were too short. Then Miss Wise let out more rope, the balloon moving just above the tree tops. [[Column 2]] Finally the men caught the drag ropes and, after a good deal of pulling, succeeded in getting the balloon fastened in the top of one of the trees with the basket some twenty feet nearer the ground, and tipped up sideways so that the aeronaut was compelled to hold on to the ropes to keep from falling out. The basket was some eight feet from the ground, but the men finally managed to pull the aeronaut out head first. Miss Wise was only too glad to have escaped so luckily and wasn't particular about observing THE RULES OF ETIQUETTE. The men who rescued her lived in a cabin near by, and here Miss Wise went as soon as she found that it was useless to try to get the balloon down in the dark, for by this time it was so dark in the woods there that they could scarcely see the balloon at all. One of the men said his name was Sam Sheva, and the other man was his father. Their cabin was about half a mile from the Missouri River, they said, and not much further from the Mississippi River, and some sixteen miles from St. Louis. It was just 6 o'clock by Miss Wise's watch when the balloon caught in the tree, just thirty minutes after the ascent was made at the ball park. It was several miles to the nearest telegraph town, Mr. Sheva said, and so Miss Wise had to give up the idea of sending her uncle and her agent, Mr. John M. Kinney, any word in regard to her whereabouts. Miss Wise accepted the hospitalities offered by her rescuers, and spent the night in their cabin, and slept as soundly there as she would have done at home, for she had been traveling on the cars the two preceding nights, and was nearly worn out. All got up very early next morning, and before 7 o'clock the tree in which the balloon had been lodged was cut down, and the balloon packed away, READY FOR TRANSPORTATION. Mr. Sheva hitched up his team and brought Miss Wise and her balloon to St. Louis on a wood wagon, arriving here shortly after 2 o'clock yesterday afternoon. Miss Wise intends remaining in St. Louis several days and if the weather permits will make another balloon ascension next Sunday, exploding the balloon this time and returning to the ground as near as possible to the place from which the ascent was made. Prof. Wise will also remain in the city a few days, but does not expect to make any ascensions while here. He is getting too old, he says, to do much active ballooning, but has not given it up altogether and never expects to. He is still an enthusiast on the subject, as much so, perhaps, as he was forty years ago. His father intended him for the Episcopal ministry, the Professor says, but he soon god tired of studying theology and went into a piano manufactory at his home in Lacaster County, Pennsylvania. Young Wise, or Weiss, as he then spelled his name, for his parents were German, soon got tired of working for other people and he resolved never to do a stroke of work again except for pleasure. He had been A GREAT KITE-PLYER in his boyhood, having sent up many a dog and cat with his kites, and he now determined to make a balloon. He went to Prof. Mitchell, of Jefferson College, Philadelphia, and learned the theoretical part of ballooning. Then he found an old table of logarithms and studied on it until he could make a balloon of the shape and size he wanted, and he then gathered together the necessary materials and made a balloon. His first ascension was made in this balloon at Philadelphia in 1835 and it was a complete success. Three years afterwards he advertised in Philadelphia that he would go up in a balloon, make an artificial cloud of sifted ashes, and explode his balloon above the cloud. This was successfully accomplished, and he was going to repeat the feat, but was prohibited by the Police Board of Philadelphia on account of THE GREAT DANGER, as they supposed, of the experiment. Since then Professor Wise has made several thousand balloon ascensions, more perhaps than any other man in the whole history of the world, and 458 of his ascensions have been aerial voyages of over one hundred miles, the longest being 1,100 miles, the one he made in 1859 from St. Louis to New York. He has yet to meet with his first accident in ballooning. Of course he has lost a number of balloons, and has landed in all sorts of places and in all sorts of ways, but as yet he has never been thrown out of a balloon or had an unexpected explosion or bursting of the balloon in the air, or met with any serious accident whatsoever. Once he came down in the middle of Lake Erie; another time in the middle of Long Island Sound, and another time in the juniper boggy country of Northern Maine, but he managed in all three instances to escape unhurt. He has taken up several thousand people in his life-time, some of them prominent college professors, scientists, journalists and men of other professions. He has contributed a good deal of valuable information to meteorological science, aiding Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institute, in establishing the United States Signal Service and ascertaining for the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, the effect which Geggie's comet in 1873 had on the earth's atmosphere. In making the ascension for this purpose Miss Wise, who accompanied her uncle, had the skin all peeled off her nose and cheeks by THE INTENSE HEAT of a strata of hot air, through which the balloon passed in its ascent. Prof. Wise is called the father of ballooning in America, for although several aerial voyages had been made in this country before his first ascension in 1835, yet he did more than all others in placing American ballooning alongside that of England and France, and the British Encyclopaedia gives him credit for it. The Professor is a regular contributor to several scientific magazines, and has published two large works on ballooning. The only balloon ascension failure of any consequence that he has ever been connected with was that of the Graphic a few years ago. He inteded to cross the Atlantic in this balloon, but it burst before the time for the start arrived, and his financial backers refused to provide him with another in its place on account of being financially crippled by Jay Cooke's failure, which happened about that time. THE GRAPHIC was not built by Prof. Wise or under his directions, and if it had been the Professor is [[Column 3]] certain that it would never have bursted, for he never yet made a balloon that couldn't stand any test to which it was put. Prof. Wise is confident that an aerial voyage scross the Atlantic can be made, and with as much safety as a voyage in any of the ocean steamers crossing the Atlantic. He is also confident that air will yet be navigated by flying machines like the ocean now is by ships, or like the air is now traversed by birds. Prof. Wise was well acquainted with Donaldson, who lost his life with the Chicago newspaper reporter, Grimwood, on Lake Michigan a couple of years ago in one of Barnum's balloons. In fact, Donaldson, like nearly every aeronaut in this country, took his first lessons from Prof. Wise. He was a brave, daring man, the Professor says, in fact too much so to make a successful balloonist. His balloon was a frail thing, with weak spots all over it, and Donaldson knew it, too, but he would not patch it up or wait for more favorable weather, or even have a steamer go out into the lake to keep track of him. He made the ascension, and the balloon went to pieces in the storm and dropped into the lake, and both occupants lost their lives. Prof. Wise has never ascended quite so high as some of the European aeronauts, but he has been as high as four and a half miles a number of times, and the air is rare enough at this height to make wrinkled faces smooth and dried apples look fresh. [[new article]] The St. Louis Times. POLAR BALLOONING. Theories in Regard to it by Prof. Wise, the Celebrated Aeronaut. EDITOR OF THE TIMES:--An article in a late Cincinnati Star headed "Poleward by Balloon" calls to mind one on the same subject I furnished the Polytechnic Review of Philadelphia some months ago. According to the law of compensation between heat and cold in air and water, there are constant interchangeable currents of the two elements between the equator and the pole. The subcurrents of the ocean flow into the polar basin as the water comes warmed from equatorial heat, and these rising to the surface give out their aqueous vapor while flowing back as a surface current. During the six months of polar darkness immense mountains of ice are formed by the deposition of this vapor, and when the sun mounts above the polar horizon, pouring its long-continued flood of light and heat for six months into and around it, the immense icebergs met by arctic explorers are sent adrift to float southward by the surface current. These are the stumbling blocks that impede the explorers always. The sea of incumbent atmosphere obeys the same law of compensation between heat and cold. The six months' warming of the polar basin gives rise to a most congenial climate in that undiscovered archipelago, well known to the wild fowl, fox, reindeer, etc., all of which attest it in their migrations thither. The colder air outside the circle of 82 degrees naturally flows into this thermal basin, there to become rarified and thus caused to ascend and flow outside as an upper current. The balloon suggests itself as the most available instrumentality with which to get into the polar basin, as well as to get out of it. We have more than surmise for a polar archipelago, if not strong presumptive proof. An area of our globe as great as that of the Kingdom of France is worth looking after--especially so, wherein nature and nature's law indicate to us is a country more than ordinarily blessed with the elements of happy life and being. The ancient Eden may be found there. The sun shining against these icy walls must inevitably produce a life-giving influence on animal and vegetable growth. The mellowed six months' winter night receives a congenial moisture, and the aurora borealis, aided by the moon, must give a magic beauty to the heavens above. These are the treasures that are guaranteed in nature's law that haunt the ambition of the arctic explorer more than does a "northwest passage," and they haunt mine, because there are more things in heaven and earth than philosophy has ever dreamed of. JOHN WISE. JOURNAL OFFICE, LOUISIANA, Mo., October 25, 1877.
