Viewing page 334 of 372

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Saturday at Baodeck 
??? Digest
  23 Feb. 1907.

SOME RECORDS IN BALLOONING.

THE record flights made by balloonists are registered and reflected upon by a  writer in The Car (London, January 23), under the heading "Aerial Records." He says that the palm for long-distance ballooning must be awarded to that very famous aeronaut, Count de la Vaulx. The ??? has performed many extraordinary feats, but greatest achievement was his trip with Count  Castillon de Saint-Victor in October, 1900, in  the ??? (aerial) ship Centaure, from Paris to Kovos???heff, in Russia, almost 1,200 miles. This remarkable flight, the writer notes, ousted from pride ??? place the record that had been held for forty-one ???  by Mr. Wise, who, in company with three other intrepid aeronauts, started from St. Louis,  U.S.A.,  on June 23,1859, and did not again touch earth until, when nearly dead, they brought their 1,150-mile voyage to a conclusion in the State of New York. Other voyages are recalled as follows:

     "The exact distance covered by Captain Goossens, when in the autumn of 1903 he and a companion were caught in a  gale and were carried for sixteen hours from Berlin to La Rochelle and back to Calais, did not transpire, but in all probability it was not  less than the 1,665 kilometers that Louis Goddard traveled on September 19 and 20, 1898, and considerably more than the distance, 835 miles, that Mr. Balsan journeyed on the occasion upon which his balloon carried him from Vincennes to Opozno, in Russia. Count Castillon de Saint-Victor journeyed to Sweden in 1899, when he voyaged from Paris to Vesterwick in twenty-four hours less forty-five minutes,  the distance being 825 miles; while in 1870 the neighboring country of Norway provided an alighting spot for Mr. Paul Rolier, when, during the siege of Paris in that year, he traveled in a postal balloon from that city to Liffeld, 774 miles away."

[[Picture.]]
THE DIRIGIBLE BALLOON "LA PATRIE."
Photographed while flying at 25 miles an hour. This is the most successful of dirigible balloons to date. It was used recently by the French military authorities for an experiment in dropping explosives.

. . . voyage of peculiar importance, we are told, was the trip of ??? miles that Miss Moulton accomplished in 1903, from St. Cloud Cleinwierau, near Breslau, in the Centaure, managed by Count Castillon de Saint-Victor. This is believed to be a woman's record distance. The prize-winner was about to visit friends in Germany, and, sending on her luggage in advance, determined to pro??? as far as she could by balloon. That a  nineteen-hour sail in had been previously held by M. David, who, in December, 1904,  journeyed from Nantes to Maeseyck, close to the Belgian-Dutch frontier,  a distance of just under 500 miles, or about eighty miles farther than  the journey accomplished by Lieutenant Lahn last September, when he won the Gordon Bennett Trophy for the United States with a voyage that resulted in his being conveyed from Paris to the Demesne Farm, Fylingdale, near Whitby, in the course of 22½ hours.
     "It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon Mr.Leslie Bucknall's recent balloon trip to the Alps, 420 miles in sixteen hours, as the details will  be fresh in the memory; but it may be put on record that when Count de la Vaulx, starting in Paris toward the end of September, 1093, landed at Carlam Hill, six miles northeast of Hull, thereby accomplishing the first voyage from Paris to this country, he  and his companions, Count D'Oultremont and Captain Voyer, in 17 hours 40 minutes traveled 360 miles, or about ten miles farther than the great Nassau balloon achieved on that famous voyage on November 7, 1836, when in eighteen hours it traveled from Auxhall Gardens to Weilburg in the Duchy of Nassau."
     Records in altitude are graphically shown on the diagram which we reproduce. It will be seen that the celebrated ascent of Messrs. Glaisher and Coxwell is probably still unsurpassed, tho it may be that it was exceeded by Berson and Suering. In both these ascents the aeronauts were unconscious, or nearly so, at their greatest altitude--an eloquent fact in itself. With the present interest in aeronautics it will not be long before there exists some annual authority for these records. At present, the author notes, the standard handbooks and "almanacs" are silent on the subject.