TEN MILES UP

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 401, 9 December 1932, Page 3

TEN MILES UP

PICCAUD'S ASCENT BALLOONIST RECOUNTS HIS' MEMORABLE, EXPERIENCE. VALUE TO SCIENCE. What does the world look like from ten miles up ? What are the possibilities opened up by my ascents into the stratosphere Both questions are difficult to an- . swer. The outcome of my experiments is not to be published to the world for some time to come. But the results ' can be regarded as noteworthy from any standpoint. Meteorology, navigation, astronomy, and many other fields bave been assisted. And the ultimate benefit, I may add, will go to the man in the street. Man is not tied to the earth'. My first trip into the stratosphere last year proved to me that he may remain in a closed cabin for seventeen hours without bad effect. He may j probably rise to any height of which his machines are capable, says Professor Piccard in "Tit-Bits." In the Silence of Space. . On this second venture into the unknown my balloon rose with such , speed that in three hours we had reached our maximum height, and we had, therefore, no little time in which to take measurements. During all those hours we were far too busy to pay much attention to the appearance of the world. We discovered to our astonishment that the sky above the cloud layer is not blue, but blaclc and grey. The light was so dim that we could distinguish few features of the earth other than the lakes and seas. The latter shone like black mirrors, and it was the outline of the Adriatic Sea that enabled me to land in Italy. The landscape itself appeared as a flat, grey plain into which event the mountains had sunk. Everything was silent. The stratosphere is reached seven miles above the earth's surface, and it is undoubtedly another sphere of existence. Not all our instruments would properly function within it. We suffered, too, from extreme cold. Our thermometers registered the equivalen -of 64.8 degrees of frost. Our fingers were so stiff and frozen that we handled pcns and pencils with the greatest difficulty. . But this warmth and cold, I believe, can be controlled. My ascent last year was made almost unbearable because the blackpainted cabin absorbed too much of the sun's heat. White paint, on the other hand, refracts too much'. If I again rise into the stratorsphere, orange will probably be the colour of the gondola. Progress was made slow by the strong air currents, but I hope one day to ascend into the stratosphere in an aeroplane. I hope to be a pioneer in the regions where the great highway of the future will undoubtedly be. Hitherto we have known but little of the stratosphere. Kites and balloons carrying apparatus recording temperature, dryness, and altitude, have afforded iirformation in the past. My flights open up a wider field. We know that as distance from the earth increases, so oxygen and the other elements necessary to our life become more rare. We know that the atmosphere up to a certain height is arranged in l'ayers and then in columns. We know that, similarly, the density and strength of the cosmic rays increase as we rise. But we do not yet know whether they are forms of matter turning suddenly into energy, or energy turning into matter — whether the creation of the world is going on, or whether the world is recreating itself. The sp'eed of aeroplaffes as we know them is hampered by the resistance of the atmosphere. This resistance lessens as height is attained. Ten miles up the resistance is so reduced that I see no reason why aeroplanes should not shoot up like roekets from the dense atmosphere of the earth, cross the Atlantic in ten hours or less, without air-pockets oi* air-sickness, without weather variations, and then shoot down to the earth once more. The principal difficulty of transAatlantic fiyers at the present time is that of being unable to forecast the weather conditions ahead of them. In the stratosphere, fiying is not this hindered, for weather conditions are stable. Atlantic rockets are not an impossibility. Planetary Communication. Inter-planetary communication. Why not? Thanks to liquid oxygen, communication between continents through the stratosphere is now a possibility. We shall doubtless achieve fiights to the planets one day. It is possible to remain for many hours in a closed cabin without inconvenience. It is possible to attain great speeds through the stratophere. That sphere of force may extend for four hundred miles above the surface of the earth, but there is no reason why pressure should increase as we rise even higher. The cismic rays may yet be harnessed to the purpose of man. On the earth's surface they can penetrate sixteen feet of lead. Why should not the aeroplane of the future harness this energy for the purpose of fiight? Why should we not discover the mystery of the Heaviside Layer, which refracts the radio waves baclc to earth so that we could not broadeast wireless signals to Mars even if we wished ? Calls are sent out from the earth, only to rebound fifteen seconds later. Why Marconi receives strange ".signals" which are not being transmitted from any earthly station. Are other woi'lds already penetrating the Heaviside ? Strange forms of life may exist in the stratosphere. There may be possibilities of harnessing electric'al power beyond our craziest dreams.