This right here.
It's a picture of the Civil War Balloon Corps. Yes. During the Civil War, the Union had a
Balloon Corps that did reconnaissance during battles.
It was a big deal.
They were short lived, but they had up to 3,000 flights.
I checked out a battlefield where they actually used balloon intelligence to change the course
of battle.
I am still in my basement. The audio just drove me a little nuts everywhere else. So
I'm here for the time being.
There's so much you could talk about with these balloons, from the tactical concerns,
to the internecine battles, to the Confederate attempts to copy the Union success. But when
I read a 400 something page book, there was one thing that kind of fascinated me.
How did those balloons actually work?
This gets yada yada yada’d, all the time. Uh, you know, there was a Civil War Balloon
Corps, yada yada, yada, the Civil War ended.
“You yada yada yada’d the best part!”
That these Civil War balloons actually worked was much more fascinating than their mere
existence. And it says something bigger about how history is much more complicated than
we think.
This is what I imagined when I think of a hot air balloon, one like this one from the,
uh, bicentennial. It's got a basket on the bottom, a propane tank shoots up hot air.
And the balloon goes up.
That is what a lot of people imagine Civil War balloons were like too. Go ahead, Google
it. You will find a lot of incorrect citations of the balloons in the Civil War as hot air
balloons.
Slate excerpted an article about these Civil War balloons with a hot air balloon headline
attached.
That is fine, except these were not hot air balloons. They were much more unusual.
They were much more like the balloons in this 1929 air race — gas balloons often filled
with hydrogen or coal gas. Hydrogen, and some gases are lighter than air. They float.
They had some hot air balloons, but gas was actually the most common method to make a
balloon float.
I have no idea what is up with that dude's voice, huh?
“More hot air, how about that.”
I see a hot air balloon wouldn't work in the Civil War. It had problems. There was no propane
tank to keep fuel flowing and the air hot. You couldn't control direction. So free flight
was tough too.
And remember, this is a spy balloon in 1861. How would you manage to tell anybody from
way up in the sky, what you saw there, wasn't like the Verizon guy helping you out?
“I’m with Sprint now.”
How they solved it — that is what makes the Civil War balloons so fascinating.
I see this, I see this unimaginable suffering and I think, uh, you know, what about the
balloons?
Let's focus on the balloons.
Okay. So all of these problems, how did they solve them? This is Thaddeus Lowe. Does he
have a fauxhawk? You remember fauxhawks? I used to have a fauxhawk. It was all the rage
in the oughts. Now I've messed up my hair for the entire video.
Thaddeus Lowe beat out a bunch of other aeronauts to become the chief aeronaut of the United
States Balloon Corps.
Pretty awesome. Let's focus on what made the balloons work.
So they needed gas because hot air didn't have enough of a fuel source to keep the balloon
going up. In cities, they could tap into gas lines.
“That goes for ordinary coal gas too, just like this one first tested and approved by
Charles Green, famous English scientist in 1821.
It's cheaper. It's handier, but heavier than hydrogen.”
I can't help but think of charging an electric car on the electrical grid, that is basically
how people inflated their balloons.
So Thaddeus Lowe, he invented these bad boys, mobile hydrogen gas making machines.
“In the early days, hydrogen was prepared by pouring sulfuric acid over scraps of iron.”
They made the gas in the generator, cooled it, purified it, and pumped it into the balloon.
“Notice the smaller box boys, those are machines to get rid of the sulfuric gas.”
It wasn't easy. One inflation took 3,300 pounds of supplies and four horses to pull the generator.
All this took about three hours and usually they tried to keep a balloon kind of pseudo
inflated so they didn't have to do the whole thing again.
But that is just part of the problem. At the time, ballooning was kind of like surfing.
You were like catching currents. One wind current would take you one way, then you'd
float up and hope that another current would bring you back home. That was not a good strategy
during a war.
So this was the solution. Do you see those guys down at the bottom? Those balloons were
tethered, but they could even get intelligence at 450 feet up.
They tied them to a tree when they were all set and the balloon would just be tugged back
to the ground for reuse. And this also led to the use of the first aircraft carrier by
tethering the balloon along the water.
The big takeaway is that Thaddeus Lowe was cool.
So then you've got the final problem. How do you tell people what you see? And that
connects to the tethering. Now they could just drop a message down from the balloon,
or Lowe also devised a system of signal balloons too, though it's unclear how much they were
actually used.
He even developed a calcium light to shine from the balloon for observation and signaling.
But the big breakthrough used that tethered line for communication, because wrapped around
it was a telegraph cable. This right here is a telegram from a gosh darn— that's right,
I said it— balloon to President Lincoln.
The Telegraph line ran right along the tether. They worked together. Lowe could telegraph
to the ground, or in some cases, straight to the War Department in DC from a battlefield
in Virginia. They used codes to keep the messages shorter. And all this stuff, it actually worked.
Using a bird's eye view, Lowe and colleagues would get reconnaissance: they'd look for
a bunch of tents together and use that to estimate troop size. They would do the same
thing with campfire smoke clouds. At a high altitude, they could see up to 30 miles away,
all from the balloon.
So, what is the takeaway here? There are a lot of ways you could go with this. I mean,
with 3000 flights, this was a significant military success. You could just go into all
the battles that were changed because of balloons. After the Civil War balloons were used in
European Wars and later military airships continued to be common, but I keep going back
to those inaccurate headlines about hot air balloons in the Civil War.
This is the fascinating thing about the past, about history. That beyond what is unimaginably
weird — Civil War balloons —there are unimaginably weirder details, like hydrogen-making
machines that made it all work and the faux-hawked inventors who strove to get it done. These
grinders, these problem solvers, they are the ones who made a society function.
And if they're good enough, a society doesn't just function. It can even float.
All right, that's it for this one. Thank you for joining me to learn about Civil War balloons.
Uh, if you are interested in personal videos, uh, like this one, or just weird things that
intrigued me or whatever, uh, please subscribe to this channel and give this video a like,
if you can. I'm begging you, it feels uncomfortable, but that's where we are.
And, uh, yeah, I put some sources in the description too. If you have any questions or want to
learn more about the weird wild world of Civil War ballooning. Alright, I'll see you in the
next one.