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Altilunium (talk | contribs) Created page with "Teisserenc de Bort designed and built meteorological recording instruments and sent them aloft on balloons and kites of his own design and modification. On 9 September 1899, he had come briefly into the public eye when one of his kite flights -- a large kite carrying a meteorograph and ten other "helping-kites" supporting the tethering cable --- broke free and, trailing 7 kilometers of cable, cut a narrow but astonishing swath through Paris, where it stopped traffic, di..." |
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Under the circumstances, de Bort suspended kite flying for a while and return to a series of upper-air experiments with free balloons. He preferred working with those made of kerosened paper. These were filled with hydrogen and trailed a very short cable holding the meteorograph and a bag of sand ballast, which dribbled out at a steady rate to control the balloon's rate of ascent. de Bort's aim was to get these all up as high as possible, often over 11 kilometers and occasionally as high as 14 kilometers. When the balloon reached its maximum altitude, the instrument pack was parachuted back to earth.
Aßmann had measured this effect several times between 1894 and 1897 in manned balloon ascents, but he was reasonably sure that it was due to the warming of instrument packet by solar radiation. He was delighted to treat the phenomenon as another problem in instrument design. Hergesell agreed that the phenomenon was probably due to instrument warming, and so did de Bort. All of them tried various ways to shield their thermometers from reflecting or absorbing surfaces on the instrument packets that contained them, in order to keep the thermometers from false readings.
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