een tried in the British service
with a non-rigid airship, which was attached to a mast in open country
in a gale of 52 miles an hour without the slightest damage to the
airship. In its commercial form, the mast would probably take the
form of a tower, at the top of which the cap would revolve so that
the airship should always face the wind, the tower being used for
embarkation and disembarkation of passengers and the provision of fuel
and gas. Such a system would render sheds unnecessary except in case of
repairs, and would enormously decrease the establishment charges of any
commercial airship.

All this, however, is hypothetical. Remains the airship of to-day,
developed far beyond the promise of five years ago, capable, as has
been proved by its achievements both in Britain and in Germany, of
undertaking practically any given voyage with success.

VII. KITE BALLOONS

As far back as the period of the Napoleonic wars, the balloon was
given a place in warfare, but up to the Franco-Prussian Prussian War
of 1870-71 its use was intermittent. The Federal forces made use of
balloons to a small extent in the American Civil War; they came to great
prominence in the siege of Paris, carrying out upwards of three million
letters and sundry carrier pigeons which took back messages into the
besieged city. Meanwhile, as captive balloons, the German and other
armies used them for observation and the direction of artillery fire. In
this work the ordinary spherical balloon was at a grave disadvantage; if
a gust of wind struck it, the balloon was blown downward and down
wind, generally twirling in the air and upsetting any calculations and
estimates that might be made by the observers, while in a wind of 25
miles an hour it could not rise at all. The rotatory movement caused by
wind was stopped by an experimenter in the Russo-Japanese war, who fixed
to the captive observation balloons a fin which acted as a rudder. This
did not stop the balloon from being blown downward and away from its
mooring station, but this tendency was overcome by a modification
designed in Germany by the Parseval-Siegsfield Company, which originated
what has since become familiar as the 'Sausage' or kite balloon. This
is so arranged that the forward end is tilted up into the wind, and the
underside of the gas bag, acting as a plane, gives the balloon a lifting
tendency in a wind, thus counteracting the tendency of the wind to blow
it downward and away f