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Show Keeping Up W&cien(e Sou no Service. WNU Service. -Sky Do-Team' of 2,000 Balloons Socks Stratosphere Jean Pioi-anl Will Attempt Hop, Usins; New Method Denver. New stratosphere records will be sought in an entirely new kind of stratosphere strato-sphere balloon, Jean Piecard, twin brother of strato-pioneer Aujruste Piecard, announced to the meeting of the American Ameri-can Association for the Advancement Ad-vancement of Science here. . Mr. Piecard will undertake the long ascension under the lift not o a single giant balloon as heretofore used, but with a "sky dog team" of 2.000 small rubber pilot balloons of the type now used by the U. S. weather bureau for unmanned nights with light recording instruments. "Since a single sounding balloon Is able to carry a half-pound instrument in-strument to an altitude of twenty miles it is obvious that 2.000 sounding sound-ing balloons could lift an air-tight gondola weighing 1,000 pounds to the same lofty position," he said. "It is my intention to construct such an assembly and to make scientific observations at the altitudes alti-tudes reached by sounding balloons. "Before making such a flight I intend in-tend to test the possibilities of the composite balloon by making, in the near future, an experimental flight with eighty sounding balloons attached to an open gondola." On this experimental flight, Mr. Piecard expects to be contented with the modest altitude of about f,vo miles. He added: ."As a whole, our new lighter-than-air craft, if it works, will work like a very large dog team and the pilot will be the driver of 2,000 'sky dogs.' " There is a widely accepted story of a multiple-balloon flight 150 years ago, with a craft said to have been invented by two prominent early members of the American Philosophical Philo-sophical society in Philadelphia. Published in France not long after the first balloon flights there, it went into great and convincing detail and was all a hoax. But the story has persisted, and is solemnly repeated re-peated in every history of aeronautics aero-nautics and in all the encyclopedias. encyclope-dias. However, multiple balloon flights really were made in both this country coun-try and Europe during the 1820's, so the Piecard proposal has precedents prece-dents of quite respectable standing. |