Silk Dresses in the Sky

In 1862 the women of the Confederacy were called upon to make a strange sacrifice in the cause of Secession. Their army wanted all the silk dresses in the South. Chests, closets, wardrobes were ransacked and bales of silk dresses were sent to a designated station. There a battery of sewing machines stitched them into a great envelope for a balloon. For the Union army had been harassing the lines of greycoats with artillery fire directed by balloon observers.

The Confederate balloon was mounted on a barge in the James River. The barge ran aground and was promptly captured, balloon and all, by the Federals. "With it," wrote General Longstreet, "went the last silk dress of the Confederacy."

Last week the remnants of those dresses went to the Smithsonian Institution. They were the gift of the family of the late Professor Thaddeus S. Carlincourt Lowe, aeronautics chief of the Union Army, who had held them as a personal trophy after the close of the war.

In 1859 Professor Lowe,* meteorologist and inventor, built the balloon City of New York, then the largest ever constructed (diameter, 130 ft.), for a flight across the Atlantic. The outbreak of the Civil War upset that plan. Professor Lowe went to Washington to propose to General Winfield Scott the formation of a balloon corps. The General was not impressed, finally lent his ear and his aid only at the personal prompting of President Lincoln.

Proudly Professor Lowe made his first official ascent on July 24, 1861, and had the satisfaction of watching the movements of the Confederates after the battle of Manassas, and of being shot at. By the following May, the Professor had perfected telegraph communication with ground forces and the last doubting footsoldier was convinced. Professor Lowe detected a Confederate maneuver to attack the troops of General Heintzleman, who was separated from the main force at Fair Oaks. Warning was flashed just in time to save the entire Army of the Potomac. In many a later engagement Professor Lowe observed artillery fire, communicating the effect of each shot.

After the war Professor Lowe made a few captive balloon ascensions at New York and Philadelphia, but they were financial failures. Then he gave up the business, sold his apparatus to the Brazilian government. In 1867 he received patents for a process of making artificial ice. Later he achieved fame for methods of making and applying water gas in heating and lighting.

Through his efforts were built the observatory and steep inclined railway at Mount Lowe, near Pasadena, Calif., favorite picture-post-card subject of sightseers.

* A granddaughter is Mrs. Florence Lowe Barnes of San Marino, Calif., prominent flyer.

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