Word: balloon
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...Filming One, Two, Three, an East-West satire set in West Berlin and based on a comedy by the late Ferenc Molnar, Director Billy Wilder sent Horst Buchholz, who plays an East German motorcycle bum, past the Brandenburg Gate with a balloon on his exhaust pipe. It inflated, as the script ordered-displaying the words RUSSKI GO HOME. Out came a platoon of People's Police, plus a Russian official who was not amused. Retreating from the row that followed, Wilder moved to Munich, where he is finishing the film beside an enormous reproduction of the Brandenburg Gate...
...that saga goes back to 1793, when a debonair Frenchman named Jean Pierre Blanchard ascended from the yard of Philadelphia's Walnut Street prison in a balloon, accompanied by a small, whimpering dog. While President George Washington and hundreds of Philadelphians craned their necks in amazement, Blanchard panicked a squadron of pigeons and drifted nonchalantly out of sight. After 46 minutes in the air, he plopped down in a woodland 15 miles away and placated the scared natives with wine...
...military possibilities were obvious -or so they seemed. During the Civil War, Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, a daring airman, sailed out near Manassas in a balloon and located the victorious Confederates. Later, balloons were used successfully at the battle of Chancellorsville. But General George McClellan finally abandoned his air force because of the difficulty of transporting the big gasbags...
Around the Skeleton. An interested spectator at the Civil War balloon experiments was a young German officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. After he retired from the Kaiser's army, in 1891, Zeppelin dedicated his life to perfecting giant rigid dirigibles-built around a metal skeleton-that would retain their shape and could be guided. About the same time, a wealthy Brazilian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, developed the nonrigid dirigible and pleased girls by taking them on flights around Paris...
...turn on his air conditioner or all the other appliances that help make the city livable. To most New Yorkers, it was simply sobering to think how utterly they can be at the mercy of a couple of large fuses in a power station-and how vulnerable their big balloon really...