Word: ballooned
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...race practically over at the end of the first leg. On the two remaining legs Shamrock gained but only because Skipper Vanderbilt was taking no chances with his yacht's gear. He was near home on the third leg before he set his spinaker and big balloon jib topsail. Never had the duralumin mast, the winches for every sail, the devices for measuring the strain on the stays proved their efficiency more clearly. Enterprise had swept the series, 4 to 0, winning this final race by more than five minutes...
Detailed extracts from the diary, radioed from the Isbjoern and relayed by cable (the whole assignment will cost "well into five figures") said the balloon landed three days after taking off from Spitsbergen, that the party then struggled for two months over Arctic ice floes before sighting the glaciers of White Island. To celebrate the finding of land they toasted the King of Sweden and Norway in 1836 wine which he had given them. A month later, although food and ammunition were still plentiful, the men were dead. Guessers last week guessed they 1) froze to death; 2) were poisoned...