Word: balloonful
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...thinking, produced minds which could have grasped the scientific conquests involved; both had carpenters and artisans capable of building such machines, and both made the fabrics, paints and materials needed for their construction. "But they didn't," he sadly concludes, "even invent the hot-air balloon...
...Trieste, Professor Auguste Picard's newest type of balloon, successfully completed its maiden voyage...
Electromagnetic Ballast. The Trieste's vertical movements are controlled just like a balloon's. To descend, it releases gasoline, which makes it heavier in the water. To rise it drops ballast. The Trieste's ballast is four tons of iron filings stowed in containers in the floater. Electromagnets, which make iron filings stick together, keep the ballast from moving. When their current is cut off, the filings flow into the sea. This system "fails safe." If anything happens to the ship's power supply, the ballast is dropped automatically. Then the Trieste, lightened, will rise...
...floater has two small, electrically driven propellers, which move it horizontally. They make the Trieste more like a blimp than like the passively floating balloon in which Professor Piccard, then a mere 48, set an altitude record...
...Piccard promised his wife that he would make no more balloon ascents. He did not promise that he would not balloon to the bottom...