Word: piccards
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When newsmen at Zurich, Switzerland last week wondered why Professor Auguste Piccard continued to postpone his balloon ascension into the stratosphere, even when weather appeared favorable, the long-haired, long-necked Belgian professor told them: "I promised Mme Piccard that I would not do anything foolish." In fact Mme Piccard, whose fifth child was born a few months ago, once made her husband promise not to make the flight at all. That was last year, just after he and his assistant, Charles Kipfer, had ballooned 51,700 ft. into the heavens- higher than man had ever before climbed...
Professor Piccard had, as he promised, taken greater precautions for his second flight. He was not seeking a new altitude record. A height of ten miles, as before, would satisfy his purpose of studying fur ther the origin of cosmic rays. His last observations agreed with famed Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan that the rays emanate from between the stars.* The new aluminum gondola which he had built to carry himself and his new assistant, Max Cosyns, 25, was superior to last year's which, covered with tourists' scratchings, rests in the library of the Free University, Brussels...
...Piccard insisted upon one final precaution. When Professor Piccard and Assistant Cosyns start skyward from Dubendorf Airdrome, airplanes and racing automobiles will set out. to be near the spot where the balloon comes to rest. In one of the automobiles will be Mme Piccard...
...Last week unmanned balloons sent up 17½ mi. (a record) by Germany's Professor Erich Regener brought down evidence limiting Piccard's observation that the intensity of cosmic rays increases steadily with altitude. Above 39,000 ft. the intensity tends to become constant...
...Anderson evidence is good in its way. To get proof from a different angle, Dr. Millikan will soon send balloons bearing registering instruments to an altitude higher than Professor Piccard's ten miles where atmosphere has less effect on cosmic rays. And Professor Compton (Dr. Millikan was his preceptor at the University of Chicago, taught him how to win a Nobel Prize) will this spring and summer make a world tour of mountain tops lugging machines too heavy for balloons...