New Departures In Aerostation.
After Mr. Coxwell's experiments at Aldershot in 1862 the military balloon, as far as England was concerned, remained in abeyance for nine long years, when the Government appointed a Commission to enquire into its utility, and to conduct further experiments. The members of this committee were Colonel Noble, R.E., Sir F. Abel, Captain Lee, R.E., assisted by Captain Elsdale, R.E., and Captain (now Colonel) Templer. Yet another nine years, however, elapsed before much more was heard of this modernised military engine.

But about the beginning of the eighties the Government had become fully alive to the importance of the subject, and Royal Engineers at Woolwich grew busy with balloon manufacture and experiment. Soon "the sky around London became speckled with balloons." The method of making so-called pure hydrogen by passing steam over red-hot iron was fully tested, and for a time gained favour. The apparatus, weighing some three tons, was calculated to be not beyond the carrying powers of three service waggons, while it was capable of generating enough gas to inflate two balloons in twenty-four hours, a single inflation holding good, under favourable circumstances, for a long period. At the Brighton Volunteer Review of 1880, Captain Templer, with nine men, conducted the operations of a captive reconnoitring balloon. This was inflated at the Lewes gas works, and then towed two and a half miles across a river, a railway, and a line of telegraph wires, after which it was let up to a height of 1,500 feet, whence, it was stated, that so good a view was obtained that "every man was clearly seen." Be it remembered, however, that the country was not the South African veldt, and every man was in the striking English uniform of that date.