Aeronautics: Two Men in a Ball

A yellow, rubberized cotton gasbag shot upward from Augsburg, Germany before dawn one day last week, dragging after it a 7-ft. aluminum sphere, half black, half silver, from which flew a. Swiss flag. Up, up—and to the south and west—the balloon CH-113 soared until it was a gleaming globule in the rays of the sun not yet risen. Up above the 42,000-ft. mark reached by the late Balloonist Lieut. Hawthorne Gray, up past Lieut. Apollo Soucek's airplane altitude of 43,166 ft.—the highest that man had ever...