In summer 1861, William J. Rhees was conveniently located to watch Professor Thaddeus Lowe demonstrate ascents of his gas-inflated balloons. As the chief clerk of the Smithsonian Institution, Rhees worked at the “castle” on the National Mall, and could easily walk to the nearby Columbia Armory grounds to watch the aeronaut demonstrate the aerial reconnaissance possibilities of his balloons. The Civil War had begun in April, and Lowe wanted to show the military applications of balloons. Rhees’s wife Laura was staying with relatives in Pennsylvania, and he included firsthand observations of Lowe’s aeronautic activities in his letters to her during that summer, which are now part of the William Jones Rhees Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
On June 14, 1861, Professor Lowe ran into a snag with an ascent. After having completed all his preparations, he discovered that the gas company would not turn on the gas necessary to fill his balloon unless someone would guarantee payment of the bill. An appeal was made to Rhees’s boss, Professor Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. But as Rhees explained to Laura, “Prof Henry wrote him a certificate that he knew Mr Lowe had been employed to make the experiment but with his usual reserve would not say that he would be security for the bill $100.”
After an hour of waiting for a resolution, Rhees decided to take matters into his own hands. “I concluded to go up & see Riggs, President of the Gas Co- Brown the Sec’y being out of the city, but we could not see him he was at a dinner party.” Moving on to Simon Cameron’s residence, perhaps with Professor Lowe in tow, Rhees was told that the secretary of war was asleep. He then went to the White House, in hopes of making an appeal to John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries, but Hay was not there. Had Rhees been lucky enough to run into the technology-loving president, he might have secured the sought-after authorization. But he wasn’t that lucky. Thus, without the Civil War equivalent of a purchase order guaranteeing payment of the bill, Lowe did not have access to the gas necessary to inflate his balloon and, Rhees lamented, “had to give up the experiment for last night.”
Lowe must have secured the necessary guarantees for bill payment, or obtained funding in some other way, as he continued with his balloon experiments and demonstrations on the Mall, including one involving Rhees himself.
On July 14, 1861, Rhees excitedly wrote Laura about his own “ride by the ‘air-line’ to regions in the skies.” He described his balloon ascent as “perfectly grand and delightful. The motion was so gentle that I could have stood in the basket without holding on to the sides at all, and I had no sensation of fear.” Lowe, who remained earthbound managing the rope tethers, estimated that Rhees ascended a thousand feet during his ten minutes in the air. Although he had “a full view of the country” at that height, he struggled to discern if the many military camps he saw through the tree canopy in nearby Virginia belonged to Union or Confederate forces. Changing conditions prevented Professor Henry and his daughters from making their own ascent that day, and Rhees told Laura, “I was the only one of the Smithsonians to ascend & the Professor said—‘well Mr Rhees this is something to remember for a life-time.’”
Thanks to letters written to his wife Laura that summer, William J. Rhees’s interactions with Thaddeus Lowe and his own ascent in the aeronaut’s balloon will be remembered well beyond his lifetime.
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“Columbia Armory grounds…” In 1861 the Columbia Armory was located near where the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is today.
“…into his own hands.” Rhees later wrote an article about Lowe and the use of balloons during the Civil War. The author identification for Rhees stated that he “had charge of Mr. Lowe’s balloon experiments for the Smithsonian Institution in June, 1861.” This may have been the primary reason Rhees took such an interest in Lowe’s balloon trials and was permitted to make an ascent himself. See William Jones Rhees, “Reminiscences of Ballooning in the Civil War,” The Chautauquan 27, no. 3 (June 1898), 257. Rhees also donated a copy of his article to the Library of Congress.