The grandest trip on earth
“Professor Lowe” was many things over the course of his long, colorful career: a scientist, balloonist, entrepreneur, investor, banker, and founder of a scenic mountain railway and resort in Southern California. Best known as Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps during the early years of the American Civil War, Thaddeus Lowe was also a prolific inventor who earned 18 U.S. patents for his pioneering advances in ice-making and refrigeration as well as the manufacture of water gas and steel, among other historic innovations.
34 min read
Each month, our Journeys of Innovation series tells the stories of inventors or entrepreneurs who have made a positive difference in the world. This month, Eric Atkisson's story focuses on inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, and balloonist Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe.
Do you know an innovator or entrepreneur with an interesting story?
“What state is this?”
The farmers paused and looked around. Had they really just heard someone ask what state this was? Up here, in a field on the western slopes of the Allegheny Mountains? They were about to resume their plowing when the question came again: “What state is this?” Turning toward the woods this time, the only place they imagined a lost stranger could possibly be shouting from, they shouted back, “Virginia!”
“Thank you!” came the reply, followed by a sudden deluge of sand on the ground behind them. Startled, the farmers turned and looked up. Hovering above them was a 50-foot-tall balloon, its tan Pongee silk envelope swelled with 20,000 cubic feet of gas. From within the wicker passenger basket a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a Victorian frock coat and sporting a bushy black mustache was emptying a ballast bag over the edge. As the balloon rose back into the sky, the farmers threw down their tools and fled toward the woods. Meanwhile, the dapper pilot — who had just as abruptly fled a Cincinnati dinner banquet in his honor to prepare for this flight — drifted further east and south, carried by swift air currents over the Alleghenies and the southern reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Though racing through space,” he later recalled of this springtime flight, most of it spent three miles above sea level, “everything around me was perfectly quiet and still.”
A lithograph, hand-colored, depicting the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12th and 13th of 1861 — a week before Lowe’s balloon flight from Cincinnati.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
It was in fact a rare moment of quiet and stillness for Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe. He was a New England Yankee flying over Southern states on April 20, 1861, a week after Rebels in Charleston, South Carolina opened fire on the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter and only three days after Virginia seceded from the Union. The American Civil War had just begun, and Lowe was racing toward its epicenter, outfitted with supplies like blankets, newspapers, snacks, scientific equipment — including an altimeter and drift meter of his own making — a large jug of coffee, and a Colt revolver.
Well aware of the danger, Lowe attempted to alter his course by dropping more ballast, ascending to a prodigious altitude of 18,000 feet or more above sea level, where the temperature was so cold it froze all of the food and water in the basket. But it was no use. The Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge, he realized, were disrupting the direction of the wind and blowing him southeast instead of due east, away from Washington, D.C. When next he landed it was near Spartanburg, South Carolina, but the stop was cut short by hostile locals demanding that he take his “hellish contrivance” elsewhere. His next and final landing, nine hours after leaving Cincinnati in the early morning darkness, was 25 miles to the southeast near the Kelton plantation in rural Union County, where the balloon was shot at and later surrounded by an angry mob. After patiently attempting to explain how he was blown off course during an experimental flight, Lowe at one point threatened to use his revolver if required.
“I then and there let the aggressive portion of my surrounders [sic] understand,” he later wrote in the memoir of his early years, “that the first man to make any hostile advances toward me would go into eternity far quicker than I had descended into their locality, but that I was willing to further any investigations they desired to make. I suggested that they appoint a party to go with me to the nearest county seat.”
He and his equipment were hauled about twenty miles to the town of Unionville, South Carolina, where a local innkeeper who had flown in one of Lowe’s balloons a year earlier vouched for him. The situation was diffused for the moment, and Lowe was sent by train to Columbia the next morning. As he transferred to another train, holding a bundle of his scientific equipment, a crowd swarmed around him with shouts of “Tar and feather the Yankee!” He was again informed at gunpoint that he was a prisoner.
“Why don’t you send for the president of your university here?” Lowe suggested this time, after he was taken to the local jail. The president and faculty of South Carolina College were duly summoned and soon arrived, happily confirmed that “Professor Lowe” was who he claimed to be, and he was given a signed document by an apologetic mayor that read:
"This is to certify that Prof. T. S. C. Lowe, now accidentally in our midst, is a gentleman of integrity and high scientific attainments, and I bespeak for him the courtesies of all with whom he may come in contact, and trust that this letter … will answer as a passport for him through the Confederate States of North America."
A “professor” in name only, and not affiliated with any university himself, Lowe’s life and career up to this point had been anything but ordinary.
Born in 1832 to Clovis and Alpha Lowe of Coos County, New Hampshire, his mother had named him after a gallant Polish soldier in Jane Porter’s 1803 novel, Thaddeus of Warsaw. She died when Lowe was 10, and because Clovis couldn’t easily support their five children on his own, Lowe was indentured to a neighboring farmer couple. It was an unhappy arrangement, and he ran away a year later. Only 11 years old, he worked odd jobs across New Hampshire and Maine before finally securing passage to Boston, where he went to work in his brother Joseph’s shoe making shop. There Lowe began to demonstrate the inventive mindset that later made him famous by developing a better way of cutting the elastic for the sides of men’s boots. Like a young Benjamin Franklin, he also began to experiment with kites.
“As a boy,” Lowe wrote many years later, “I was intensely interested in scientific investigation, in botany, geology, and especially in mechanics and chemistry, and my mind was centered on the possibility of an airship, or machine, at an early age.”
He read every book he could find on these subjects, and whenever possible he consulted with experts, including a visiting chemistry professor who was so impressed by Lowe’s enthusiasm that he took him on as a paid assistant.
It wasn’t long before Lowe himself was lecturing and performing chemistry experiments in front of large audiences. He settled in New York and enrolled for a brief period in the formal study of the sciences. By the time he turned 21, in 1853, Lowe was determined to pursue a career in aeronautics and was already contemplating the construction of his own balloon, a project he saved money for by continuing to lecture. After one such lecture in 1855, he was approached by a striking 19-year-old woman named Leontine Augustine Gachon. The daughter of a loyalist to King Louis Philippe who fled to the United States during the French Revolution of 1848, Leontine was beginning to pursue a stage career when she met Lowe. They fell in love and eloped a week later in Cleveland before heading off on a long, meandering honeymoon by river to New Orleans. Along the way the newlyweds joined a troupe of more than 100 performers, and Lowe was put in charge of the showboat’s museum, with its collection of human “freaks” and wax celebrities.
At left, Leontine Augustine Lowe on Feb. 14, 1855, the day of her marriage to Thaddeus Lowe at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio. At right, a later portrait of the couple with their children and grandchildren.
(Courtesy of Lance Ferm and the Pasadena Public Library)
In New Orleans, Lowe resumed his scientific lectures and study of aeronautics, with Leontine often assisting on stage with his experiments. Once they could afford it, the couple returned to Ohio and then to New Jersey, where Lowe’s father Clovis helped him build his first balloon, the aptly named "Enterprise." Now, at last, the professor’s experiments could begin in earnest. He was convinced that the air currents in the upper atmosphere, the “great rivers of the sky,” always moved in an eastward direction, no matter what direction the wind blew on the surface of the earth. Today we call them jet streams, but in the 19th century they were still an unproven theory. Lowe’s great ambition was to confirm their existence by riding the air currents to Europe. Much of his time in the years leading up to the Civil War was spent touring the United States and Canada demonstrating with his balloons, and raising capital for a giant balloon called "City of New York," later renamed "Great Western," for his planned crossing of the Atlantic. Even his most supportive investors, however, doubted the wisdom of such a flight without further tests and trials. Lowe encountered the same skepticism from no less an authority than Secretary of the Smithsonian Joseph Henry.
“Take your balloon far inland,” Henry advised Lowe, “and wait until the surface air currents are strong and going to the west. Then ascend with your balloon and if you can travel back to the eastern seaboard on the upper air currents going to the east, I’ll be convinced.”
A massive 103 feet in diameter with a lift capacity of more than 11 tons, "City of New York" — later renamed "Great Western" — was one of Thaddeus Lowe’s many audacious projects. It is depicted here in the Nov. 19, 1859 issue of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Lowe accepted the challenge, and it was that very test flight from Cincinnati on April 20, 1861, that landed him in South Carolina and almost cost him his life. Early the next morning after securing his passport to leave Columbia, he boarded a train for Ohio by way of Kentucky. The cars were full of Confederate soldiers heading north to Virginia, as well as Northern civilians fleeing the Confederate states, their faces “serious and solemn, and scarcely a word was exchanged between the passengers as the train rolled on.” It wasn’t until crossing the Ohio River four days later that the silence was broken and the remaining passengers cheered the first U.S. flag they had seen during their journey. The balloonist’s dream of a transatlantic flight would have to wait, he realized, for there were now other, more pressing uses for a man of his talents.
Less than two months later, on June 18, the man upon whose shoulders the fate of the United States now rested received a telegram from the “Balloon Enterprise” and signed “T.S.C. Lowe.” It read:
“This point of observation commands an area near fifty miles in diameter. The city with its girdle of encampments presents a superb scene. I have pleasure in sending you this first dispatch ever telegraphed from an aerial station and in acknowledging indebtedness to your encouragement for the opportunity of demonstrating the availability of the science of aeronautics in the military service of the country."
From his office window on the second floor of the White House, then more commonly known as the Executive Mansion, President Abraham Lincoln could see the Enterprise floating about 500 feet above the Columbia Armory, where the National Air and Space Museum stands today. Welcoming this diversion from office-seekers and cabinet meetings, he requested that the balloon be towed to the mansion’s south lawn, where he could inspect it more closely. As an attorney who had worked on more than 20 patent cases over the course of his career, and a one-time inventor with a patent to his name, Lincoln had a keen interest in technology and innovation. In his new role as the nation’s chief executive, he had an even keener interest in putting down the armed rebellion of the Southern states by any and every means available. Intrigued by Lowe’s demonstration and his offer to organize a balloon corps for the Union cause, Lincoln invited him to spend the night.
“The President was intensely interested in my outline of the proposed Aeronautic Corps,” Lowe wrote in his memoir, “and after the departure of his secretaries and assistants, we discussed the possibilities of the service and the details of operation. He was especially interested in my plan for directing the fire of artillery on an enemy that the gunners themselves could not see. We talked till late into the night, and then retired, he wearied with the cares of State, and I almost too excited to sleep, so enthused was I at the prospect of being directed to form a new branch of the military service.”
The first-ever telegraph message received from a balloon, sent by Thaddeus Lowe to President Abraham Lincoln in June 1861.
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
While Lowe was not the first aeronaut to propose the use of balloons for the Union war effort, Lincoln was impressed by his knowledge and his bold demonstration, incorporating the novel use of a telegraph line and the first-ever telegraph sent from the air. Lowe also had the enthusiastic endorsements of scientific, military, and political authorities, including the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase.
After the Union Army’s humiliating defeat just west of Washington in July 1861, the president summoned Lowe back to the White House.
“I’ve been thinking that our defeat at Bull Run might have been averted if someone in a balloon could have observed the movements of the Confederate forces,” Lincoln told Lowe, who readily agreed. “I am now ready to accept your offer. Can you proceed at once?”
Lowe was more than ready and willing, and the president wrote a note for him to deliver to Winfield Scott, commanding general of the Union armies. A gruff old veteran of the War of 1812, the Indian Wars, and the Mexican-American War, Scott had no interest in balloons and had already refused to see Lowe on several occasions. Hearing of this from Lowe, Lincoln himself escorted Lowe to the War Department and was immediately invited into the general’s office.
“General,” said the commander-in-chief, “this is my friend, Professor Lowe, who is organizing an Aeronautic Corps for the Army and is to be its chief. I wish you would facilitate his work in every way, and give him a letter to Captain Dahlgren, the Commandant of the Navy Yard, and one to General Meigs, with instructions for them to give him all the necessary things to equip his branch of the service on land and water.”
Lowe was duly appointed Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps, the earliest forerunner of the United States Air Force, with pay equivalent to a full colonel. That summer, before he and the other aeronauts even began receiving their pay, they performed a number of reconnaissance flights, often to allay fears of rumored enemy advances on Washington. Returning from one such ascension on July 24, after a free flight west of Washington scouting for Confederate forces that weren’t there, Lowe experienced his first real danger of the war as he began to descend near Arlington House, just across the Potomac from Washington.
“Our troops commenced firing at the balloon, supposing it to belong to the rebels,” he wrote in his official report to the War Department. “I descended near enough to hear the whistling of the bullets and the shouts of the soldiers to ‘show my colors.’ As I had, unfortunately, no national flag with me, and knowing that if I attempted to effect a landing there my balloon–and very likely myself–would be riddled, I concluded to sail on and to risk descending outside of our lines.” He landed several miles beyond the federal picket lines south of Alexandria, partially damaging his balloon among some trees.
This stereograph, created May 31, 1862, shows Thaddeus Lowe observing the Battle of Fair Oaks from the “Intrepid” while Union soldiers hold the balloon’s tethers. Sometimes mistaken as an enemy spy by his own side, Lowe earned a reputation as “the most shot at man of the war.”
(Courtesy of Library of Congress)
“A detailed account of my escape would be interesting,” he continued in his report, “but it is sufficient to say that I was kindly assisted in returning by the 31st Regular N.Y. Volunteers, and brought back the balloon.” The interesting details he left out may have involved his wife, Leontine. According to a note later added to the report by a family member, Leontine had followed Lowe’s progress from the ground and not only enlisted the help of the New York infantry regiment but actively participated in the rescue by disguising herself as an old farmer woman, leading a horse and wagon to Lowe, and helping smuggle both him and the deflated balloon back to friendly lines. If true, had they been captured by Confederates, both could have been summarily executed as civilian spies. While there continued to be sharp disagreements among the Union Army balloonists about the risks and benefits of free flight, Lowe’s near escape put him solidly in favor of tethered ascensions.
Meanwhile, the Balloon Corps, whose small number now included Lowe’s father Clovis, set to work building seven bigger, stronger balloons that could hold more gear, perform in adverse weather, and resist damage from a variety of obstacles, including trees and friendly or enemy fire. Six of the balloons were put into active service and one in storage. On September 24, 1861, Lowe made an ascension west of Washington to spy on Confederate forces encamped at Falls Church, Virginia. Using a signal flag and telegraph line, Lowe was able to direct and adjust artillery fire from a nearby Union battery until they were soon hitting the Rebel encampment. It was the first documented case of balloonists directing artillery fire.
The balloons needed a mobile source of hydrogen gas so they could be inflated in the field, instead of by city gas works. Putting his diverse scientific expertise to work, Lowe had mechanics at the Navy Yard build six large boxes lined on the inside with copper and capable of containing the chemical reaction between iron filings, water, and sulfuric acid that produced hydrogen gas. The boxes were set on old army wagons, with “Lowe’s Balloon Gas Generator” boldly painted on the outside of each. In collaboration with Captain John Dahlgren at the Navy Yard, Lowe also had a coal barge retrofitted to carry one of his gas generators and to serve as a floating platform for launching balloons, making the USS George Washington Parke Custis the first documented use of an aircraft carrier. Lowe successfully tested the Custis in November, when he ascended about 25 miles downriver from Washington to observe the construction of Rebel artillery batteries on the Virginia shore. Impressed by Lowe’s ingenuity, General George McClellan directed him to prepare the Balloon Corps for support of military operations in the field.
Thaddeus Lowe’s Balloon Gas Generators at the Columbia Armory on the National Mall, around 1861. Designed by Lowe himself and built under his supervision at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., the generators provided a mobile source of hydrogen gas to Union Army balloons during the American Civil War.
(Courtesy of the National Archives)
In the early months of 1862, the corps set up an outpost south of Alexandria at Pohick Church, where they used a tethered "Intrepid" — the largest of Lowe’s balloons — to observe enemy troop movements along the Occoquan River. Confederate General Joseph Johnston complained that the “infernal balloon” was making it difficult to deceive Union commanders and limiting the time he had to reposition his forces. The balloons were then towed south to Yorktown for McClellan’s Peninsula campaign. They performed valuable reconnaissance in the siege of Yorktown and the battles of Fair Oaks and Gaines’ Mill, several times signaling with artillerists on the ground to more accurately direct their fire.
“At all times we were fully aware that you Federals were using balloons to examine our positions,” Confederate General James Longstreet wrote to Lowe years after the war, “and we watched with envious eyes their beautiful observations as they floated high in the air, well out of range of our guns.”
Unable to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, McClellan’s army retreated back down the Peninsula and was gradually withdrawn by sea to Washington. Aside from a few ascensions along the James River, the Balloon Corps was idle the rest of the summer. They missed the Second Battle of Bull Run in August, and after returning to Washington they were unable to coordinate transportation to Maryland for the Battle of Antietam. Stationed near Fredericksburg, Virginia in December 1862, they reported enemy dispositions across the Rappahannock, but the Union army now under General Ambrose Burnside nevertheless suffered a crushing defeat when they attempted to cross the river and seize the city. The following April and May, the balloonists played a more active role in the Battle of Chancellorsville. One balloon under Lowe’s supervision at Fredericksburg and another miles west at Banks Ford each provided accurate reports on the movement of Confederate forces, but smoke and stronger winds in the latter days of the battle limited their effectiveness, and the Army of the Potomac once again withdrew after another humiliating defeat.
Lowe by this point was frustrated by a combination of issues, not least of which was his own health. Still suffering the lingering effects of malaria contracted near Richmond the previous summer, he also had struggles with the Army and government bureaucracy, ambitious rivals in the Balloon Corps, and his newest Army superior, who cut the balloonists’ pay and demanded that Lowe’s father Clovis be discharged from the service. Lowe resigned his position in May, after Chancellorsville, and returned to his original family home in New Hampshire to recuperate. The Balloon Corps continued for a few months without him but was officially disbanded in August 1863. While its impact on the Union war effort was minimal, Lowe nevertheless retired from the war with the thanks of several prominent Army officers, including General Samuel P. Heintzelman, a corps commander at the Battle of Fair Oaks.
He wrote to Lowe in a letter:
“From my own observation and experience with the portable gas generating apparatus and other of your inventions. I would consider your balloons indispensable to an army in the field, and should I ever be entrusted with such a command I would consider my preparations incomplete without one or more balloons.”
In addition to the gas generators, Lowe’s first-ever use of telegraphs from the air, his first-ever aircraft carriers, his novel improvements to the balloons themselves and assorted equipment like the altimeter, and the superior mapping techniques he and his men pioneered from their aerial reconnaissance flights all had a lasting impact in the field of aviation. Among those inspired by Lowe’s work was a young engineer officer of the Württembergian Army named Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, who followed the Union Army as an observer in 1863. Stopping at Lowe’s home before returning to Württemberg, Zeppelin consulted with him at length on his wartime experiences and knowledge of balloons. Years later, as a German general and inventor of the Zeppelin rigid airships, he credited his observations in the American Civil War as the origin of his inspiration for dirigibles.
Now at home with Leontine and their four children, Lowe had time to relax, recover, and make his own plans for the future. No longer among them was a transatlantic balloon flight on the eastern air currents, whose existence he had already proven to his own satisfaction. Joseph Henry and others had been right to caution him against such a risky undertaking; no balloonist would successfully cross the Atlantic until 1978.
Fatigue from the war and a growing family that needed his attention no doubt weighed heavily on Lowe’s mind. When Emperor Dom Pedro II wrote to him soliciting his services and expertise in organizing a balloon corps for Brazil’s war with Uruguay, Lowe politely declined but consulted with the Brazilian army officers who came to visit. He also gifted the Empire of Brazil one of his balloons and several gas generators, for which he had applied but never received a patent. He and Leontine bought a place in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and aside from a number of highly publicized ascensions in New York City's Central Park in 1865 and 1866, mostly to raise money for new ventures, Lowe devoted the years between 1863 and 1866 to science.
Lowe’s ice machine, Patent No. 63,404, and his improved “mode of manufacturing ice,” Patent No. 63,413, revolutionized cold storage and cold transport in the United States.
“My mind was now engaged in evolving a method for the manufacture of artificial ice,” he later wrote. His years as an aeronaut had afforded him unique experiences with gases and the formation of ice, including the “miniature snowstorms” he had observed inside his balloons after rapid ascents from warm ground temperatures to subzero temperatures at high altitude, including during his famous flight from Cincinnati to South Carolina. With time to spare, he set to work tinkering and experimenting with ways to recreate similar processes in a controlled environment.
Although an ice-making machine had been invented in 1845 and patented in 1851 by Dr. John Gorrie, it relied on a cumbersome, inefficient system involving steam-powered air compression. The leaky machines were widely mocked by the press, and Gorrie’s attempts to market them failed. The improved “apparatus for the manufacture of ice” and “mode of manufacturing ice” that Lowe soon devised, and for which he received his first two U.S. patents in April 1867, involved pumping carbon dioxide or other gases, such as ammonia or nitrous oxide, into a hermetically sealed, reinforced expansion chamber with cylindrical copper pipes, a spring-driven plunger, and several “falling-doors” beneath the chamber for the retrieval of the ice.
The practical applications extended far beyond making ice to the even more revolutionary possibilities of cold storage. Eager to demonstrate those possibilities, Lowe and some other investors incorporated The Lowe Refrigerated Steamship Company in 1868 and purchased the William Tabor, named after a New Hampshire soldier and Medal of Honor winner in the Civil War, that Lowe redesigned to carry up to 400 tons of meat cooled by his patented process. Driven by the same exhibitionist impulse behind his aerial telegraph to President Lincoln in 1861, Lowe proposed to load the ship with fresh fruit and sail it from New York City to Galveston and New Orleans, returning with a cargo of freshly slaughtered beef. The voyage in 1869 was a mixed success. The refrigeration worked as promised, but the Tabor’s draft was too deep for the shallow port at New Orleans. Undeterred, Lowe and his associates had the Tabor deliver a heavy load of perishables around the tip of South America to San Francisco and back, bringing Western produce to New York City, and they purchased more ships, intending to expand their operations. Ultimately their business venture failed, but a whole new industry of cold transport was born that lasts to this day.
Lowe traveled around the country marketing his inventions, and the commercial production of artificial ice grew dramatically. He also continued to experiment and innovate in the production of gas. At the time, coal gas was still widely used for street lighting, household heating, and cooking in towns and cities, but the amount of energy it produced was weak and its polluting side effects extensive. Water gas could produce more heat, but it was costly and inefficient to generate on a large scale. Lowe therefore devised improvements to the apparatuses and processes for manufacturing gas and heating homes, for which he received three U.S. patents in 1872.
Two of Thaddeus Lowe’s inventions for which he received patents in 1872. At left, Patent No. 130, 380, “Improvement in Apparatus for Refining Iron and Making Steel.” On the right, Lowe’s invention for generating gas and heating dwellings, Patent No. 130,381. In total, the inventor would receive 18 U.S. patents and many more international patents in his lifetime.
As with his refrigerated shipping venture, Lowe was not content merely to invent but wanted to start businesses that employed his patented inventions on a large scale. With other investors, he built a gas manufacturing plant in Norristown and later joined in the incorporation of the United States Improvement Company, which sold large quantities of gas to the Philadelphia Gas Works. He also formed companies built around the patents he received in 1872, including one for an improvement to purifying iron, extracting the impurities, and making steel.
Among his many ventures in these years was a factory for the manufacture of stoves, heaters, fireplaces, and other appliances powered by water gas, including a popular incandescent gas light. By 1879, he was producing water gas for more than thirty cities and towns. At the American Gas Light Association Meeting that year, a W. H. Pearson of Toronto reported that his city’s adoption of the Lowe Process yielded a reduced cost of labor, less wear and tear on the gas-burning apparatuses, significantly less amount of storage room required (without the need for coal), faster gas production, and faster heat reduction when no longer needed.
“Situated as we are in Toronto,” said Pearson, “with anthracite coal a little cheaper than bituminous, and petroleum at a moderate price, we find it considerably to our advantage financially to make gas by the Lowe Process–so much that we felt justified in reducing the net price of our gas.” His report was greeted with applause, and Lowe’s processes were soon adopted overseas in countries like Germany, Great Britain, France, and Sweden, from which he received dozens of international patents. By the 1880s Professor Lowe was not only a wealthy man but the recipient of honors and accolades from scientific circles in the United States and beyond, including the Franklin Institute’s coveted Elliott Cresson Medal for the “Invention Held to be Most Useful to Mankind” for his work in the field of water gas. He and Leontine, with their now ten children — seven daughters and three sons — lived in a spacious, three-story mansion in Norristown.
Inventor, entrepreneur, and balloonist Thaddeus Lowe’s mansion in Pasadena, California featured its own observation tower. He and his wife Leontine, along with their youngest children, moved to the city in 1890.
(Courtesy of the Anne Read Collection)
In spite of his success, or perhaps because of it, Lowe, now in his mid-50s, began to feel that a change of pace and scenery would do him some good. Taking their youngest children with them, he and Leontine moved to Los Angeles in 1887 and to the newly incorporated city of Pasadena in 1890, where they had a palatial Victorian home built. From the top of the mansion’s five-story observation tower, Lowe could admire the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains to the west and the higher, rugged peaks of the Sierra Madre (renamed the San Gabriel Mountains in 1927) to the north and east. It was a sight that stirred his imagination and rekindled his restless energy. He opened several ice-making plants, invested in gas and transportation projects, and in 1890 founded the Citizens Bank, serving two years as its first president.
But the lofty peaks of the Sierra Madre beckoned, and even grander projects were beginning to take shape in the old aeronaut’s fertile imagination. Lowe began to envision a railway that could wind its way up Mount Wilson, where only the hardiest of men and women had ever ventured on foot. One such plan had been conceived a few years earlier, but after a careful survey it was abandoned as impractical and costly. Never one to give up easily, Lowe once again determined that he would succeed where others had failed.
Introduced to a well-known civil engineer named David Macpherson, who had made his own surveys of Mount Wilson with the same goal in mind, the two of them formed a dynamic partnership that combined Macpherson’s knowledge and engineering prowess with Lowe’s finances and vision. Frustrated by land and easement disputes on Mount Wilson from the start, in January 1890 Lowe and Macpherson led a party of surveyors up the mountain, along perilous trails looking for a viable alternate route into the Sierra Madre. Smitten by the panoramic views of canyons, forests, and waterfalls, Lowe at last halted the party on the shoulder of a peak called Oak Mountain.
“Right here,” he said. “I’ll build a hotel and mountain cabins, and we’ll call the place Alpine Tavern.”
While they all agreed on the route they had sketched out, the railway itself still presented significant, if not insurmountable challenges. By the engineering expertise of the times, only a steam-operated cogwheel railway system seemed capable of making the steep climbs required. But Lowe rejected that approach.
“There ought to be a better way,” he said, “a way that would avoid smoke and dust and ashes.”
A conductor and his passengers riding through the Granite Gate on their way to Mount Lowe, in the background.
(Courtesy of Lance Ferm)
Just as years earlier he had invented improvements to the manufacture of gas for heating and lighting, Lowe wanted something cleaner and more efficient for his mountain railway. He was impressed by the trolley car systems he and Macpherson had seen on a visit to Pike’s Peak, Colorado. They agreed that a combination of cable incline funicular and electric trolley line would solve the problem, with the electricity generated by several power stations equipped with gas engines or water-driven turbines, depending on the availability of mountain water. That decided, Lowe got to work on the financing. Investing much of his own fortune up front, with Pasadenans pledging to buy the remaining $600,000 in bonds, he organized the Pasadena and Mount Wilson Railroad and filed articles of incorporation as its president on June 3, 1891. He also purchased the Pasadena Grand Opera House to serve as headquarters for his various business ventures and to house a small factory for gas fixtures and gas stoves.
Construction of the railway began the following April, 1892, under Macpherson’s supervision as chief engineer. In September, Lowe and a group of businessmen from Los Angeles and Pasadena returned to Oak Mountain on horseback. Awed by the panoramic views and the audacity and scope of Lowe’s grand project, one of the businessmen spoke up.
“I propose that we organize ourselves into a committee and I move that this peak be called Mount Lowe in honor of our friend here,” he said to hearty, unanimous approval and no doubt to the great pleasure of Lowe himself. Andrew McNally of the Rand McNally mapmaking firm read of the incident in the newspapers and wrote to Lowe, “This is just the thing, right and proper, and if you can send me a drawing showing the location of Mount Lowe, I will have it properly renamed on our maps.”
An illustration showing the route of the Mount Lowe Railway.
(Courtesy of Lance Ferm)
The railway’s first section, or Mountain Division, had already been completed earlier in 1892, and the second, the Great Incline, was completed the following year. On July 4, 1893, the Mount Lowe Railway opened with great patriotic fanfare. For an admission of 25 cents, passengers could board the trolley at the Mountain Junction terminal in downtown Altadena. After several residential stops passengers were taken along steep, forbidding precipices with breathtaking views and across bridges that seemed to float in the air. At the Mountain Division’s terminus 2,000 feet above sea level was the Rubio Pavilion, a platform that spanned the canyon with a 12-room hotel and a series of stairways and bridges from which visitors could take in charming views of up to 11 waterfalls.
Next, they could transfer to the Great Incline. Uniquely built with three rails, a four-railed passing track at the halfway point, and a trestle spanning a 150-foot-deep chasm, the Great Incline took visitors to the summit of Echo Mountain. Here, nearly 3,500 feet above sea level, with some of it still under construction, was a luxury Victorian hotel, chalet, dance hall, restaurants, bowling alley, tennis courts, picnic areas, and more. There was even a menagerie that housed several local species, including lynxes and a black bear, and further uphill an observatory was added in 1894, under the supervision of the famed New York astronomer, Dr. Lewis Swift. Because the buildings were all painted white, the Echo Mountain resort was soon dubbed “The White City in the Sky.”
The railway’s third and final section, or Alpine Division, was begun in 1894 and completed in 1896. It ran across three canyons, over and around high trestles, and up and down switchbacks, sometimes feeling a bit like a roller coaster. At the railway’s terminus on Mount Lowe, nearly seven miles from the Mountain Junction station in Altadena, was the “Alpine Tavern” Lowe had envisioned on his hike with Macpherson and the surveyors several years earlier. Resembling a Swiss chalet, it had 12 rooms and was surrounded by several cottages and tent cabins to house additional guests, and it boasted amenities similar to the White City on Echo Mountain. It marked the completion of Lowe’s dream and was the only scenic mountain railway ever built with an electric traction rail line. Newspaper ads called it “The Grandest Trip on Earth.”
It was not, however, a financial success. Built at enormous cost, the Mount Lowe Railway and its scenic resorts were not easily accessible to the average American, or even Californian, of the time; the Los Angeles Terminal Railway only ran to Altadena twice a day, limiting the freedom of visitors to make the trip on their own schedule except by horse and buggy. The railway still drew plenty of passengers and positive press, but not nearly enough to recoup the vast amounts of his own fortune that Lowe had spent to build it. Compounding the difficulties, the Depression of 1893, one of the worst in American history, started a few months before the railway’s grand opening, and the years that followed were ones of social, political, and economic turmoil in the United States.
Lowe in his office in Pasadena, year unknown.
(Courtesy of the Joseph Ferm collection)
In 1898, in a nation once again at war — this time with Spain in Cuba and the Philippines — Lowe was forced to declare bankruptcy. The following year, all of the railway's properties were auctioned off except the observatory, whose title remained in Lowe’s hands. Forced to sell his Pasadena estate but allowed to remain as a tenant, he was reportedly evicted in 1900 for failing to keep up his monthly rent.
Bankrupt and now 68 years old, one might have expected this to be the end of Lowe’s career, but in fact his passion for invention and business was as strong as ever. Aware of Southern California’s lack of coke but abundance of crude oil, he developed and patented a method of “cracking” crude oil to produce water gas and coke as well as carbon black, which could be made into briquettes for heating. He also acquired six acres of property and built a plant to provide consumers in the Los Angeles area a cheaper source of water gas, laying pipes into residential districts, but the venture was unprofitable and the business was absorbed by the Los Angeles Gas Company. Lowe incorporated several other gas companies in California and beyond, each eventually taken over by other firms. He served as director of the Citizens Ice Company and the Pasadena Packing Company and bought and sold real estate. He even formed a Lowe Airship Construction Corporation to market stock for a globular “planet airship” lifted by hydrogen gas and driven by gasoline-powered propellers, but there was not enough interest in the scheme. On a trip back east in 1911 to enlist support for a new method of making coke, Lowe fell and broke his hip while visiting his daughter Augustine in Norristown. He would never walk again.
It was the beginning of the end for Lowe. His beloved Leontine, with whom he had shared so many adventures, triumphs, and failures, passed away the following year, at 76. Lowe moved in with his daughter Edna’s family in Pasadena. He died eight months after Leontine, on January 16, 1913, surrounded by eight of their 10 children.
“Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, dead in Pasadena at the age of 81 years, was one of the most marvelous men of his times, and they were times when men of might were not few,” read a Jan. 17, 1913 article from the Santa Cruz Surf and Superior California Farmer newspaper lamenting his passing. “His was a remarkable make-up. Studious and scientific, yet a thorough man of the world; imperious in promotion of his projects, courteous as a companion, an admirable conversationalist.” Similar tributes poured in from around the country. The variety of labels applied to him — scientist, master chemist, inventor, discoverer, aeronaut, and builder, among others — testified to the breadth and depth of his achievements.
Patent art for an airship designed by Thaddeus Lowe.
While sections of the Mount Lowe Railway would continue to run for another 25 years, nature had already begun to destroy the rest. The Echo Mountain House burned in 1900 and was never restored. Another fire driven by gale force winds consumed the dance hall, zoo, powerhouse, and chalet in 1905. A violent flood and rockslide destroyed the Rubio Pavilion in 1909. In 1928, a windstorm tore the roof off of the observatory and ruined the building. Fires and floods continued to reduce the rest, including several trestle bridges, until all that was left of “The Most Scenic Railway in the World” was demolished by dynamite in 1959 and 1962.
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Percy Bysshe Shelley had once written, imagining a traveler from another land reading those words on the pedestal of a pharaoh’s shattered statue in the desert. But as the traveler in “Ozymandias” solemnly notes:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
So it was with the last of Lowe’s mighty works in the heights of the San Gabriel Mountains. His impact in other fields, however, was more enduring. His pioneering innovations in ice-making and refrigeration, his advances in heating and lighting, and his improvements in the manufacture of steel had all improved the quality of life for countless millions around the world and would continue to do so as the foundation for later innovations.
But Lowe’s earliest adventures and accomplishments as a balloonist were the ones that left the most indelible mark on the public’s imagination. On May 13, 1913, four months after he passed away and fifty years almost to the day after he resigned as Chief Aeronaut of the Union Army Balloon Corps, he received his eighteenth and final U.S. patent for the “new and useful Airship” he had promoted several years earlier. It was never built, but hundreds of tethered observation balloons soon rose along both sides of the Western Front in Belgium and France, while German “Zeppelins” drifted in the skies over England on reconnaissance and bombing runs. The age of military balloons had dawned at last, inspired in no small part by Lowe and his fellow aeronauts of the American Civil War. While their widespread use in the First World War was never to be surpassed again, a century later tethered, unmanned balloons called aerostats still provided critical surveillance and security for American military forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Widely considered the grandfather of American military aviation, the Lowe Army Heliport at Fort Novosel, home to the U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence, is named after Thaddeus S. C. Lowe.
Credits
Produced by the USPTO’s Office of the Chief Communications Officer. For feedback or questions, please contact inventorstories@uspto.gov.
Story by Eric Atkisson. Additional contributions by Whitney Pandil-Eaton, Linda Hosler, and Leah Taber.
The photo at the beginning of the story features Thaddeus Lowe in 1855 and is courtesy of the Library of Congress. The graphic on the homepage is by Gabriella McNevin-Melendez.
Special thanks to Steven and Patrice Demory and Lance Ferm, a descendant of Thaddeus and Leontine Lowe who maintains an extensive repository of images, documents, articles, and links.
References
Babal, Marianne, “The Balloon Corps Banker,” Wells Fargo, n.d., https://history.wf.com/from-above-the-civil-war-battlefield-to-the-bank/
Block, Eugene B., “Above the Civil War: The Story of Thaddeus Lowe, Balloonist, Inventor, Railway Builder”. Berkeley: Howell, North, 1966.
Jarrow, Gail, “Lincoln’s Flying Spies: Thaddeus Lowe and the Civil War Balloon Corps,” Honesdale, Pa.: Calkins Creek, 2010.
N.A., “Balloons in the Civil War,” American Battlefield Trust, May 29,2024, battlefields.org/learn/head-tilting-history/balloons-civil-war.
N.A., “Civil War Ballooning During the Seven Days Campaign,” American Battlefield Trust, May 29, 2024, battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-ear-ballooning-during-seven-days-campaign.
N.A., “Early Views of Mt. Lowe Railway, Water and Power Associates, n.d., https://waterandpower.org/museum/Mt_Lowe_Railway.html
N.A., “The Mount Lowe Observatory,” Mount Lowe Preservation Society, https://www.mountlowe.org/mount-lowe-history/the-mount-lowe-observatory/
Onion, Amanda, et al., “Balloon crosses the Atlantic,” History.com, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/balloon-crosses-the-atlanti…
Pohl, Robert, “Lost Capitol Hill: Lowe’s Balloon Gas Generators,” The hill is home, May 03, 2021,https://thehillishome.com/2021/05/lost-capitol-hill-lowes-balloon-gas-g…
“The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies Series III - Volume III.” Washington: Government Printing Office, 1899.
Scott, Joseph C., “The Infernal Balloon: Union Aeronautics During the Civil War”. Army History Magazine, Fall 2014.South Carolina Digital Newspaper Program,. “Professor Lowe’s 1861 Balloon Voyage to Union, S.C.” University Libraries, University of South Carolina, 2011.Professor Lowe’s 1861 Balloon Voyage to Union, S.C.
