Jack Hitt

They bring the balloon up to Richmond in 1862, and they put it in action.

And Lowe's balloon was also in that fight.

So they had two observation balloons at the same time.

Your official military historians will say this is the first air-to-air combat.

And they cut him up into little squares and every congressman in the North was given one of these little squares of the petticoat, you know, as another stunt to sort of like increase the funding for the balloon corps.

No Union balloon was ever shot down and no balloon corps aeronaut was ever killed.

But strangely, you know,

And this is true of all new sort of inventions.

There's a set of people that just simply don't care how good it is.

They like the old way.

And strangely, despite all of its successes, it just kind of faded from use by 1863 and kind of disappeared.

Like still in the war, it faded from use.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

By the end of 62, it was pretty much out of business.

At this point, you know, the war ends and Thaddeus does what you do in peacetime, which is he decides to make money.

Oh, they do.

That's true.

Very famously, there are those.

He brought gas into the house to heat homes better than firewood, better than coal.