Pilot Balloons
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
small, free balloons sent up for the purpose of indicating the speed and direction of air currents by their drift. They are used in connection with aeronautical undertakings of all kinds and were sent up by thousands in the Great War for the purpose of determining wind allowances to be made by gunners, as well as for the guidance of aviators. PIUS XI. (ACHILLE RATTI), POPE, was born at Desio, near Milan, Italy, May 30, 1857, his father being a well-to-do weaver by trade. He received his first education at the school of Don Giuseppe Valonteri, a priest of Desio, and was later sent successively to the gymnasium of St. Peter Martyr, the college of St. Charles Borromeo, the Major Seminary of Milan, and the Lombard College at Rome, being ordained to the priesthood in 1879. Returning to Milan in 1882, he was first a teacher of theology and sacred eloquence in the Major Seminary there, and was afterward for twenty twenty years a member of the college of doctors of the Ambrosian Library, Library, the greatest of the Church libraries in northern Italy. In 1907 he was chosen head of the library and in 1914 became prefect of the Vatican Library in Rome. He is universally regarded as one of the ablest scholars of the Catholic Church and is thought to be favorably inclined to peace with the Italian Government on the Roman Question, which he has pronounced to be "an international question which must be solved for the glory of God and the best interests of the world." He was made Cardinal Archbishop of Milan June 13, 1921, and was elected to the papacy Feb. , 1922. 6
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921, a small free balloon followed by eye or theodolite was the only practical way to measure winds aloft, and the war had sent them up "by thousands" so gunners could reckon their wind allowance. Within a decade the balloon acquired a radio: Pavel Molchanov's radiosonde of 1930 let an instrument package report pressure, temperature and humidity on the way up, and tracking the transmitter's position gave the wind as a by-product. Today roughly 800 weather stations worldwide release such balloons twice a day, most of them fixed by GPS, while gunnery and aviation take their winds aloft from Doppler radar, wind profilers and numerical forecast models rather than from a drifting rubber sphere. The plain pilot balloon ("pibal") survives as a cheap fallback at small airfields and for smoke- and spray-drift work.
Written for this edition, 2026.