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John Wise (balloonist)
John Wise (February 24, 1808 – September 28, 1879) was a pioneer in the field of ballooning. He made over 400 flights during his lifetime and was responsible for several innovations in balloon design. His balloon, ''The Jupiter'' carried 123 letters to make the first official airmail delivery run for the US Post Office in 1859. Early career John Wise was born on February 24, 1808, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States, to William and Mary Trey Weiss who anglicized his surname to Wise. He was the fourth of eight children. He worked as an apprentice cabinetmaker from the time he was 16; after the age of 21 he briefly became a piano maker. A short column and plaque were erected near the corner of East Marion Street and North Lime Street in Lancaster (), by the Lancaster County Historical Society in 1955 stating that Wise "lived most of his life near this spot." He had been interested in ballooning since reading an article in the newspaper when he was 14, and in 1835, at the ...
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Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Lancaster, ( ; pdc, Lengeschder) is a city in and the county seat of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It is one of the oldest inland cities in the United States. With a population at the 2020 census of 58,039, it ranks 11th in population among Pennsylvania's municipalities. The Lancaster metropolitan area population is 507,766, making it the 104th-largest metropolitan area in the U.S. and second-largest in the South Central Pennsylvania area. The city's primary industries include healthcare, tourism, public administration, manufacturing, and both professional and semi-professional services. Lancaster is a hub of Pennsylvania's Dutch Country. Lancaster is located southwest of Allentown and west of Philadelphia. History Originally called Hickory Town, the city was renamed after the English city of Lancaster by native John Wright. Its symbol, the red rose, is from the House of Lancaster. Lancaster was part of the 1681 Penn's Woods Charter of William Penn, and was laid ...
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Easton, Pennsylvania
Easton is a city in, and the county seat of, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, United States. The city's population was 28,127 as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Easton is located at the confluence of the Lehigh River, a river that joins the Delaware River in Easton and serves as the city's eastern geographic boundary with Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Easton is the easternmost city in the Lehigh Valley, a region of that is Pennsylvania's third largest Metropolitan statistical area, metropolitan region with 861,889 residents as of the 2020 United States census, U.S. 2020 census. Of the Valley's three major cities, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Allentown, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Bethlehem, and Easton, Easton is the smallest with approximately one-fourth the population of Allentown, the Valley's largest city. The greater Easton area includes the city of Easton, three townships (Forks Township, Northampton County, Pennsylvania, Forks, Palmer Township, Northampton County, Pe ...
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Union Army Balloon Corps
The Union Army Balloon Corps was a branch of the Union Army during the American Civil War, established by presidential appointee Thaddeus S. C. Lowe. It was organized as a civilian operation, which employed a group of prominent American aeronauts and seven specially built, gas-filled balloons to perform aerial reconnaissance on the Confederate States Army. Lowe was one of a few veteran balloonists who was working on an attempt to make a transatlantic crossing by balloon. His efforts were interrupted by the onset of the Civil War, which broke out one week before one of his most important test flights. Subsequently, he offered his aviation expertise to the development of an air-war mechanism through the use of aerostats for reconnaissance purposes. Lowe met with U.S. President Abraham Lincoln on 11 June 1861, and proposed a demonstration with his own balloon, the ''Enterprise'', from the lawn of the armory directly across the street from the White House. From a height of he telegra ...
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American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction. Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the west. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, ...
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Henderson, New York
Henderson is a Administrative divisions of New York#Town, town in Jefferson County, New York, Jefferson County, New York (state), New York, United States. The population was 1,360 at the 2010 census. The town is named after William Henderson, the original European-American land owner. Henderson is in the western part of the county and is southwest of Watertown (city), New York, Watertown. The Seaway Trail, Great Lakes Seaway Trail runs through the town along New York State Route 3 and includes a monument to its founder, William E. Tyson. History This area had long been occupied by the Onondaga people, a nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, a Native American coalition of tribes who controlled most of upstate and western New York around the Great Lakes by the 15th century. Because most nations of the confederacy had allied with the British in the American Revolutionary War, after the defeat of Britain the United States forced the Iroquois to cede most of their land in New York under ...
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John LaMountain
John LaMountain (1830 Wayne County, New York – February 14, 1870 South Bend, Indiana) was a ballooning pioneer. He was privately contracted as an aerial observer by General Butler at Fort Monroe during the American Civil War and is accredited with having made the first report of useful intelligence on enemy activity. Afterwards he worked a short assignment with the Union Army Balloon Corps. Early life and ballooning He had but little education, and on the early death of his father he became the sole support of his mother. When a young man he was successful in making several minor ascensions. Known more for his overbearingly contentious mannerisms, and a propensity to ride the coat tails of more successful balloonists, LaMountain was not considered relevant to the science of ballooning. In 1859 he was invited to join with the more senior and prominent, and just as sanctimonious, balloonist John Wise in an attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in Wise's mammoth aerostat appro ...
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Jet Stream
Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering thermal wind, air currents in the Atmosphere of Earth, atmospheres of some planets, including Earth. On Earth, the main jet streams are located near the altitude of the tropopause and are westerly winds (flowing west to east). Jet streams may start, stop, split into two or more parts, combine into one stream, or flow in various directions including opposite to the direction of the remainder of the jet. Overview The strongest jet streams are the polar jets around the Polar vortex, polar vortices, at above sea level, and the higher altitude and somewhat weaker subtropical jets at . The Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere each have a polar jet and a subtropical jet. The northern hemisphere polar jet flows over the middle to northern latitudes of North America, Europe, and Asia and their intervening oceans, while the southern hemisphere polar jet mostly circles Antarctica, both all year round. Jet streams are the prod ...
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Cover (philately)
In philately, the term cover pertains to the outside of an envelope or Mail, package with an address, typically with postage stamps that have been Cancellation (mail), cancelled and is a term generally used among stamp and postal history collectors. The term does not include the contents of the letter or package, although they may add interest to the item if still present. Cover collecting plays an important role in postal history as many covers bear stamps, postmarks and other markings along with names and addresses all of which help to place a cover at a given time and place in history. History The term originates from the practice of covering a letter by folding a separate sheet about it to physically protect it and prevent infringement of confidentiality. In the first half of the 19th century it became the fashion to cut the cover into a diamond or lozenge shape. This was the precursor of the version of the envelope known today. Its convenience and popularity led to the lozen ...
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Crawfordsville, Indiana
Crawfordsville is a city in Montgomery County in west central Indiana, United States, west by northwest of Indianapolis. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 16,306. The city is the county seat of Montgomery County, the only chartered city and largest populated place in the county. Crawfordsville is part of a broader Indianapolis combined statistical area, although the Lafayette metropolitan statistical area is only north. It is home to Wabash College, which was ranked by ''Forbes'' as #12 in the United States for undergraduate studies in 2008. The city was founded in 1823 on the bank of Sugar Creek, a southern tributary of the Wabash River and named for U.S. Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. History Early 19th century In 1813, Williamson Dunn, Henry Ristine, and Major Ambrose Whitlock, U.S. Army, noted that the site of present-day Crawfordsville was ideal for settlement, surrounded by deciduous forest and potentially arable land, with water provided b ...
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Lafayette, Indiana
Lafayette ( , ) is a city in and the county seat of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, located northwest of Indianapolis and southeast of Chicago. West Lafayette, on the other side of the Wabash River, is home to Purdue University, which contributes significantly to both communities. Together, Lafayette and West Lafayette form the core of the Lafayette metropolitan area, which had a population of 224,709 in th2021 US Census Bureau estimates According to the 2020 United States Census, the population of Lafayette was 70,783, a 25% increase from 56,397 in 2000. Meanwhile, the 2020 Census listed the neighboring city of West Lafayette at 44,595 and the Tippecanoe County population at 186,291. Lafayette was founded in 1825 on the southeast bank of the Wabash River near where the river becomes impassable for riverboats upstream, though a French fort and trading post had existed since 1717 on the opposite bank and three miles downstream. It was named for the French general ...
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Airmail
Airmail (or air mail) is a mail transport service branded and sold on the basis of at least one leg of its journey being by air. Airmail items typically arrive more quickly than surface mail, and usually cost more to send. Airmail may be the only option for sending mail to some destinations, such as overseas, if the mail cannot wait the time it would take to arrive by ship, sometimes weeks. The Universal Postal Union adopted comprehensive rules for airmail at its 1929 Postal Union Congress in London. Since the official language of the Universal Postal Union is French, airmail items worldwide are often marked ''Par avion'', literally: "by airplane". For about the first half century of its existence, transportation of mail via aircraft was usually categorized and sold as a separate service (airmail) from surface mail. Today it is often the case that mail service is categorized and sold according to transit time alone, with mode of transport (land, sea, air) being decided on the ...
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Jet Stream
Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering thermal wind, air currents in the Atmosphere of Earth, atmospheres of some planets, including Earth. On Earth, the main jet streams are located near the altitude of the tropopause and are westerly winds (flowing west to east). Jet streams may start, stop, split into two or more parts, combine into one stream, or flow in various directions including opposite to the direction of the remainder of the jet. Overview The strongest jet streams are the polar jets around the Polar vortex, polar vortices, at above sea level, and the higher altitude and somewhat weaker subtropical jets at . The Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere each have a polar jet and a subtropical jet. The northern hemisphere polar jet flows over the middle to northern latitudes of North America, Europe, and Asia and their intervening oceans, while the southern hemisphere polar jet mostly circles Antarctica, both all year round. Jet streams are the prod ...
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