England was using them, might ask this country to supply some. The American government too might have use for them. So, long before there was even any hint of orders, Mr. Litchfield threw a new problem to the engineers at Goodyear Aircraft and the operating men at Wingfoot Lake—the job of designing an efficient barrage balloon. They were not to make Chinese copies of foreign balloons, but draw on their experience in lighter-than-air and see if principles and technique established there could not be applied to design balloons which would ride with maximum stability in gusty and unstable air. Men went to work, designing, building, flying, observing, rejecting, altering, improving, week after week, month after month, until several satisfactory types were evolved. One of these was capable of flying at 15,000 feet, twice the usual height. Orders began to come in, and the little group of men and girls in the balloon room quickly grew into a large organization. The department outgrew its quarters, took over room after room, expanded to subsidiary plants outside Akron. One instrument developed illustrates how the airship men were able to utilize past experience in a new project. Mounted alongside the winch on the ground, it gave exact information, as often as was wanted, as to what the barrage balloon was doing, a mile or three miles up. This assembly included a moving picture camera, which continuously, or at fixed intervals, or at any instant desired, by means of radio control, would photograph recording dials and show these things: wind velocity at the balloon, tension on cable, gas pressure inside the balloon, temperature of confined gas, temperature and humidity of the air surrounding the balloon, angle of attack at which the balloon faced the wind, both fore and aft and from side to side, also a clock, which showed the time the readings were recorded. These pictures, when developed gave the engineers the data from which they could modify designs and arrive at a type of balloon which would ride most easily aloft, avoid undue tugging and surging on the cable—incidentally permitting smaller gauge and weight cable to be used for a given height with ample safety margin. Perhaps the largest single result, however, growing out of the fleet operations was that it had created manufacturing facilities, ships and personnel on which the Navy could draw, as fully as it wanted, in emergency, and with little more delay than the time it took for a man to change his uniform. Boettner, Sewell, Blair, Hobensack and Hill followed the others into the service. Hobensack’s ground crew in California signed up with him in a body, and men from other ground crews, expert in rigging, in motors, radio, in mooring out and maintenance joined up. In the end only Fickes and Crum were left at Akron to build the new ships, and Sheppard, Crosier and Massic to test-fly them, then ferry them to their destinations.