The Union Balloon Corps
Thaddeus Lowe and the Birth of Aerial Reconnaissance

About this book:

Long before drones or satellites, a self-taught showman from the New Hampshire backwoods convinced Abraham Lincoln to launch the world's first military air force. Thaddeus Lowe's Union Balloon Corps turned silk and hydrogen into the eyes of the Army of the Potomac, floating above battlefields from Bull Run to Fredericksburg to telegraph Confederate movements directly to generals below. Lowe built a fleet of war balloons, invented mobile hydrogen generators, and even converted a coal barge into history's first aircraft carrier—all while dodging Confederate artillery and the deadlier fire of Union bureaucrats who dismissed his "aeronauts" as carnival acts.

*The Union Balloon Corps* resurrects this forgotten chapter at the vanguard of modern warfare. Through meticulous research and vivid narrative, it follows Lowe from his audacious pre-war drift into secessionist South Carolina to the corps' heartbreaking disbandment weeks before Gettysburg—where aerial eyes might have changed history. Here are the eccentric aeronauts, the baffled Southern gunners trying to shoot down "Yankee clouds," and the infantrymen who looked up to see the future of war hanging by a thread above the smoke. This is the birth of military aviation, told with the sweep of a novel and the authority of a historian.