Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880, page 9 by Various Authors
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o make an ascension at Pittsburg with a balloon that had not been used since the previous season, his assistant, Harry Gilbert, noticed that the ropes attaching the netting to the concentrating-ring seemed rotten, and proposed to replace them with new. This Donaldson insisted would take too much time, but he was finally induced to allow eight of the sixteen to be renewed. While giving his customary trapeze performance high above the housetops the old cords began to snap, and before he could bring the balloon down every one of them had parted--a startling intimation of how his rashness might have resulted.
Among the unkilled American aëronauts undoubtedly the best known for professional skill and experience is Samuel A. King. He seems to have been a predestined air-sailor, for he made his first ascension (Philadelphia, 1851) in his twenty-third year, and during more than two hundred subsequent voyages, many of them extending over hundreds of miles, and some adding darkness and proximity to large bodies of water to the ordinary dangers, he has shown an intuitive knowledge of the construction and management of the balloon and an appreciation of aërial forces which, while they have not robbed his experiences of thrilling incidents, have kept them singularly free from disastrous consequences. One of the most memorable of these excursions was made from Plymouth, New Hampshire, September 26, 1872, on which occasion Mr. King was accompanied by his friend and frequent fellow-voyager, Luther L. Holden, of the Boston Journal. The balloon used only held twenty thousand cubic feet of gas, but was inflated with hydrogen. It was liberated at 4.18 P.M., and immediately manifested a determination to accompany some dense black clouds which were hurrying in a north-easterly direction toward the heart of the mountain-region on the verge of which Plymouth lies. Over Mount Washington and across the Androscoggin Valley it flew at the rate of fifty miles an hour. At six o'clock Lake Umbagog was floating beneath