Balloons of War

    

This week in class I studied the American Civil War, where we see the first official military use of aerial reconnaissance in the United States.  Obviously there weren't airplanes yet, so what did they use? Balloons!  Although now the novelty and sport of balloons makes this idea funny (for me at least), balloon reconnaissance was a dangerous field.  The hydrogen gas used to fill the balloons was highly flammable, and before the balloon ascended high enough, it's occupants were very susceptible to gunfire.  Also, being in the air was a new and scary thing for most people. In class on Wednesday, my fellow student Moe told the class that as balloons started to be implemented in the Union, prisoners were forced to go up in the balloons because everyone else was too afraid to try it.  One of the most famous aeronauts of the war was Thaddeus Lowe, a balloon enthusiast who actually set up a demonstration of his balloon in Washington to convince the military to take it on.  From perhaps his most notable balloon flight Lowe gathered intelligence that led to the Battle of Gettysburg: he saw that the fort at Yorktown was being evacuated.

    

 

One of Lowe's balloons, the Intrepid

http://www.old-picture.com/pics/civil-war/005/replenishing-CONSTITUTION-Professor-INTREPID.htm

Apart from studying the history of military balloons in class, each student had to pick a connected subject that interested them and independently research that.  I decided to look more into the use of cryptography in the US Civil War.  I just recently saw "The Imitation Game" (with one of my favorite actors EVER Benedict Cumberbatch), which follows the story of Alan Turing and his team breaking the Nazi code "Enigma" in WWII.  We've come a long way since then, and I comparatively wanted to see how far we'd come by the 1940s from the 1860s.  During the Civil War, the Caesar cipher, also known as the Vigenére cipher was widely used by both sides.  First seen in 1553, the Caesar cipher lines up two alphabets where each letter signifies another.  A code word at the beginning of a message would prompt the reader where to set their alphabet.

 A Confederate Vigenére cipher
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/vigenere/

 Although historians aren't sure how much either side cracked the code of the other, we now know how to crack the cipher quite easily.  William Friedman (1891-1969) created a statistical analysis of the cipher called the "Index of coincidence."  Basically, the letter "e" is the most common in the English language, happening at a frequency of .127, so it is most likely that the highest repeated letter in a message is an e.  From there, one can find out the whole cipher.  Although now the Caesar cipher is considered one of the most easily broken codes, it was once thought to be unbreakable.  The same was true for the "Enigma" machine in WWII.  It's funny how everyone thinks that something is impossible until someone beats it!

 Bibliography:
Glassford, W A. "The Balloon in the Civil War." Journal of the Military Service Intitution of the United States 18 (1896).

Lowe, T. (1911). The Balloons with the Army of the Potomac. The Photographic History of the Civil War, 8.

Reuvers, P., & Simons, M. (2014, May 15). Vigenère Cipher. In Crypto Mueseum.

Week One: A History of Remote Sensing

In my first year seminar at Furman, "Eyes in the Sky," I'm learning about the history of remote sensing, or effectively the history of photography.  I was under the impression that the camera and the photograph was a relatively modern invention, since most of the old photographs I've seen are from about the 1850s onward.  In actuality, the idea of the camera has been around for many centuries before, dating back to 336-323 BC when Aristotle began to contemplate that light was only a state, not a substance.  The idea for the camera obscura, the precursor to the camera, was invented in 1038 by Al Hazen and later actually brought into being by Roger Bacon in 1267.  I find it incredible that people were able to figure out the principles of the camera so long ago when society still had over 200 years to realize that gravity was a thing!  In 1777 chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele found that silver chromate could create a fixed image on a plate when rinsed in ammonia, thus discovering the basis for photographic film.  I have absolutely no clue how these early inventors of photography came up with such seemingly random ideas to make photography work.  One of my friends this past semester took photography, and I helped her out in the dark room a fair amount of times.  We had to put the film in a solution for however many minutes, while shaking it after however many seconds.  Then once the film was printed, we had to put the prints in 3 different baths for differing times, and finally, we put the pictures in some strange water circulating machine with a function that is still a mystery to me.  All these steps are so seemingly random and unrelated, if I were trying to invent photography, I know I wouldn't get anywhere close to figuring it out.  Even so, people figured this process out even before scientific evidence of germs, which seems to me like such a strange line of events. The first photo of nature was taken in 1827 and the first aerial photograph in 1848.  At about this time, innovations in photography and remote sensing really started to take off.  People used basically anything that could go in the sky to take pictures from kites to balloons, and from this want for aerial photography came things such as the noble Bavarian Pigeon Corps.

a brave pigeon soldier geared for reconnaissance

http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~jeff/115a/history/pigeonremotesensing.html

In both world wars, remote sensing was used to gather intelligence, but the most infamous use of remote sensing was in the Cold War.  In 1962, a spy plane geared with photographic equipment flew over Cuba and captured pictures of nuclear warhead platforms.  These warheads were sent by the USSR to protect it's western ally against attacks from the United States.

Nuclear launch sites in Cuba 

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/cuban-missile-crisis

With tensions running high between the United States and USSR, this discovery led to some of the most dangerous days in history, where the world came the closest to nuclear warfare in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  After 13 days of standoff, the USSR agreed to remove its missiles from Cuba with the promise that the United States would not invade Cuba.  In my mind, this is one of the most significant events in modern history of remote sensing.  In the 1960s, the United States started to gather space satellite images, and advances in satellite imaging bring remote sensing history up to today.   

The creation of photography and remote is definitely a feat human ingenuity and curiosity, and I am excited to learn more about it in the following semester.