Thaddeus Lowe was born in 1832 in Jefferson, New Hampshire, to a poor farming family and got only three months of winter schooling a year. At 18 he volunteered at a traveling chemistry lecture on lighter-than-air gases, became the lecturer’s assistant, then bought the show and billed himself as Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe. He married Parisian actress Leontine Gachon in 1855 and, with backing from Smithsonian head Joseph Henry for his theory of a steady west-to-east upper air current, built the giant balloon Great Western in 1859 to cross the Atlantic. Gas supply problems in New York and a windstorm in Philadelphia stalled the attempt, and an April 1861 test flight from Cincinnati in the balloon Enterprise came down in South Carolina just after Fort Sumter, where locals took him for a spy.

On June 11, 1861, Lowe sent the first air-to-ground telegraph message to Lincoln from 500 feet above the White House and became chief aeronaut of the civilian Union Army Balloon Corps. He resigned in May 1863 after his pay was cut from $10 a day to $3 and he fell ill with malaria. He then turned his skill with gases to civilian work, patenting a water gas process in 1873, building compression ice machines using ammonia, and shipping refrigerated beef and fruit by steamship. He won the Franklin Institute’s Elliott Cresson Medal, moved to Pasadena, and spent his fortune on the Mount Lowe Railway.

• At Seven Pines, Lowe used a camp kettle with its bottom knocked out to move hydrogen from one balloon to another in about 15 minutes.
• His field generators made hydrogen by pouring sulfuric acid over iron filings in copper-lined wagons.
• German observer Ferdinand von Zeppelin studied Lowe’s balloon operations during the war.
• The Mount Lowe Railway, built with engineer David J. McPherson from 1893, included a 2,800-foot funicular to Echo Mountain, an 80-room hotel and an observatory with a 16-inch telescope.
• The venture went into receivership by 1899, its hotel burned in 1900, and Lowe died in 1913 at 80, living in his daughter’s Pasadena home.