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Article: Balloon Reconnaissance, History
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- Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, andSecurity
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Balloon Reconnaissance, History
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JUDSON KNIGHT
Just three months after the first manned balloon flights in France in 1783, Benjamin Franklin wrote of the new invention's military capabilities. Over the next 13 decades,
balloons would increasingly serve fighting forces both for reconnaissance
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particularly in the American Civil War
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and later as bombers. The latter application would reach its apex with the German airships of World War I, a conflict in which the airplane proved itself a vastly superior instrument of aerial combat. Thereafter, the principal nation using balloons for surveillance was not Germany, but the United States, which employed them in the ...