With all the talk these days of going green, recycling and re-use, creative ways of using old materials for new purposes is all the rage. Imagine being faced with the task of recycling a hot air balloon. The National Geographic Society met that challenge back in 1936 when it decided to transform the gas bag of its historic Explorer II balloon into bookmarks. 

The Explorer II made a historic flight into the stratosphere on Armistice Day, November 11, 1935 from the Black Hills of Rapid City, SD. Piloted by two Army captains, Orvil Anderson and Albert Stevens, it achieved a record-breaking height of 72,394.795 feet, roughly fourteen miles. Captain Anderson explained that the precise number was because France once took away the altitude record from the United States by .00205 feet. Their achievement broke an unofficial record set by a Soviet who met a tragic end in 1934. But it was a flight by Professor Auguste Piccard and Karl Kipfer in 1931 that began a series of balloon flights in the 1930s to study the stratosphere.

Although the record seems quaintly modest by today’s standards, it was not just a publicity stunt aimed at setting a record. It was a true scientific expedition in which the intrepid captains used 64 scientific instruments to take photographs, study high altitude spores, test shortwave radio and trap cosmic rays. During the months prior to the flight, the New York Times was filled with articles on the preparations including shipment of special instruments, monitoring the weather, testing and simulating their maneuvers. One anonymous commentator on June 9, 1935, p. E8, speculated on the scientific questions the flight might be able to answer, saying that the stratosphere was the principal object of study. He described it in an article titled “Into the Stratosphere” as follows:

There it lies, seven miles above us, a mysterious ocean shot through and through with electrical discharges of which very little is known, all but cloudless, windless, weatherless. We live in the mere dregs of the atmosphere, turbulent and murky in comparison with that serenity.

Explorer II was originally slated to ascend in July, but the gas bag burst one hour before take-off. The balloon fabric was returned to its maker, Goodyear-Zeppelin in Akron, Ohio. Two months later, a new gas bag was ready and preparations resumed for the flight that eventually was successful, setting a record that stood for 21 years. The pilots, with their borrowed football helmets and homemade sandwiches, were the first to view the curvature of the earth.

Following the flight, the gondola was displayed in Rockefeller Center and in San Diego, California, along with the scientific instruments that had been carried on board, in the Palace of Transportation, part of the Pacific International Exposition of 1936. The troublesome gas bag was not so easy to display nor was it in any condition to be re-inflated. The National Geographic Society determined that “the continued strains to which the balloon was subjected throughout the two inflations and long hours of successful flight at great altitude made it advisable for safety to life to retire it honorably.”

In January 1936 in Omaha, Nebraska, Captain Orvil Anderson revealed that the bag was being cut into about 1 million pieces to be given to members of the National Geographic Society as souvenir bookmarks. The February 1936 issue of National Geographic announced that members could obtain a souvenir bookmark as a personal memento of the historic flight by writing to The Society “as long as the supply lasts.” 

The National Geographic Society’s web site once had information on the bookmark in its Collectors Corner saying that the bookmark is considered one of the “great” collectibles among National Geographic fans. Although it sports an image of the balloon and many facts about the flight, it is not the loveliest bookmark in my collection. The rubberized long-staple cotton fabric is dull, browned due to chemical aging of vulcanized material or ultraviolet light during flight according to various collector sources. The bookmark appears on eBay and other auction and collector sites every so often. The October 1998 issue of National Geographic has a small article about a 92-year old man in Victoria, British Columbia, who sent for the giveaway in 1936.  He said he was always losing the historic bookmark in his books and solved the problem by keeping it on his TV.

The little bookmarks continue to remind us of the explorations that preceded and paralleled those that took us into the stratosphere and beyond.  The same anonymous commentator in the New York Times wrote on the day after the Explorer II’s flight hailing the “Vikings of the Air,” explorers like Anderson and Piccard, who have counterparts in a later age, Armstrong and even the imaginary Picard. 

They bid us look beyond the tenuous layers where meteors and auroras glow, and wonder if we shall rise to heights where the stars and the sun blaze day and night in a perpetually inky sky.

Note: The links to the two articles, “Into the Stratosphere” and “Vikings of the Air,” require a New York Times subscription to view. If you don’t have a subscription, you can log in to your library system using your library card and, if they subscribe, may be able to view or search them from there.

Bookmark specifications: This fabric bookmark is part of the balloon “Explorer II.”
Dimensions: 2 1/4” x 7 1/8”
Material: Rubberized cotton
Manufacturer: National Geographic Society
Date: 1936

Laine Farley is a digital librarian who misses being around the look, feel and smell of real books.  Her collection of over 3,000 bookmarks began with a serendipitous find while reviewing books donated to the library. Fortunately, her complementary collection of articles and books about bookmarks provides an excuse for her to get back to libraries and try her hand at writing about bookmarks. Farley’s web site is Collecting Bookmarks (Physical, not Virtual), and she can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it