The Mount Lowe Railway was the fulfillment of one community's fantasy to have a scenic mountain railroad that went to the summits and across the crest of the San Gabriel Mountains above Pasadena. Though plans and diagrams to do so were plentiful, no single or multiple benefactor had ever stepped forward to realize such a venture…at least not until the arrival of one Professor Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe 1.

Professor Lowe came to Pasadena in 1890 from his home in Norristown, Pennsylvania. He made Norristown his home after the Civil War. He was born in 1832 in New Hampshire as the youngest of five boys to poor Scottish-English parents who sent him away to another farm where he could be raised–unfortunately, as an indentured servant. From his boyhood he was always fascinated by the phenomenon of meteorology which at that time was not much researched at all. He longed to read books that could answer so many questions he had concerning the movements of clouds in the upper atmosphere. Working on the farm afforded him little time in school except for the few cold and snowy months of winter.

His first experiment in exploration of the atmosphere was an attempt to see if anything could live at altitudes in excess of treetop. He caged a cat, tied it to a kite with a couple of lanterns, and on a windy night set the whole airborne craft aloft, up several hundred feet. The lanterns told him the kite was remaining aloft. The test was to see if the cat would live. Reeling the kite in at dawn, young Thaddeus was delighted to see the cat was alive, albeit shaken and prepared to bolt upon release. He promised never to do that to any living creature again. It would be his own mortality that he would put up against the elements in a quest to find out what those easterly winds were that blew high above the clouds.

Lowe took his independence from slavery on July 4th of his twelfth year. By age seventeen he had arrived home to his father who, since the death of Thad's mother, had remarried and added seven children to the family. One day his older brother came home and announced that Professor Dinckelhoff was in town with his side show demonstrations of scientific phenomenon never before shown to man. The boys went to the show, but it was Thaddeus who was captivated by the experiments with never-before-heard-of gasses, like hydrogen, which created bubbles of fascinating durability and lighter-than-air properties. Lowe joined the Professor's show and went on the road with him and within two years found himself out giving similar demonstrations to whomever would watch…and pay. The side show business became lucrative, and Lowe sought to use the proceeds to send himself to school.

In an attempt to fulfill his grandmother's wish to become a doctor, Lowe took up studies in medicine. It bored him horribly, so he returned to his first interest, lighter-than-air gasses. Part of his interest was fueled by his fascination with aviation, the new field of ballooning. With determination to become the best balloonist in the world, Lowe delved into all the study there was to find on flight, aviation, aerodynamics and gasses, even taking him into the mathematical principles developed by Archimedes.

By 1857, Professor Lowe had come into his own. His work was well-known and his crowd-drawing charisma was unequaled. He had built several balloons, the largest of which he named The City of New York. It was a 22-ton balloon, a designation based on its lifting capacity. He had finally decided to use it in his life's ambition to pilot the balloon on the high easterly winds across the Atlantic to France. It would be fitted with a large riding compartment capable of holding seven men and a life boat.

More a visionary than an adventurer, Lowe thought that study of atmospheric conditions could be used in weather forecasting. He even envisioned a system whereby several manned positions around the nation could telegraph local conditions to a central station in Washington, D.C. from which agriculture and maritime services could benefit.

In 1861 Lowe wrote to a Professor Joseph Henry of Smithsonian Institution describing his plans. Henry, not all too enthused with such a precarious undertaking, suggested he take his balloons west and sail back to the east coast. Heeding the suggestion, Lowe took several of his balloons to Cincinnati where he awaited for just the right conditions by which to make his ascent. Friends and media, familiar with his ambition, flocked behind him, some supportively, others skeptically.

Then came the evening on April 2oth, while he was attending a dinner in his honor, word was brought to him of the ideal wind conditions. The ground level gusts were bounding westerly, but it was that high east wind that the Professor wanted to explore. Between three and four o'clock in the morning he was ready. With a bottle of hot coffee wrapped in a cloth (thermoses didn't exist then), and a stack of freshly printed Cincinnati newspapers, Prof. Lowe headed for the heavens. Much to the glee of his detractors, the balloon ascended with the westerly gusts, but by noon telegraph reports were coming in from Kentucky reporting a high-flying craft traveling east across the sky. The professor, attaining altitudes in excess of 13,000 feet had found his east wind and was headed home. Well…almost.

By some understandable miscalculations, the balloon drifted southward across Virginia where Professor Lowe could hear the cannonading below; the Civil War had broken out and the Confederates were celebrating their secession from the Union. Lowe landed in a field just over the South Carolina 2 border where he was greeted with the pitchforks of angry farmers 3. He was being taken for a Yankee spy, but the rubber bottle of frozen water made his presence even more mysterious. Lowe pleaded his case as merely a scientific venture.

His balloon was loaded onto a wagon. Fortunately he was able to hide the newspapers among the folds lest his fate as a Yankee intruder be sealed. He was imprisoned for a time while the town's sheriff contacted a local university to verify his claims. Satisfying the townsfolk that Lowe was who he said he was, he was given a letter of free pass to return to Cincinnati to pick up his balloons. Lowe put in an aside that what he saw crossing the Confederate States as they seceded from the Union would fill another volume in itself.

Note: The photo at the top of the page was taken of a portrait of Professor Lowe which hung in the lobby of the Alpine (sic) Mt. Lowe Tavern. It was presented to him by the Pasadena Board of Trade (Chamber of Commerce) and was lost in the 1936 fire.

1. Professor Lowe's name of Constantine has been replaced by the name of Coulincourt in historical accounts. It would seem this name was given him sometime during the Civil War. It is agreed by 75% of historians that he was named Constantine for a novel of his birth period, "Thaddeus of Warsaw" in which the names Sobieski and Constantine appear. It is supposed that his mother read that novel.

2. South Carolina was the first state of the Confederacy to claim secession in 1860.

3. Lowe's trip had covered 900 nautical miles in 9 hours. The length of the trip is exacerbated by the altitudes he attained.

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