l x v i I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 5 great significance for the history of aeronautics. Although balloons had been used in science previously, and although Piccard himself was an experienced aeronaut, his success in helping rebut Miller encouraged him to combine his physics career with his passion for ballooning (see Illustration 28). Significant funding was need- ed for manned scientific ballooning, and Piccard saw the Miller affair as a perfect opportunity to interest potential funders, especially with Einstein’s “moral sup- port” (Docs. 74 and 87). His brother (and fellow aeronaut) Jean recalled the mo- ment when Piccard resolved to go higher than anyone had gone before: “My twin brother, Auguste, first discussed this proposed flight with me in 1926. He wanted to go to a greater height, not to establish an altitude record, but to determine, if pos- sible, the action of cosmic rays and their quality and intensity at different altitudes.” (Ziegler 1989, p. 960). Piccard was anxious to contribute to the debate on the origin of cosmic rays, which were widely thought to be of extraterrestrial origin, but which Millikan had argued were terrestrial. Since Millikan’s unmanned balloon flights had provided controversial evidence for a noncosmic origin, Piccard argued that a manned balloon flown to high altitudes would facilitate a more reliable ex- periment. Accordingly, he invented a sealed capsule that enabled him to set an al- titude record in 1931 by becoming the first person to ascend to the stratosphere, nearly 16,000 m up. The resulting fame saw him immortalized in the character of Professor Calculus by his fellow Brussels resident Georges Remi, better known by his pen name of Hergé, in the pages of The Adventures of Tintin. Some of those attempting to replicate Miller’s results shared his theoretical pref- erence for a result falsifying the theory of relativity. Among them was Rudolf Tomaschek, a student and then assistant of the anti-relativist Phillip Lenard, who hoped for a positive result when, as Einstein put it, he went “to Miller around” on the Zugspitze, in southern Germany (Doc. 85). Tomaschek figured in the discus- sions between Wien and Schrödinger (Mehra and Rechenberg 1987, p 453.). Schrödinger proposed a Michelson-type experiment to be performed on the Jung- fraujoch, a saddle ridge between two peaks in the Swiss Alps considerably higher than Mount Wilson, but accessible via railway, and boasted a research station and observatory near the top, which were then under construction. He asked Wien to suggest a good optics specialist to perform the experiment, and Wien nominated Tomaschek, who was experienced in interferometry and had already performed ex- periments on the very same mountain ridge as part of Lenard’s research program. According to Schrödinger, the Swiss were skeptical of Tomaschek’s impartiality, given his connection with Lenard, and he was rejected, much to Wien’s disappoint- ment. Ironically there is evidence that neither Lenard nor Tomaschek placed much faith in the reliability of Miller’s work. All of Tomaschek’s experiments indeed contradicted Miller’s findings (Doc. 260).