Shown here 110 years ago this month in the March 1911 issue of Popular Electricity is an aerial searchlight system. According to the magazine, one of the most serious problems of naval warfare was lighting the enemy’s vessels sufficiently to make them good targets. A spotlight directly from the ship would be counter-productive, since it would provide a target for the enemy. One possibility was to mount the lights on smaller boats which were “harder to hit and not so costly if sunk,” but the problem was communicating with them, which would require either signal lights or wireless which could be detected by the enemy.

The solution was to mount the searchlight in a balloon powered by cables from the ship. The balloon would be carried by the wind and not switched on until it was sufficiently far away to avoid revealing the ship’s location. It could be controlled by magnets run from the ground.

The invention was actually the subject of a German patent by one L.J. Mayer. The magazine notes that the inventor was from “Metz, the warlike frontier town which Germany wrested from France in 1871.”