of a flatboat on the Mississippi River so that they can direct the fire of U.S. Navy mortar boats against the Confederate-held Island Number Ten It will be the last aerial guidance of naval gunfire anywhere in the world until 1904. March–May – The George Washington Parke Custis transports and tows observation balloons along the York River in Virginia during the Peninsula Campaign. April – John B. Starkweather ascends several times in a balloon from the deck of the Union paddle steamer May Flower to observe Confederate positions at Port Royal, South Carolina. June – The Confederate States Navy chooses the steamer CSS Teaser to embark a balloon for use in observation of Union Army positions along the James River in Virginia. 1–3 July – The Confederate States Navy steamer Teaser operates a coal-gas silk observation balloon to reconnoitre Union Army positions along the James River in Virginia, the only use of a balloon by the Confederate States Navy. Her capture on 4 July by the steamer ends Confederate naval balloon operations. 5 September – Aeronaut Henry Tracey Coxwell and English physicist James Glaisher officially reach a height of in a coal gas balloon according to their balloon's barometer, although later estimates place the maximum altitude they attained at between . The two men nearly die of hypoxia during the flight, Glaisher falling unconscious and Coxwell losing all feeling in his hands. 1863 The Union Army Balloon Corps is disbanded early in the year. Dirigible airship flown by Solomon Andrews over Perth Amboy, New Jersey. John H. Steiner takes Ferdinand von Zeppelin, an officer from the Army of Württemberg assigned to the Union Army as an observer, aloft in a balloon. Zeppelin later will credit this ascent as his inspiration to create the rigid airship, which he first flies in 1900. 1864 Outbreak of the Paraguayan War between the Alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay. The Alliance forces made much use of balloon reconnaissance over the next six years. English philosopher-scientist Matthew Piers Watt Boulton of the UK writes his short paper, On Aerial Locomotion, detailing several inventions, including that of the aileron almost as an afterthought (he later patents them in 1868). Boulton's inspiration has been attributed to French Count Ferdinand Charles Honore Phillipe d'Esterno, whose detailed analysis of flapping and soaring bird flight, Du Vol des Oiseaux (On the flight of birds) was published as a