JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

This was the vision of future high-altitude flight, at least according to Illustrated World magazine in their July/August  1920 issue , page 806. It was reported in these pages that at about 22,000 feet the sky above is perfectly black and all of the stars are visible.  This of course is not near the limit of the atmosphere, and not very close to the Karman line “outer space” it may have been believed to be (though the blackness part does come into play at around 60,000′. and at 100,00 kilometers the Karman line is far beyond that). 

In any event the record for the highest altitude achieved by humans was still at the mark of 39,000′ set in a balloon in 1862, a record which would not be broken (at 43,800′) until 1927, when the achievement cost the aviator/balloonist his life.  The article was slim on the atmosphere and slimmer on the necessaries for the high-altitude aircraft–except to say that the current open-cockpit approach just wouldn’t do at cold temperatures, thus giving rise to a tiny discussion on the only mentioned feature of the future aircraft: that it would have an enclosed cockpit.  

• Flight altitude records via Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record