And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.
Actually steam and fog are different things. Fog is already condensed steam that consists of small water droplets. This technology captures the condensed water droplets and at this point no no extra latent energy from steam is released.
I often have trouble with claimed cognate words without any references or analysis. This very often applies also to Wiktionary.
E.g. even the given example - I would find it believable that "muscle" cognates with Latvian "miesa", Russian "мяса" and English "meat", but "mouse" seems sketchy.
There exists an entire industry for counting and sorting things(e.g. optical bean sorting).
There also are rather cheap optical tachometers(measuring rotations by applying reflective tape on rotating surface). I would guess such devices could also be tailored for counting falling objects.
And also there are multiple old- school tricks for similar tasks. E.g. if you need to count nails, weight them all, then weight a single nail, then divide the weights to get count.
Add a fin to a baloon and you can steer it.
And once the baloon can hold direction in the wind with the help of the fin, you can add sail to actually get some propulsion in direction other than wind.