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About The Sunday Oregonian. (Portland, Ore.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 10, 1922)
A' r VOL. L1 POKTLAXD, OREGON, SUNDAY 'MORNING, DECE3IBER 10, 1923 NO. 50 CD CT: V it D) mm The Revolutionary New Theory of an Earth Sun That Gives Sea Creatures a Prodigious Vitality. if WW ff IMiM --'' ''it Yi 4I 1 ! :' r lllllllillllll? i As f i K J1 v i lit Hi , ' 'i 7 iv jv1' !i I:-.:.-:;.': if t All V incalculable benefit to mankind were made possible by mankind's coarser In stincts. It was the lust for gambling, concen trated m the famous Casino at Monte Carlo, that provided the funds that financed the researches that put science tfn the trail of the ocean's radium secret. Monte Carlo, as almost everyone knows, is owned by the principality of Monaco. Its profits go to Monaco's re gent. And-" the late prince of Monaco used most of them to pay for the indul gence of his greatest hobby. That hobby was trying to find the answer to the old Question, "What is at the bottom of the. sea?" He owned a private yacht equipped with every resource science offered for plumbing ocean depths. He financed ex pedition after expedition to discover "what's beyond the surface." Unearth ing the ruins of buried Assyrian citiea had no fascination to compare to un earthing the secrets of the sea, found the prince. And the skeletons of wrecks and the treasures of sunken galleons did not lure him with the strength of nature's cwn mysterious treasures strange growths, fantastic fishes, and the magio glow which permeated all this hiddea world. - The glow baffled the prince. He learned that, at a certain depth In the ocean, the light from the sun ceased. It could penetrate no farther. And yet, be yond this distance, even to the bottom most holes in the ocean floor, there was light an intense,' violet light that illu minated cavities where the sun could never reach or reflect. The light of the sun came from above. This light came ill' i ,l f mtmm i 'Jl ' Ukuf," "W A single flipper of a radium-energized whale weighs as much as the whole body of the biggest elephant. f 3 lift; f M f - - BY DR. W. H, BALLOU. ! WHAT is at the bottom of the sea? " For- a hundred million years that question ' went unanswered while man explored the earth, penetrated its most remote harbors,, and wrested out its last secrets except the one great riddle of what was hidden by the deep waters his ships sailed. Now, countless centuries since the first fisherman peered over the side of his boat and marveled at the ghostly glow he, saw drowned in weedy depths, science claims to have solved the mystery. The bottom of the sea, says science, is floored with ton after ton of that costly super-energy which itself was only re cently discovered-radium. The ocean, in brief, is one gigantic, "radium bath tub:" . , - : It is radium that causes the weird flashes in the track of ocean liners which we call "phosphorus." - It is radium that gives the tingling, tracing, restorative quality to sea air. It is radium that produces brilliant lights around the heads and in the mouths of certain deep-sea monsters. It is radium that makes whales grow so big, turtles live so long, octopuses wax so strong and sharks so hard to. kill. Radium, the investigators believe, col lecting through the ages on the ocean's floor, today forms a tremendous "earth tun," which, shining up from its' cav ernous home, fills every drop of salt wa ter with minute fires of life, imparts its energy to the plants and creatures of the sea, and dances in the air above the sea in billions of invisible sparks hammered from that huge anvil buried fathoms deep in ooze and slime. Oddly enough, the first investigations that led to a discovery which may be of. mm WW mm m f am if - A 1 fv - 1 Jr " Wif ' I f3wt 111 W"V II ' U fc -f-L ill pieces ot m.wmmmMw 1 'II1 fetS4! 1 I'liivlShw r. ; ' " mm Ilk x if - ESfi.' -Sapphire and M o 'tiKii;"-:!:::.;:-':!:.'":..--::''" .. . . -n-ii mracue com after exposure radium rays rViM',P"i'4.i'iilli i if ji "U 0 lfr rid ""WW I 'l l 4!.! . jj-w - j -r ' s " 1 ' J 7 ft- i'lTf vaV - . r J- V 1 . -fi -s-h ( - . 'HI, ) J . 1 'i 1 i ipuw',1 "" i -nl mm 9 1 " SI. A if .vit-4wy ST ATS - il 5 i i Nt 1 Not :: a chemist's tubes, but iil minute sea animals, which get f their light from radium. i-r o vi-i. '' 'U4J QIHHt- -fop- . . . Strange growths, fantastic fishes, and the magic glow which permeated all this' , hidden world." Submarine life Miss- Lulu MCA Crath as the mermaid in a movie, made' on the floor of the sea. -at the Bahamas. from below. It was, in effect, another sun an "earth sun." The prince did not know what it was. He compared it to electricity, but he advanced the opin ion that it was a distinct force in itself an energy yet to be analyzed and classed by man. In 1898 Mme. C.urie of France dis covered radium. Since then more than 30 ra'dioactive elements have been found ' by scientists, but radium is the only one of these elements lending itself to prac tical use in industry and medicine. The great handicap to man in . using ladium, however, is its cost. The uranium mines of Utah and Colorado, where reduction plants are located under the supervision of the government, can get only one part of radium to 3,000,000 parts of uranium. It requires 1000 tons of chemicals applied to 500 tons of uranium ore to produce one gram of radium. The American production amounts to but 50 grams annually, and at this writing there are in existence ex actly six ounces of radium for commer cial and medicinal use. In view of the tremendous difficulty of manufacturing radium, one can un derstand the thrill that shot through the. scientific world recently when investiga tors working on the theory advanced by the prince of Monaco announced that, in their opinion, the strange "glow" that fascinated the prince in his deep-sea ad ventures was from nothing more or less than radium. Its presence in the ocean they explained in this way: Originally the seas of the world conceivably were of fresh water. During uncountable centuries, whether they were fresh or not, they received all types of. salts and other elements con veyed to them from the land by the rivers tnat emptied into them. Among the deep sea deposits were boundless quantities of uranium, the ore from which radium is extracted. - The United States geological survey computes that an inch of the entire sur face of the earth is carried annually Into the sea by the erosion of rains and ptreams and rivers on the land. During millions of years the uranium swept into the ocean has gone through the same process of reduction that the ores are subjected to in the reduction plants of Colorado. In addition, in the ocean it self are rocks with vast quantities of (Concluded tia iage z,)