At first glance this seems almost too strange and wonderful to believe, and yet this is only the beginning of the wonders which the earthquake camera—or the seismograph (earthquake writer, as the scientists call it)—has been disclosing.
Professor Milne's Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears Enclosed in its Protecting Box.
The Sensitive Pendulum, or Seismograph, as it Appears with the Protecting Box Removed.
The earthquake professor who has worked such scientific magic is John Milne. He lives in a quaint old house in the little Isle of Wight, not far from Osborne Castle, where Queen Victoria made her home part of the year. Not long ago he was a resident of Japan and professor of seismology (the science of earthquakes) at the University of Tokio, where he made his first discoveries about earthquakes, and invented marvellously delicate machines for measuring and photographing them thousands of miles away. Professor Milne is an Englishman by birth, but, like many another of his countrymen, he has visited some of the strangest nooks and corners of the earth. He has looked for coal in Newfoundland; he has crossed the rugged hills of Iceland; he has been up and down the length of the United States; he has hunted wild pigs in Borneo; and he has been in India and China and a hundred other out-of-the-way places, to say nothing of measuring earthquakes in Japan. Professor Milne laid the foundation of his unusual career in a thorough education at King's College, London, and at the School of Mines. By fortunate chance, soon after his graduation, he met Cyrus Field, the famous American, to whom the world owes the beginnings of its present ocean cable system. He was then just twenty-one, young and raw, but plucky. He thought he was prepared for anything the world might bring him; but when Field asked him one Friday if he could sail for Newfoundland the next Tuesday, he was so taken with astonishment that he hesitated, whereupon Field leaned forward and looked at him in a way that Milne has never forgotten.
"My young friend, I suppose you have read that the world was made in six days. Now, do you mean to tell me that, if this whole world was made in six days, you can't get together the few things you need in four?"
