The Martinique event was destined, through many explorers, to reform geophysics. Vesuvius introduced me to the importance of superb photography as represented by Perret and Anderson. The Aleutian Islands introduced the question of nautical exploration and the importance of a field base laboratory for work in a land of adverse weather. The Japan-Hawaii expedition showed me the national seismometric work of Dr. Omori in the field, and laid the foundation for the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. Finally, the Costa Rica expedition introduced me to the complexity of seismological field work in a land of volcanoes, with the problems of engineering ably investigated, and afterwards published by Spofford. This decade thus logically leads into a totally different one, field experiment in geography and founding a volcano observatory in and on the most active volcano in the world, with a permanent dwelling on a crater.
Chapter IV
Living with Volcanoes
“He took his journey into a far country.”
The next decade began true experiments with volcanoes, when two organizations some 5,000 miles apart combined their resources. The Whitney Foundation created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology an endowment of $25,000 for geophysical work on earthquakes and volcanoes, expressing a preference for work in Hawaii; and a group of businessmen in Honolulu, the Volcano Research Association, offered to pay my salary for five years.
When President Maclaurin and a group of professors at M. I. T. gave me a dinner at the University Club in Boston to celebrate my departure for Honolulu, the dinner table conversation turned to the terrors of the deep sea, the dangers of volcanoes, the awfulness of leprosy in Hawaii, and the heroism of giving up a secure teaching job in Boston. I replied that their pessimism reminded me of the last words of Daniel Webster, as quoted by a New England farmer, who said “Dan’l opened his eyes, took one look at the glass of whiskey on the table at his bedside, another at the pretty nurse, and said ‘I ain’t dead yet.’”
I had organized the funds available so that a pair of Bosch-Omori seismographs were shipped from Strassburg, and other seismographs were ordered from Omori’s instrument maker in Tokyo. I collected experimental instruments such as high temperature thermometers and chronographs, of the type used in experimental physiology. Vaguely, I was going to take the blood pressure and pulse of the globe. Also I obtained a full set of weather bureau instruments for temperature, rainfall, barometric pressure, and humidity, together with the electric pyrometers, range finders, and photographic apparatus used in my previous expeditions. And I had some small Japanese transits, as well as plane tables and alidades for topographic experiments.
I was unable to go to Hawaii until 1912, so I was delighted when Perret consented to go to Kilauea Volcano in company with E. S. Shepherd, gas chemist of the Carnegie Geophysical Laboratory of Washington, in the summer of 1911. Dr. A. L. Day, director of the Carnegie laboratory, kindly supplied at our expense two Leeds and Northrop resistance pyrometers and the accompanying Wheatstone bridge, as well as thermocouples loaned from his equipment. Perret and Shepherd went to Kilauea Volcano House; and Perret built a hut at the edge of Halemaumau pit, where an inner lava lake was bubbling and maintaining an island some 200 feet below the rim. Kilauea is the big cauldron, Halemaumau is the firepit in its floor. “Kilauea” activity generally means Halemaumau. They have separate cliff margins.
L. A. Thurston, leading journalist and publicist of Hawaii and keen promoter of a proposed Hawaii National Park, did everything possible to help the scientists. Perret wrote weekly reports on the condition of Halemaumau lava, and sent in photographs to Mr. Thurston’s newspaper, the Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Living and camping at the fire pit, Perret inaugurated something new for Hawaii, and set a standard for the Volcano Observatory. These continuous reports had been my dream for such volcanoes as Vesuvius, where publication had usually been in delayed annuals and gave no current news of what the volcano was doing. Furthermore, the Vesuvius observatory was at the foot of the peak.
I had ordered from the Lidgerwood Company an equipment of cables, including some containing electric wires. These were to span the 1,500 feet and to lower a thermometer into the pit of Halemaumau. Assisted by Alex Lancaster, the active little half-breed guide from Virginia, and by numerous laborers from the plantations, whose managers, spurred on by Thurston, took a great interest in the project, Perret and Shepherd erected two high A-frames on opposite sides of the fire pit and built a trolley on the cable stretched between them. Perret kept constant angular measurement of the changing height of the liquid lava, as the glowing slaggy pool rose and fell overflowing its banks. At one side of a triangular island was a point of ebullition called “Old Faithful” where gas bubbles burst in a fiery dome, irregularly, but approximately once a minute. The objective was to find the temperature of the liquid lava in the vicinity of the bubbling. This was achieved by actually dipping the electric pyrometers into the molten slag, then observing the precise temperature at the recording box, which was in the hands of Dr. Shepherd, who remained on the pit rim at the upper end of the connecting wires.
Finally the day came, after numerous rehearsals, when the long steel tube, or terminal, on the end of the movable cable could be moved out by the trolley to a middle point over the pit, where it would make contact with bubbling liquid lava when lowered. This was an extremely ticklish procedure, for the lava was a heavy mat of self-crusting liquid rock with the crust forming hard slabs; few places kept up an appearance of bubbling porridge. No one had ever made contact before with the liquid of a fountain like “Old Faithful.” It was fortunate that the apparatus, which was expensive, consisting of platinum wires imbedded in silica glass, was made in duplicate so that we had two of everything. The splashing liquid of “Old Faithful” looked as harmless as a kettle of boiling soup, but Perret and Shepherd were in for a surprise. When Shepherd lowered the terminal directly into the liquid, “Old Faithful” exploded, for the molten slag proved to be a suction whirlpool which threw tentacles of lava over the steel pipe. The apparatus went down to destruction “like a bass under a log,” and the cable was bitten off like a piece of line. The entire terminal vanished into the vortex, leaving only a corroded wire.