Science: Claude in Cuba

Last week scores of delegates converged on Berlin for a World Power Conference, to discuss problems of distribution and utilization of Power manufactured from natural resources. Simultaneously the French Academy of Sciences was discussing in Paris a despatch from one of its members reporting progress on his project to develop Power from an inexhaustible natural resource not yet tapped by man.

Three years ago greying, sad-eyed Georges Claude told his academy colleaguesof his plan to utilize the temperature differential of surface and subsurface sea water to generate electric power. He told what success he had had with a small seapower plant at Ougrée, Belgium.

Year and one-half ago Inventor Claude went to Matanzas Bay, Cuba, to build a 12,000-kilowatt plant, big enough to supply a town of 25,000 people. This plant would, he predicted, be 70% efficient and would supply power at half its present cost. Inventor Claude’s principle, old to physicists, rests on the fact that water’s boiling point is governed by pressure. Lower the pressure sufficiently and water will boil at room temperature. Why not, reasoned Inventor Claude, put warm surface sea water (between 79-86° F. in tropical seas) in a boiler, reduce the pressure and set it to boiling? Cold water could be brought up from 5,000 ft. below the sea’s surface to condense the exhaust, maintain the vacuum. The cheap steam thus generated would whirl turbines, make electricity.

Rich and patient, Inventor Claude was not discouraged a few months ago when heavy seas crumpled the pipe he was sinking to fetch his cold water to the surface. He set to lowering another pipe. His last week’s despatch to his colleagues said that this pipe was now laid.

The accomplishments of Academician Claude to date include invention of neon lights to illuminate advertising boards and air fields; a process for capturing gases from coke ovens which are converted into hydrogen, nitrogen compounds, innumerable drugs; a method for liquefying air which is used by the $25,000,000 Air Reduction Company; a method of dissolving acetylene in acetone, a process which yields $20,000,000 in annual sales.