Science: Byrd’s Second

People who had lately gone through the trials of Moving Day could sympathize last week with Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd’s difficulties in getting a self-sustaining village of 70 men packed off for a two-year stay in the Antarctic. His supply ship Bear of Oakland developed engine trouble off North Carolina, had to be towed into Wilmington. His flagship Jacob Ruppert (named for New York’s beer & baseball man, the expedition’s angel) becameflooded with oil while fueling at Bayonne, N. J. In Boston some of his dogs got sick. In Bayonne some of his men got discouraged and quit. But at last, with the Bear at Newport News for a quick overhauling, the Jacob Ruppert at Norfolk taking on the last of the expedition’s 14,000 supply items, Admiral Byrd was ready to push off this week on his Second Antarctic Expedition. Geologist Laurence M. Gould, Flyer Bernt Balchen, Photographer Ashley C. McKinley and other notables of the first expedition were content to be left behind. Most prospective inhabitants of the second Little America are younger, expected to be more tractable than the veterans of the first. Optimistically taking along a new motor for the Ford trimotored plane which he snow-cached at Little America nearly four years ago, Admiral Byrd also has a giant Curtiss Condor biplane for flying over & beyond the South Pole, a Kel-lett autogiro which he hopes to set down on top of it. Geographical and geological surveys, weather and radio studies, collection of plants and animals are the expedition’s formal aims. One Charles J. V. Murphy of Boston was sent along as announcer for Columbia Broadcasting System, which expects to radiocast from Little America (via Buenos Aires) every Saturday night of the two years.