Science: Double Blanket

For all the fine things devised by Science for the safety and convenience of men, little has been done to dispel the danger and delay inherent in fog. In 1935 it is still the rule, when fog blinds land and sea, to stand and wait until it clears. Last fortnight a great white pall closed in on the Atlantic seaboard, spread over the U. S. as far west as Iowa and Nebraska. When it lifted last week it had lasted four days, the worst since the five-day fog of 1914.

From Nova Scotia to North Carolina fog-sirens in shore stations set up a lugubrious caterwauling, and harbors were hideous with metallic moans. A dozen great ships inbound from Europe and the Caribbean, and scores of lesser liners, hove to rather than try to make port. The Cunard-White Star liner Majestic stood off Ambrose Light for two days while her impatient passengers bet on the length of the delay. The Empress of Britain reported more business at the bars during one day’s delay than during a whole ten-day cruise. The French liner Champlain stuck briefly in a mudbank. Near the Statue of Liberty a ferry sank a coal-barge. The Hamburg-American liner Resolute sideswiped a freighter, erasing the last six letters of her own name from the bow. Ellis Island’s Immigration Station reported it was short of food.

On land there was more trouble. East of the Mississippi, from Alabama to Canada, airports announced “Zero-zero” weather, and air transport stood stock-still. For three days not a plane reached or left the world’s busiest port at Newark. In Chicago a lost, invisible plane thrummed round & round the 30-story Furniture Mart for hours. In Alabama Lieut. James L. Majors, U. S. A., tried to land in a fog-wrapped field, crashed, died.

Consensus of shipping men was that the fog had cost them $1,000,000. James Henry Kimball, Manhattan’s longtime weatherman, was inclined to double that figure. American, Eastern and United Air Lines and TWA estimated fog losses totaling $110,000. Manhattan’s Empire State Building put its loss of sightseeing revenue at $1,000 per day.

Fog is produced when warm, wet air encounters cold water, cold ground or cold air which condenses the moisture into droplets ranging from .00004 to .0008 of aninch in diameter. Thus last week’s great pall was accompanied by unseasonal warmth. It was really a double blanket : an ocean fog caused by high pressure over the Atlantic and a land fog caused by low pressure over the Ohio and Mississippi valleys.

Scientific attacks on fog as a natural barrier to normal human activities have not been notably successful. Radio beacons have been of assistance to ocean ships and airplanes in transit but do not solve the delicate problem of landing in fogbound harbors or airports. A small start has been made with the use of infra-red radiation, which pierces much farther through fog than visible light. Experimentally developed have been a “fog-eye” to collect infra-red radiation from unseen objects, convert it into electricity to ring bells, flash lights (TIME, May 8, 1933); an infra-red camera which theoretically enables a slow-moving ship to photograph its way through fog (TIME, Jan. 15, 1934). Last year Henry G. Houghton Jr. of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, attacking the problem from another angle, erected a big framework of pipeswith which he cleared a channel a half-mile long through fog by spraying it with calcium chloride (TIME, July 30). But to be of practical service in such a fog as enveloped almost half of the U. S. last week, such a device would cost countless millions of dollars.