Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 July 1895 — RISKED HIS LIFE FOR SCIENCE. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

RISKED HIS LIFE FOR SCIENCE.

Daring Frenchman Photographs the Ocean Maelstrom. Once again a legend of romance has been torn to shreds at the hands of science and demolished by the wink of the

camera’s shutter. The old maelstrom of the Norwegian coast, one of the harrowing subjects of the school of romanticists and tale-tellers exists no longer as regards the horrors that have been painted of it by Imaginative pens. A daring Frenchman skimmed across Its surface the other day in a basket that swung 100 feet below the car of a balloon, and, suspended ’twixt heaven and the torrent, unconcernedly took instantaneous photographs of the whirlpool’s seething waves. He found that, after all, the maelstrom was not the frightful watery abyss that tradition and folklore had been depicting it for centuries. Down in his little basket, oscillating to and fro, almost within reach of the slapping waves, he felt no fear. There In a spot where no mortal man had ever been before, the first on earth to see the whirlpool of the world as it really was, he learned, and he has brought back tangible proofs of the unlying lens, that tlie maelstrom is simply a succession and conglomeration of torrents, eddies and currents in which no small boat could live, but through which any large vessel, properly handled, migh. uass to safety. A more Important piec* of news, a more valuable bit of contribution to the day-book of science, has seldom been given out One by one the old myths of the world, dating back to the time when fairies, elves and goblins, gods and demons, giants, satyrs and pigmies were believed in, are being disproved by careful investigation. The tradition of the maelstrom is the latest to go.

PHOTOGRAPHING THE MAELSTROM.