The Last Volcano Read online

  Jaggar’s initial idea was to use a kite to position the device, then lower it down and into Old Faithful, but Day dissuaded him from the idea. Any such device would be too heavy to be carried by a kite. They needed a cable stretched across the crater, then, by means of a traveling pulley, position and lower the device down to the lake. Jaggar had MIT civil engineers design the cable-pulley system. Day was in charge of designing the device that would measure the temperature.

  After months of work, the device and the system were ready. On March 2, 1911, Jaggar wrote to Thurston, informing him that “an apparatus for spanning the crater with a cable and lowering an armored electric thermometer to the surface of the lava” was completed. Day would be sending Ernest Shepherd, one of the chemists at the Carnegie Institution, to oversee the measurements. Frank Perret had agreed to join Jaggar at Kilauea that summer, so there would be two men to work with Shepherd on the temperature experiments. Afterwards, Jaggar assured Thurston, the routine work of a volcano observatory would be started.

  But personal complications forced a change in the plans. On April 24, Jaggar wrote again. He confirmed the arrival of Shepherd and Perret, but he would not be able to join them.

  “I find that I, personally, shall be detained in New England owing to the condition of Mrs. Jaggar’s health,” he wrote.

  What was her condition? She was three months pregnant.

  Perret and Shepherd arrived in Hilo on July 2. Thurston met them and took them to breakfast. They then boarded the train. At the end of the train line, a motorcar from the Volcano House was waiting to take them the final ten miles, the stagecoach having been replaced a few months earlier.

  Hotel manager Demosthenes Lycurgus was there to greet them.‡ They settled into a cottage owned by the hotel. Later the same day, Lycurgus sent them in his personal car to the edge of Halema’uma’u; a macadamized road to the edge of the crater had been completed the previous December. Volcano visitors could now ride in comfort to see molten lava.

  Perret began his study of the volcano by walking completely around Halema’uma’u, stopping to take several photographs. He then watched the lake. The level of the lava was three hundred feet down from the crater rim, one hundred feet deeper than when Jaggar had seen it in 1909. Old Faithful was spouting at minute intervals.

  Thurston arrived a week later to help with preparations for the measurement of lava temperature. Three carpenters from his lumber company came with him. He had the carpenters build wood anchorages on opposite sides of the crater that would be used to suspend the cable. While this work was underway, Shepherd checked the devices that, in turn, he would lower into the crater.

  He had brought three devices of two different designs. Two of the devices were “resistance-type” instruments, meaning a temperature was determined by measuring the change in electrical resistance of a coil of platinum wire. The higher the resistance, the higher the temperature. The coil was insulated with a quartz tube that fit inside a nickel case that was placed inside a long iron box.

  The other device, the “electro-element” instrument, had a sensor that consisted of two wire elements made of different metals. One element was of platinum and the other of a platinum alloy. When connected and one was kept cold while the other was heated, an electric current would run between the elements. The higher the difference in temperature between the two wire elements, the greater the electric current that would pass between them. The problem was keeping one element cold while the entire device was placed in molten lava. To solve the problem, the cold element was surrounded by a fifty-gallon steel tank that was filled with water, which added considerably to the weight of the entire device.

  Each device, regardless of the design, weighed a few hundred pounds. Shepherd considered the two resistance-type instruments to be the more reliable ones, and so he decided to use these two for the initial tests.

  After the cableway was completed and the traveling pulley was ready, Perret and Shepherd spent a few days hanging an instrument from the pulley and sending it out along the cable to the midpoint. At that position, they lowered the instrument a short distance, then pulled it back up and retrieved it. As each day passed, the cable-pulley system deteriorated. Strands of volcanic glass, Pele’s hair, rising from the crater caught on the cable and fouled the wheels of the pulley. Acids in the volcanic steam ate into and weakened the guide wires that supported the wooden anchorages.

  Finally, on July 20, they were ready for the first measurement. At least six people were needed to operate the cable-pulley system. On that morning, Thurston arrived with three guests from the Volcano House to help.

  The first step, as Shepherd instructed the others, was to gather wood from the nearby forest for a bonfire. After the wood was gathered and brought to the crater’s edge, a fire was started and Shepherd stoked the flames, waiting for the coals to be red hot. He then had Thurston and the hotel guests lift one of the resistance-type instruments and place it on the coals. They waited. After several minutes, Shepherd checked the needle on a meter attached to a pair of wires connected to the encased platinum coil. The indicator needle moved an expected amount. The electrical connections were good; the coil was responding to the high temperature. The fire and instrument were then doused with water. Once cooled, the instrument was lifted and attached to the pulley. It was then sent out over the crater.

  A rope was used to control the sliding of the pulley down the cable. Shepherd had the pulley stopped when the instrument hung over the point where Old Faithful would erupt, about five hundred feet out from the crater rim. Old Faithful was then quiet. Next Perret operated a reel that, by use of a strong steel wire, lowered the instrument down into the crater.

  No one thought to record how long it took the instrument to reach the surface of the lake, but, once it did, the tip of the two-hundred-pound iron-encased instrument broke through what looked to be a leathery crust and immersed itself halfway into red lava.

  Shepherd, who had watched the slow descent, turned his attention to the meter. He pressed a switch. The needle did not move. He began to check the wire connections when he saw a small burst of lava shoot up around the instrument. Part of the fallback from the burst struck the steel wire and snapped it. Fifty feet of the wire and the instrument now lay on the crater floor. Those on the rim watched as the debris was soon caught up in the general circulation of the lake surface and rafted to one side where it was eventually pulled under, Shepherd recording the scene as “much as a fish carries the angler’s line under a root.”

  The first experiment had been a failure. But they had two more instruments. Thurston said he had to go to Honolulu, but would return in nine days. They would try again then.

  On the day before Thurston returned, a new crack opened on the floor of Halema’uma’u, sending a dense plume of smoke and gas fumes over the site where one of the anchorages was located and where the cable-pulley system was operated. It was now impossible to see the crater floor from this location. Nevertheless, when Thurston returned on July 29 and had three guests from the Volcano House with him, it was decided to make a second attempt immediately.

  The second resistance-type instrument was used. Again, a fire was built to check the electrical connections. And, again, they seemed to work perfectly. When all was ready, the instrument was hung from the pulley and sent out over the crater, though, this time, to a place away from Old Faithful.

  Because of the heavy smoke and fumes, Perret, who was operating the reel that lowered the instrument, could not see the crater floor. And so Thurston stationed himself at the other anchorage on the opposite side of the crater and had the two hotel guests at intermediate places on the crater rim between him and Perret. Thurston and the two guests were each given a flag. The idea was to use the flags to relay a signal from Thurston whether to lower or raise the instrument. Shepherd stationed himself near Perret, ready to read the meter.

  It may have been confusion in understanding the flag signals or it may have been a gust of wind that
caused the heavy instrument to swing wildly as it was lowered into the crater. Whatever the cause, as the instrument was lowered, it bumped against a rock jutting out from the edge of the lake. Shepherd checked the meter. The needle was not moving. The instrument was reeled back in.

  As soon as the outer iron and the inner nickel cases were opened, Shepherd knew what had happened. Both the quartz shield and the platinum coil were shattered. The instrument was useless. Only the less reliable electro-element instrument was left to use. They would try once more the next day.

  That evening Perret had an accident. He was returning by car to the crater. The car had stopped and Perret was getting out when the driver decided to move the car forward to a better position. Perret was thrown to the ground, striking his head on the hard lava. Someone who saw the accident was surprised that Perret had not broken his neck.

  The next day, July 30, Thurston and Perret and Shepherd went to the crater. It was raining and three huddled under umbrellas to have a discussion.

  The guide wires and the metal bolts that held the wooden anchorages together were deeply corroded. Both anchorages and the cableway would probably soon collapse and fall into the crater. The plume of smoke and fumes passing over one of the anchorages had intensified. Mats of Pele’s hair now clung to the cable itself, so that soon it would not be possible to run the pulley out over the crater.

  These dire conditions actually made the decision easy. Either they made a last try today or abandoned any future attempts. They decided today would be the day.

  Thurston had managed to convince only two hotel guests to come to the crater’s edge in the rain and assist. And so he enlisted his wife and two children to help him.

  Because of his injury, Perret was unable to run the reels. He positioned himself on the opposite side of the crater and would send flag signals. The two hotel guests were given flags and stood an intermediate distances along the crater rim, ready to relay signals. Shepherd stayed close to where Thurston and his family would operate the reel, Shepherd finding a secure spot where he could watch the needle on the meter, knowing a reading may last for only a second.

  Thurston, his wife Harriet and twelve-year-old son, Lorrin, had the most dangerous jobs. As Thurston cranked the reel, his wife would keep the wire tight on the drum while his son hustled back and forth, keeping the electrical wires from getting tangled. All three had to be on a narrow ledge between the anchorage and the crater rim. The crater is so large—a half-mile in diameter—that when coupled with the strong wind, the heat at the rim is not prohibitively strong. Meanwhile, his daughter, sixteen-year-old Margaret, would be watching for flag signals, calling out instructions to her father on how to move the instrument.

  The rain was steady and Thurston heard a shout from his daughter to send the pulley and instrument down the cable. As the pulley and heavy instrument slid down, putting strain on the anchorage, every wooden strut and metal bolt creaked and groaned. The whole structure seemed ready to fall into the crater.

  A second shout came from his daughter, and Thurston stopped the pulley. Then a third shout came. Thurston began to crank the reel, lowering the instrument. His wife and his son busied themselves at their assigned tasks. Another shout. And he stopped the cranking.

  As the instrument was lowered, Perret could see it was positioned directly over Old Faithful, which was then quiet. At exactly 1:35 P.M., according to Perret’s notes, the tip of the instrument touched red lava. At that same moment, Shepherd saw the needle rise steadily, then stop. Perret signaled to pull up the cable, then to lower it again. When the instrument touched a second time, a burst of steam shot out. The steel tank holding the fifty gallons of water needed to cool one of the sensors had ruptured. Just as that happened, a fountain of lava rose from Old Faithful, the down rush of molten rock snapping off the instrument.

  “I regret that only one reading was possible,” Shepherd wrote later, “but I have every confidence that it was a good reading.”

  The lava temperature measured that day was 1,850°F (1,010°C). And much has been made of this measurement—most of it critical.

  First, the immersion of the instrument into the lake was too short a time for the platinum sensors to have felt the full heat of the lake, and so the temperature is certainly too low to be wholly accurate. Second, at these high temperatures, there should have been a chemical reaction between the iron casing and the platinum sensors, discounting the reliability of any measurement. Much more recent measurements, using a variety of techniques, indicate the temperature of a lava fountain at Kilauea is about 2,100°F (1,150°C), close to the guess made by Dana in the 1880s.

  Nevertheless, what Perret, Shepherd and Thurston accomplished that day—and Jaggar should be included because he planned and organized the effort—cannot be discounted. It was a first. And it had been heroic. (Thurston made sure of this by publishing a detailed account of the effort, complete with photographs, on the front page of his newspaper.) No one had attempted anything like it anywhere in the world.

  It set the cornerstone for more than a century of work at Kilauea and other volcanoes where measurements of lava temperature have been combined with microscopic examination of lava samples to relate, in the field, lava temperature and lava mineralogy, that is, to reveal the temperature conditions inside the earth and how various minerals are formed.

  Shepherd left in August. Perret stayed two more months.

  With material donated by the Volcano House and with the help of the hotel’s handyman, Perret built a small hut on the rim of Halema’uma’u, the back wall literally a foot from the crater’s edge. He had a large window with a glass pane installed on the back wall that quickly became hot to the touch and remained so for the three months Perret lived in the hut. The window provided a commanding view of the lava lake in all types of weather.

  From this close vantage point, he kept a constant watch. He left only to gather groceries at the Volcano House or to use a photographic dark room that Lycurgus permitted him to assemble in a vacated storeroom at the hotel. It was within the hut that he wrote his weekly reports on the state of the lava lake, Thurston publishing each one in his newspaper. These reports are remarkable for their candor. For example, Perret describes how one day he managed to climb partway down the steep crater wall to where he found a narrow ledge. He followed the ledge to a cave where the hot walls were glowing a dull red. He photographed the cave and collected rocks. The next day, continuing the narrative in a matter-of-fact tone, he related how the ledge had collapsed during the night and was now inaccessible.

  These reports—and his role in making the first measurement of the temperature of lava at Kilauea—made Perret a celebrity in the islands. Now when new guests arrived at the Volcano House, their first question was: Was it possible to meet Mr. Perret? And the answer was: Yes, it was. He was always somewhere within sight of the lava lake.

  His hut consisted of four thin walls comprised of wooden slats nailed to a wooden frame and covered by a corrugated iron roof that corroded so quickly in the high concentration of sulfuric acid in the fumes that it gave little protection from frequent rains. The floor was hard lava rock. As soon as he moved in, Perret placed one of his “seismoscopes,” as he called them, on the floor. It was a device he had invented consisting of a small weight attached to the top of a thin metal rod that was free to swing in any direction. Perret placed a large glass bell over the instrument so that the wind could not disturb it. As soon as he placed it on the rocky floor, the small weight and rod started to vibrate. It continued to vibrate for the entire two months he lived in the hut, sometimes more and sometimes barely perceptible.

  In locating the hut, Perret insisted that it be built over a deep crack that he used for another experiment. He dropped a microphone connected to wires down the crack, then sealed the crack with concrete. He attached the headphones to the free-end of the wires. For hours, he would lie on a cot, the headphones to his ears and his eyes focused on the seismoscope, noting how the sound through
the headphones or the swings of the seismoscope varied as the red glare of the lava lake filling his room rose or fell in intensity.

  One person who visited the volcano that summer and met Perret—and there were hundreds of visitors—wrote to Jaggar about “the strange little man who seemed to thrive on air filled with the smell of sulfur.”

  “I was at the volcano last week,” the visitor wrote to Jaggar, “and had several interviews with Perret. He is certainly an enthusiastic as well as a keenly intelligent worker. It is impossible to get him away from the little building he had erected at the brink of Kilauea. He is there night and day, and, from what I can gather, is so interested in gathering information concerning Pele’s doings that he gets scarcely any sleep.”

  On September 17, after living at the crater’s edge for fifty-five days and without giving warning to anyone, Perret packed his personal and professional things and moved into the Volcano House where he spent a few days to compile his notes. Then he left for Honolulu where he gave a public lecture about his adventures at Kilauea. Every seat in the thousand-seat auditorium was taken. People crowded in the aisles and in doorways, anxious to hear from the man who had lived at the volcano. As one person who attended remarked, “There were five times as many persons present last evening to hear about volcanoes as came last week to listen to the imminent danger of yellow fever in the community.” And he electrified his audience, telling them of his experiences at Vesuvius in 1906 and his later adventures at the volcanoes of Stromboli and Etna and seeing the destruction caused by the Messina earthquake.

  A few days later Perret met privately with Thurston who tried to convince him to stay and live at Kilauea and take charge of the scientific work. But Perret declined. He said he thought he could serve the study of volcanoes best by not devoting himself to any one place. With that final comment, he left and returned to Italy.