The Last Volcano Page 9

Suddenly, much became clear. Volcanic explosions and the menacing ash clouds they could produce—a phenomenon that Lacroix described using the French term nuée ardente, literally, “glowing cloud”—were powered by the expansion of gas bubbles from gas-charged molten rock within the volcano—and the earth—itself.

  But to think that Lacroix’s insight was the last word in understanding how volcanoes work is like imagining that Benjamin Franklin’s flying of a kite during a thunderstorm revealed the fundamentals of electricity.

  The lesson of St. Pierre was just a beginning.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  VESUVIUS

  While Jaggar was in the Caribbean, his friend and colleague, Charles Palache, wrote to him, keeping him aware of developments at Harvard.

  In the first letter, dated three days after the Dixie had sailed from New York and was still en route to the Caribbean, Palache mentioned that Professor Shaler had come into his office soon after Jaggar left to say that he no longer had anything against Jaggar going to Martinique, though he still considered the trip unnecessary. In fact, Shaler had sat in Palache’s office for over an hour, reminiscing about a trip he had taken many years earlier to Italy. During the trip he had climbed Vesuvius—he was there in the winter of 1882 when, as he remembered it, “it was possible to creep up to the very edge of the crater and look down upon the surface of boiling lava”—and, in that one view, as he told Palache, he had probably seen more volcanic activity than Jaggar would at Martinique.

  In another letter, dated three weeks later, Palache reported that he had finished teaching Jaggar’s classes, which included giving the examinations. Palache also reported that the fieldwork they had planned for that summer in the Bradshaw Mountains had been cancelled. Then, perhaps, as an afterthought, he attached a note saying that his cousin from San Francisco, Helen Kline, was visiting and that she would be staying an unknown length of time.

  Helen Kline was the twenty-two-year-old daughter of George Washington Kline, a vice-president at Crocker-Woolworth National Bank, one of San Francisco’s major banks, a position that allowed his family to live in great comfort.

  The family home was a large house located at the intersection of Fillmore Street and Pacific Avenue in one of San Francisco’s most fashionable districts. The house itself, as Helen would remember it, was “of grey gingerbread elegance, three stories high with a basement and an attic and a prominent round turret.” It set at the center of three adjacent lots. Wide lawns surrounded it on all sides. Passersby could see it through a spiked iron-wrought fence. It was within these confines that Helen spent her childhood, one of wealth and privilege, her every need met by a small army of maids and other house servants. Through it all, as she later lamented, “I grew up bored.”

  “I can’t remember anything special happening to me,” she would write in a memoir that she secreted away and was found years later by her daughter, “except that I didn’t die.”

  She also grew up defiant.

  I was always very naughty—a terrific liar, stubborn as the dickens and always saying and doing unexpected things which had to be suppressed . . . I was spanked and spanked, had my mouth washed with various household commodities such as brown soap and mustard—and so far as I can see nothing ever availed.

  One of the rare pleasures of her childhood came after the birth of her sister Eliza. Helen was sitting in a large chair at the age of five, grinning widely, when the baby was placed in her lap. It was a moment that gave her “an awful lot of joy.” But, to her regret, as time progressed, she and Eliza grew apart. Her sister became an energetic and likable person who was curious about everything and who showed a genuine interest in people. Helen, in contrast, was given to fits of anger and was hard to tolerate. She once tormented a piano teacher to such a degree that the teacher called out, “Mrs. Kline, will you come here and see if you can do something with this child.” The teacher soon left and never returned.

  In the spring of 1902, Helen Kline decided to demonstrate her independence by taking a trip. She announced to her family that she was traveling by herself to Boston. No one challenged the decision.

  In Boston, Miss Kline presented letters of introduction to the social elite who, in turn, invited her to afternoon teas on Beacon Hill and to other exclusive affairs. She also called on her cousin, Charles Palache, who invited her to family dinners. It was at one such dinner that she met Thomas Jaggar.

  Jaggar was a frequent guest at the Palache house. He was a favorite of Palache’s two young daughters who were fascinated by his card tricks and his ability to pull an endless supply of 50-cent pieces from their ears. Jaggar also performed for adults. During a Thanksgiving dinner, he suddenly stood up from the table and feinted a cough. After covering his mouth with a large napkin, he proceeded to pull colored paper streamers from his mouth until they covered the entire table, much to the disapproving eye of Mrs. Palache. Another time, at Christmas, he dressed as Santa Claus and ran back and forth in front of the Palache house in the snow jingling bells so that the daughters could see him. He then climbed through a window with a pack on his back and gave presents to everyone. To Palache’s daughters, he was “volatile and glamorous.” And he caught the eye of Helen Kline.

  She, too, came under the spell of the charming Harvard man. When they met, he had just returned from the Caribbean, tanned and fit. Though prematurely bald and with a large beaked nose and a crooked mouth—as he described himself—his overall features made him acceptably handsome.

  And he was attracted to her. Helen Kline was young and wealthy and buxom. She was a woman of his own religious faith. And she reveled at social affairs. But Helen had her difficulties. She had a sharp tongue and had trouble controlling it. She was also impractical, buying overly elaborate hats and clothes that never lasted. But her biggest failure, as she freely admitted, was an inability to manage money, though she knew that she could write to her father “when what I had was spent.”

  Nevertheless, she would be the ideal wife for an ambitious man. And a courtship began—one that proved more difficult than most.

  One evening during dinner a woman who Jaggar had known in Vienna arrived unannounced at the Palache house. The two Palache daughters were fascinated by her because the woman had arrived wearing a provocative dress, she smoked and she had arrived without a hat. After dinner, the woman and Jaggar went into a private room. The two girls raced to a secret place where they could hear anything happening inside the house. They heard the woman talk about marriage and money. In the end, the woman left. The two girls ran to tell their father what they had heard.

  Charles Palache had seen such awkward situations before. And so he wrote to Helen’s father, telling him of Jaggar’s broken romances and dalliances in Europe. The father wrote to his daughter and demanded that she break off the relationship. But Helen was in love. Jaggar soon proposed. And she accepted.

  Helen hurried back to San Francisco to prepare for a wedding, her father accepting her decision. He hired men to move furniture from the three main floors and put it in the attic or the basement or anywhere it could be stored. Heavy muslin was laid down to protect the carpets. Every room was repainted, given a different color scheme. Pink was the color of the master bedroom where presents would be displayed. Blue was the color of the main room where the ceremony would be performed.

  A week before the wedding, Helen’s mother hired caterers to begin working in the kitchen. Meanwhile, apparently oblivious to the activity all around her, Helen concerned herself with fittings for a gown and with ordering sets of frivolous hats. The Kline household was in an uproar when, in a rare display of anger, her father stopped all preparations and ordered his daughter to make do with what was on hand. He reminded her that, as a married woman, she would have to live within her means.

  The wedding took place at the Kline house on the afternoon of April 15, 1903. Helen’s only attendant was her sister, Eliza. Her brother, James, was the best man. The groom’s father, Bishop Jaggar, performed the ceremony. More tha
n a hundred people attended. Afterward, the newlywed couple boarded a train and headed back to Boston, the groom resuming his hectic schedule of teaching classes and writing scientific papers.

  That fall, Jaggar was appointed an assistant professor at Harvard and the head of the geology department at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the two institutions planning to merge their curricula. The next spring, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also found time to continue an acting career as an amateur, joining a pantomime group known as “The Strolling Players.” In the summer of 1904, he led Harvard and MIT students on a field trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Helen spent most of the first two years of their marriage in San Francisco.

  Still, Thomas Jaggar remained unsettled. In October 1904, he again applied for a position at the Royal British University in Melbourne, Australia. In the application letter, he gave the reason he wanted to leave Harvard and MIT.

  It is not for the salary, nor for discontent here, that I put myself in line as a candidate for the Melbourne chair. . . . It is for the reason that there is every prospect of my settling down here to too great a permanency, that I seize such a possibility as Australia. I have always preached travel to my students and would be untrue to myself if I did not try for every opportunity.

  He was not selected for the job.

  The next year, 1905, he organized a summer expedition to Iceland. The expedition would include himself, several other Harvard and MIT professors and several students. The expedition was to leave in May. They would travel to Scotland where they would board a ship that would take them to Iceland. Once there, travel would be on foot or on horseback.

  A week before the planned departure, he excused himself from going, writing to the others that it was “impossible” for him to go because he intended “to spend the summer months in finishing my Martinique work and other matters.” There was also another reason. Helen was three months pregnant. A son, Russell Kline Jaggar, was born at the end of summer on September 29, 1905.

  Another academic year passed, Jaggar continuing to teach at Harvard and MIT. Then, on April 8, 1906, a newspaper headline again caught his eye. Vesuvius was exploding—and tens of thousands of people were fleeing for their lives.

  Now Jaggar was determined. He was not going to miss an eruption of Vesuvius—which would prove to be the largest in almost 300 years—the way he had missed his own expedition to Iceland.

  By April 8, Vesuvius had been exploding for more than a year. Admittedly, the explosions were minor and intermittent and, up to that time, few people considered them worrisome, and life continued as usual.

  The first explosion occurred on May 27, 1905, when the people of Naples, who had a full view of the volcano, watched with amazement as a white cloud shot horizontally out from high on the volcano. Several minutes later, several streams of red lava poured slowly down the volcano in narrow streams. Within a day, the flow of lava ceased.

  Similar explosions, also high on the volcano, continued for almost a year, spaced a month or more apart. And, again, there were a few short lava flows. None of this was enough to raise concern, even among those who lived on Vesuvius. Then, on the evening of April 7, 1906, a single deafening boom echoed across Naples Bay. Those who lived in the city, several miles away, looked toward the volcano and, this time, saw a single large cloud heavy with dark ash rise up quickly from the volcano’s summit. More explosions followed. Each one sent out streaks of red-hot rocks that arched across the sky and fell on the lower slopes of the volcano. Then at least five streams of lava began to pour down the volcano, threatening everything in their paths. Those who lived on the volcano quickly packed their few possessions and, also carrying images of saints and the Madonna, praying all the while that the explosions would stop, ran for their lives.

  A correspondent for The New York Times was in Naples at the time. He saw the explosions and watched lava cascade down the volcano and described the scene. “Torrents of liquid fire resembling distance serpents with flittering yellow and black scales, coursed in all directions, amid the rumblings, detonations and earth trembling, while a pall of sulfurous smoke that hovered over all made breathing difficult.”

  The next day, in a second report, the correspondent mentioned the unusual work being done by Raffaele Matteucci, the director of Vesuvius Observatory, who was charged by the Italian government with judging the danger. The correspondent ended his second report by saying “an American engineer named Perret was with Director Matteucci at the observatory.”

  Frank Perret once had a photograph of himself taken next to a steam vent on the floor of a volcanic crater near Naples. His slender figure is swallowed by an ill-fitting suit. In preparation for the photograph, he had placed the wide-end of a megaphone over the steam vent and had dropped a microphone, of his own design, attached to two wires, through the mouthpiece and down the vent. The other ends of the wires were connected to a headset, also of his own design. He is leaning forward concentrating on what he can hear. His straw hat has slid over his forehead, hiding part of his face. As he would tell others, this stance and the equipment he was using were the best way to listen “to the faint rumbles coming from the bowels of the earth.” It is an odd photograph of an unusual man.

  Born in Connecticut in 1867, an interest in volcanoes came early when, at age six, Perret watched his father, a Swiss immigrant and a seller and repairer of precision watches, hang a metal engraving on the wall of the family store in Brooklyn, New York. His father had accepted the engraving as payment for one of his watches.

  The engraving showed the destruction of Pompeii by an eruption of Vesuvius. The boy spent hours studying the various features of the eruption depicted on the engraving. A great cauliflower-shaped cloud had risen from the volcano. Off to one side were smaller clouds crisscrossed with lightning bolts. At the bottom of the engraving were crowds of desperate people trying to get away and save themselves. Others had already died.

  Ten years later, now age sixteen, two other events, totally unrelated, became guiding points in his life. The first occurred on May 24, 1883, and was the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. From that night on, the glaring blue-white arc lights that outlined the bridge shone onto the tenement where the Perret family lived, illuminating the boy’s bedroom. It was a constant reminder that electricity was the wave of the future—that its skillful application of new technology could change people’s lives.

  He was more awed by the second event, than inspired by it. It happened on the evening of August 30, 1883, when Perret was watching the setting sun. Instead of a normally blinding disk, he saw the sun “burnished like a copper ball.” The subdued color was due to volcanic ash, shot high into the air four days earlier by Krakatoa. The ash was now circling the earth. That fact that a distant volcanic explosion could dim sunlight on the other side of the world intrigued the boy. The idea that powerful natural forces could be understood stayed with him the rest of his life.

  Perret’s formal education ended soon after these two events, at age eighteen, when he left the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute—a preparatory school in engineering and science for boys who were planning to attend a university—and was hired by Thomas Edison to work in his laboratory in Brooklyn, not far from where the Perret brownstone was.

  Edison assigned Perret to work with a team that was developing a safe and reliable lightweight battery. Perret had barely begun to work at the laboratory when workers went on strike. That caused Edison to close the Brooklyn laboratory and move it to New Jersey. Perret did not follow. Instead, he remained in Brooklyn, still living with his parents, and started his own company, the Elektron Manufacturing Company, which produced small, high-torque electric motors of his own design.

  The young entrepreneur proved to be a poor businessman. After five years and few sales, he turned control of the company over to a banker, a Mr. John Barrett. Barrett reduced the product line from ten to two motors and moved the company to his hometown of Springf
ield, Massachusetts, a place better suited to manufacturing because it had lower rents than Brooklyn. It also had a history of heavy industry. Since the Revolutionary War, Springfield had been a major center for the manufacturing of ordnance.

  There was an unexpected bonus to moving to Springfield. Its businessmen were interested in investing in new ideas. And Perret abounded in them. And so, in 1898, he started yet another company, the Perret Storage Battery Company.

  The purpose of this second company was to produce lightweight batteries that could be used to power electric automobiles, a less noisy alternative to the gasoline-fueled contraptions that were starting to dominate the industry. In fact, Perret built several electric-powered vehicles. His most practical one was a 440-pound vehicle that could carry a single person at speeds of up to 13 miles per hour for a distance of 40 miles. The vehicle was never produced commercially. And the constant designing and building of vehicles—as well as the continued development of low-torque electric motors and lightweight batteries—took its toll on him.

  In the spring of 1902, Perret suffered a complete breakdown of his health. While resting in bed, he read newspaper articles about the disaster at St. Pierre. As he later described his feelings, “The accounts of the complete annihilation of the city and its twenty-thousand inhabitants impressed me so much that volcanology, in which I had been interested from childhood, appeared to me to be the career for which I was destined.”

  And so, as soon as he got better and was able to travel, he sold his companies and headed for Vesuvius, one of the world’s most famous volcanoes.

  Perret arrived in Italy in late 1903. He took an apartment in the small town of Portici at the base of Vesuvius where the road to the summit began. He met local guides and hired them to take him on daylong hikes around the volcano. He took hundreds of photographs with one of the newly invented, folding pocket cameras, developing the photographs in a darkroom he had built in his apartment.