SECRET OF WATER-DIVINING

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1936, Page 4

SECRET OF WATER-DIVINING

RADIATION THEORY. LONDON, March 20. Any ideas that water divining is a sort of mystic art appear to be exploded by findings of Mr H. M. Budget!. member of the British Society of Dowsers (waler diviners). After two years study he declares that the phenomenon by which certain people can discover underground sources of water by means of a twig in their hands is due to a sort of radiation which makes itself felt equally in both an upward and downward direction, whether 3000 feet down in a. mine, on the earth’s surface. or 5000 feet in the air. Mr Budgett apparently had little difficulty in finding water by means Oi the twig or rod held in the thumbforks of his hand, but he wanted to know the why and wherefore of it. In addition to locating the underground streams which supplied wells, Mr Budgett found out other curious tilings. The twig, or rather his .muscles, were affected by masses of cencrete. or to put it more accurately. by the edges of the mass: they were always affected by the edges of a stream or lake, never when over the middle of the water. This was equally evident when in| a subway under the Thames, or at tbei edges of vaults, railway-bridges, cul-j verts —in fact anywhere where pass-1 ing a sudden variation in the density! of substantial quantities of matter ; lying vertically above or below the;

observer. Even a train passing above or below will produce the effect on the observer which causes the twig to turn in his hands.

5 LOCATED FROM PLANE. • A test as to the penetrating power - of the rays—if they are rays—was ’ made at a place where -thousands of tons of lead ingots were piled in a ; dump about 30 yards square and 41 - feet thick. 1 Underground water was traced up ; to the edge of the dump and right ’ across it to the other side. And the ; influence was felt just as strongly when walking over the dump as if it had not been there. Flights in an aeroplane were equally decisive. Mr Budgett, sitting behind the pilot, without seeing the, ground called out “there” when canals or rivers were crossed and the pilot checked them up as correct in ever}- case. A heavy thunderstorm or the proximity of a large running dynamo seemed to have no effect on the influence. Mr Budgett says that his only interest was to find some explanation of the water-divining phenomena. Having ruled out gravity, magnetism, and potential gradient in the atmosphere, by a series of tests, he devised a machine which proved to j his satisfaction that the influence felt by a “diviner” is, at any rate, asjsociated with, if not actually caused Iby the variations in the intensity of !a very penetrating; vertical, ionizing radiation, which has a considerable absorption co-efficient in water. t