DARING GAS TEST.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20650, 23 August 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

DARING GAS TEST.

AMONG POISONOUS FUMES. SCIENTIST IN STEEL CHAMBER. What does it feel like to be shut up for an hour in a steel chamber full of poisonous fumes ? Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the Oxford scientist, has related his experiences when he and a companion—a Mount Everest explorer—submitted themselves to the test. " The mind," professor Haldane said, " becomes a complete blank or forms strange delusions. " During tho hour I | was in the steel chamber I was talking and giving instructions all tho time, but I have no memory of.it at all." " Unlike many, of tho cases I have known, I did not invent some cock-and-bull story about what had happened to me during that time. ". Some time ago I went to a hospital to see a workman who had been poisoned by carbon monoxide while at work. lie said ho was in hospital for a burn on his leg, which had been blistered by a hot-water bottle. The man would not believe he had been poisoned by gas. " I have often carried out what looked like very risky experiments, but there is no danger—if you know what you are doing. " I was very soon all right after this particular experiment, but I felt just a little funny for a:i hour or two—in fact, I had not a very good temper!" Many a man, according to Professor Haldane, has been accused of drunkenness when he was really a victim of car-bon-monoxide poisoning. 1 his, he said, was the explanation of the mystery at Barnet last December when two men were found dead iu a stationary car on tho road. Professor Haldano chuckled when he asked if friends over tried to dissuade him from taking part in risky experiments. "Sometimes they do," ho admitted, " but it is simply becauso they do not understand. "My wife? She is now quite hardened to this sort of thing. I go down mines and in alt sorts of funny places, but 1 think sho believes I shall keep out of mischief. " Once, when she was younger, she wanted to come and help mo when I was trying out the effects of carbon-monoxidc, and was very useful, too, for aftor I had had a good close, I could not walk home straight, and everyone would have thought 1 was drunk—and she walked homo with 1110."