ST. ELMO’S FIRE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23332, 26 October 1937, Page 11

ST. ELMO’S FIRE

BLAMED FOR HINDENBURG DISASTER St. Elmo’s fire, which was among the things blamed for the explosion which killed 36 voyagers on the Hindenburg, is a phenomenon which mariners have often noted on their masts and rigging during stormy weather (says the New York Times), To the modern scientist, St. Elmo’s fire is something perfectly natural and matter of fact—a discharge of accumulated atmospheric electricity which takes the form of little dancing lights or flames. But to sailors it has always been awesome and supernatural. Pliny, in his natural history, refers to the little lights as stars. “ I do remember,” says a passage in “ Hakluyt’s Voyages,” 1598, “ that in the great and boysterous storme of this foule weather there came upon the top of our raaine yard and

maine maste a certain little light, much like unto the light of a little candle, which the Spaniards call the Cuerpo Santo, This light continued aboard our ship about three houres, flying from maste to maste.” The name St. Elmo is a modification of St. Erasmus, the patron saint of sailors of the Mediterranean. The seagoing men of that area look upon the dancing lights as a good sign, a promise that the saint will see them through. During a typhoon the light appeared to Captain Ahab and his crew in Herman Melville’s story of whaling “ Moby Dick.” “All the yardarms were tipped with a palud fire and touched at each tripointed lightning-rod end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphorous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar. “While this pallidness was burring aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew, who in one thick cluster stood on the fore-

castle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence like a faraway constellation of stars.” The Hindenburg explosion is the first disaster that has been scientifically attributed to St. Elmo’s fire Even now there are experts who doubt that such static sparks could have caused the airship’s hydrogen to explode. But Secretary Roper’s experts hao tests made at the National Bureau of Standards and found that it was “ possible ” to ignite leaking hydrogen with the sparks. So it appears that captains of any hydrogen-buoyed skv liners of the future will have to pay as much attention to the eerie little lights as their brethren of surface vessels have paid in the past. Try It: A few words in bold type in plenty of space attract attention. Try it on the readers of the Otago Daily Times.