Squirting Fogs Away

This is how age (67), distance (Boston) and position (professor of meteorology) brought Alexander George McAdie of Harvard to describe a foggy day in Manhattan in Scientific Monthly, published last week.

"Swinging up Fifth Avenue with stately steps and slow, the customary St. Patrick's Day parade had just reached the reviewing stand. Then it was that Skiron [northwest wind] turned Sassenach. Like the Assyrian of old he came down on the fold. In a jiffy he knocked off hats from every head. A thousand silk toppers of assorted vintages went tossing on the breeze. They were borne skyward but not on the wings of song. Coat tails, hitherto sedate enough, designed to cover substantial parts of the human anatomy, became possessed of seven devils. With hilarious impudence they flapped in places where they were not wanted. Badges were torn from the imposing fronts of the city fathers; and stern-faced color guards, strong to face the wind, realized that whichever way they turned they had better have turned some other way. Nor did the ruffian Skiron spare the skirts of sisters and sweethearts. Graceful draperies sprang into life as parachutes, revealing much not usually disclosed to the eye of man. But the fog was conquered."

Wind and sun are the only efficacious dispellers of fog. But to dissipate thin shallow fogs such as rise over a harbor the warm morning after a still, clear night, Professor McAdie suggests that fireboats squirt their streams at the mist. "Electrified spray from these mighty nozzles would not only wash a channel through the fog, but cause the fog droplets to coalesce and agglomerate and drop as a drizzling rain. The squirting would not be very expensive."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.