Phantom Smoke

Last week the New York Sun published a remarkable photograph of Manhattan's 1,046-ft. Chrysler Building. From the building's slender spire, a thin stream of smoke appeared to be shooting almost vertically upward at high velocity (see cut). Since the spire is just a decoration and not a smokestack, the phenomenon looked like a scientific mystery.

The picture was taken several years ago by a Manhattan electrical supply dealer named Frank W. Carlin. Hearing something last fortnight about someone seeing a "beam of black light" emanating from the Chrysler spire, he sent his corroborating photograph to the Sun. One improbable explanation heard last week was that sunlight reflected from the East River cast an elongated shadow of the spire on frost particles in the air.

In Washington, a more plausible explanation came from Dr. William Jackson Humphreys, a Weather Bureau expert on electrical phenomena, who discoursed learnedly for the Government during investigations of the Hindenburg disaster. Dr. Humphreys ventured the opinion that the dark streak was caused by a streaming electrical discharge ("St. Elmo's fire"). He estimated that a total charge of some 50,000 volts was leaking off the spire. This electric discharge would create ions (electric particles) in the air above the spire, making it slightly more opaque than the adjacent air. To astronomers and radio experts, this theory seemed reasonable. It is known that the ionized layer or "radio mirror" which surrounds earth is partly opaque to certain wave lengths of the sun's radiation. And last month astronomers of Yerkes Observatory reported the existence of a huge, almost transparent star (TIME, Jan. 24) with an ionized shell around it which partly blocked the light of the giant star's bright companion.

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