EXCERPT

From Page 26-27 (July 13, 1935) …. As I approached Radio City, I had second thoughts about the interview. Was I ready to talk on the radio? What if I got dragged into my methodology? Could I keep it safely obscure and still sound plausible? Or should I just plead for privacy? … My excuse that I used Betsy, my calculator—intense computations always subject to error—begged the question of how I located the most likely point of an earthquake in advance, or how—the real acid test—I could feel certain there would be no other quake to upstage me. A nip from my bourbon flask didn’t help. There were a lot of “smoke and mirrors” needed in the “no earthquake forecast” issue….

When I walked into Radio City, I knew I had to be extra alert. But I never anticipated WEAF would invite other people to the interview. Or that one of them would be Carl Payne Tobey,

He was a prominent astrologist and considered an authority on psychic phenomenon, the last person I wanted associated with my work, which was supposed to be scientific.

The other invitee was William Lawrence from the Times who’d authored the article about my forecast on Krakatoa. I was relieved to meet him. He would later become the official Historian of the Manhattan Project and win two Pulitzers. Sadly, he was not then the Science Editor at the Times. I would have preferred an editor who would have a feel for what was publishable material; something that would pass the editor’s smell test.

Both men were pleasant, though not friendly to each other. I guess it wasn’t surprising they were antagonistic; Lawrence had a science background and wanted a scientificly reproducible result. Tobey, I was certain, wanted to validate the notion of psychic earthquake prediction. … On the radio, I said that the highest tides occur when the moon or a large planet align with the sun as in a solar eclipse, and thus exert a greater pull-on oceans and some part of the Earth’s crust. I explained I had a mathematical model, noting that it required intense computation, and claimed that the model could predict future quakes reliably…..