114 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1934 



prohibitive, and to produce it by the calcium hydride process was 

 too costly in the quantities we required. Captain Rogers, of the 

 Royal Airship AVorks at Cardington, designed an apparatus for 

 producing the gas by the interaction of hot caustic soda on finely 

 granulated quartz. From the generator the gas passed through 

 water traps into a reservoir bag, and from this it could be pumped 

 by bellows into either the pilot balloons or ballons-sondes. An excel- 

 lent piece of ajDparatus for its purpose in summer once its idiosyn- 

 crasies were known, this hydrogen generator could be the most 

 capricious item of our equipment in the winter months. It was 

 liable to do anything with little or no provocation or warning. A 

 shower of boiling caustic soda was common ; Mr. Morgans, in charge 

 of the meteorological work, and on whom almost all of this aerological 

 work fell, escaped miraculously on one occasion when the roof of 

 the hut was bloAvn up, and the windows out, and parts of the ap- 

 paratus rendered more or less permanently hors de combat. 



Pilot balloons were sent up at least once a day throughout the 

 period of our stay at Rae, and the larger balloons with Dines meteoro- 

 graphs attached on days when the pilot balloons indicated that the 

 upper air currents were likel}^ to carry them into a part of the Indian 

 reserve through which trapping and hunting trails mainly passed. 



The recovery of the meteorographs was one of our very serious 

 problems. For, except for the few Indian trails winding through 

 the bush from Rae to the Barren Lands and Bear Lake trapping 

 grounds in the north and down the lake shore toward the Yellow 

 Knife estuary in the southeast, the country around our main base 

 was almost completely uninhabited. To have attempted to hunt for 

 the instruments ourselves, even if we had had double the personnel 

 we actually had, would have been wholly impracticable because of 

 the difficult nature of the bush country. And even the project — 

 Avhich we very seriously contemplated — of transporting all our aero- 

 logical equij^ment 100 miles down to the main lake, we finally saw 

 would not materially help our chances of recovery. So we were 

 forced to rely on our pilot balloon and nephoscope observations (and 

 these after all can tell us very little of where a meteorograph may 

 be carried by the time it gets well into the stratosphere) indicating 

 that, at any rate during the early stages of its journey, the ballons- 

 sondes would be moving over areas where there was a chance of a 

 few isolated Indians on the trail. To increase the chance of the 

 meteorographs being found a long brightly colored tape was tied to 

 each one and the Indians were encouraged to keep their eyes open 

 for them by promise of a substantial gratuity. Further, by offering 

 presents (illegally, as it turned out) from our small liquor store to 

 the traders of the settlement to whom their Indian customers might 

 bring the meteorographs, we hoped to encourage them to continue re- 



