Popular Science Monthly 



561 



Pouring oil on the troubled waters is no longer a marine necessity, if bubbles of air are handy. 

 Inventors have been experimenting for years on a scheme for stopping breakers by means of 



compressed air 



Breaking Storm Billows With 

 Compressed Air 



THE gnawing seas are ceaselessly 

 busy changing our coast lines. The 

 bulk of us are unaware of this, but the 

 coast dweller, particularly he who lives 

 near sandy beaches, can tell many a 

 story of wind-lashed breakers and 

 pounding surf. Whole stretches of the 

 New Jersey coast have been under- 

 mined and demolished in this fashion. 

 Our sandy western shores have been 

 similarly assailed, and property owners 

 on both seaboards have spent great 

 sums in trying to rear barriers against 

 these attacks. Unhappily, neither bulk- 

 head nor jetty has proved permanently 

 effective, and the fundamental reason of 

 their failure lies in the fact that they 

 are designed to halt the well-nigh ir- 

 resistible onrush of the storm-tossed 

 billows. 



A test will shortly be made upon tlae 

 southern coast of California of an in- 

 genious system which represents a mini- 

 mum of cost compared with what it is 

 promised to do. It is not essentially an 

 experiment, because the principles in- 

 volved have been tried out before, with 

 encouraging results. The lay mind in- 

 stinctively pictures a rigid bulwark of 

 some sort, for nothing short of this 

 seems logically the medium to arrest the 

 mighty drive of a great tumbling wave. 

 And yet Mr. Philip Brasher, the in- 

 ventor, employs nothing more sub- 

 stantial than a curtain of ascending air 

 bubbles ! 



The feasibility of the scheme hinges 

 upon two factors — a knowledge of wave 

 motion and the catching of a billow be- 

 fore it has time to break. Despite what 

 most of us think to the contrary, the 

 body of a deep-water wave does not ma- 



