Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/589

 Popular Science Monthly

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����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 the southern coast of California of an ingenious system which represents a minimum of cost compared with what it is promised to do. It is not essentially an experiment, because the principles involved have been tried out before, with encouraging results. The lay mind instinctively 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 inventor, employs nothing more substantial 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-

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