Word: greenspan
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Your science editor would have really distinguished himself from the herd in reporting quake-quack Greenspan (TIME, July 22) if he had footnoted somewhat as follows...
Unless genius Greenspan, or others of these perennial prophets, will name the exact place and time more definitely than 16 million square miles of the world's most active earthquake belt some day next week (cf. "in islands northeast of Australia," July 11 & 12), the entry should be scratched. And I fail to see how even juicy journalism can construe as fulfillment of such a futile forecast a volcanic eruption at Krakatoa, or a quake in Japan. "Gosh, that's wonderful...
...Mineral Industries, writing in Science last week, "that our present knowledge ... of earthquakes does not permit any prediction of location and time of occurrence of a major earthquake with scientific precision." Meanwhile major quakes were occurring here & there over the globe and in Manhattan a young Jew named Reuben Greenspan seemed to be doing an astonishingly good job of calling them before they happened...
...tidal theory is behind the method worked out by Reuben Greenspan. Last month he told a newshawk that a conjunction of the moon and the planet Jupiter seemed to indicate earth disturbances "in islands northeast of Australia" for July 11 and 12. Early last week he wrote letters to newspapers repeating this prophecy. When July 10 came round Krakatoa, a volcanic island with a dreadful record, between Java and Sumatra, suddenly started erupting at two-minute intervals, hurling lava spume a half-mile above the rim.* When he heard of this Prophet Greenspan cried: "Gosh, that's wonderful...
Next day, July 11, Japan suffered one of the worst quakes in a decade. In the tea and orange district of Shizuoka, 100 miles southwest of Tokyo, nine persons were killed, 101 injured, 125 houses destroyed. Mr. Greenspan had predicted other temblors "in Turkey, Italy and around the Mediterranean" to take place on or before July 14. In that case he seemed to be shooting all around the mark because minor temblors actually occurred on July 13 in Rumania and Bulgaria...