July 19: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
ON THIS DAY IN 1916, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Fluke and weakfish, which formerly abounded in and about Jamaica Bay, have practically all disappeared since the beginning of the shark scare. Curator of Natural History Robert Cushman Murphy of the Brooklyn Institute Museum on Eastern Parkway, returning from a 48-hour shark hunt, said today that the occupants of more than 100 fishing boats had told the same story. Where two weeks ago it was an ordinary thing for a man to pull fluke out of the water almost as fast as he could drop his hook in, one man fishing all day Monday caught only four. Few fish were being caught anywhere in the bay.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1927, an Eagle editorial said, “The world is bound to be interested in the announcement of Dr. Gustav Egloff, oil technologist, before the Institute of Chemistry at the State College of Pennsylvania, that ‘perfection of the process for making the same kind of oil as that formed by nature dispels all fear of the possible exhaustion of the world’s oil and gasoline supply.’ The method is explained as the catalytic treatment of either natural gas or water gas, getting 15 percent of petroleum compounds, gasoline, naphtha, lubricating oil or paraffin. But cheapness is another matter. What seems evident is that science is economically blocked from competition with nature as in the case of rubber. The laboratory has been able to make rubber for a series of years, but high as prices have been raised by the British monopoly, laboratory competition is impossible. So, after all, the most hopeful thing about the Egloff address is the assurance that nature herself for an indefinite number of centuries has been using the catalytic process and is still using it. In other words, if we are taking out immense quantities of petroleum, nature may keep up with our demands. Synthetic petroleum is the card we hold in reserve, and it may not have to be played for many decades to come.”