The Kusko Times

SEA WATER GOLD FAILS
GERMAN WAR DEBT PLAN

BERLIN.—Faint hopes that Germany might pay her war reparations debt with gold extracted from sea water were dashed today by Professor Fritz Haber, who lectured before the Oceanographic Congress here.

Professor Haber said that any prospect of winning appreciable amounts of gold from the sea has utterly vanished.

The lecturer won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1918 and is professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for physical and electric chemistry. His position and reputation gave his conclusions great weight with the scientific audience.

Professor Haber said that the possibility of extracting gold from the oceans had long been a strong appeal to scientists and inventors. Since 1872 some thirty extracting processes have been patented.

When the reparations commission in 1921 fixed Germany's war debt at 132 milliards in gold marks, equal to 50,000 tons of gold, German chemists again approached the alluring possibility of obtaining yellow metal from the seas.

The great Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1903 estimated that there were eight milliards tons of gold in the ocean. Professor Haber said today that the highest yield ever obtained was 60 milligrams of gold from a ton of water. He explained that this was ten times more than Arrhenius had calculated, but he added that sea water varied so extraordinarily and unaccountably in gold content that laboratory experiments had resulted only in disappointment.

Gold is there, he concluded; but the hope that science might make its extraction a paying proposition had not materialized.