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 The group received national attention again after
they tried dropping two, 2" diameter steel balls down one of the shafts.
They had estimated that the balls should strike a point approximately 4 feet
eastward of straight down due to the Earth's rotation. For both attempts,
however, the ball never even made it to the bottom. While the work was done
one afternoon by the curious just to see what would happen, and was not
published, the result was picked up and then exaggerated by the popular press
who stated that anything which was dropped down such a shaft would end up
on the eastern wall whether it be a wrench or human body parts (Full Quote [PDF]). While he
initially ignored these reports, in 1906 he finally had had enough
and McNair wrote:*
Instinctively one feels that ... very far underground conditions must
be quite different from those one finds on the surface... When,
therefore, there is made the statement that objects dropped into
the deep shafts of the Lake Superior copper district 'do not fall to
the bottom but are invariably found clinging to the east side of the shaft'
probably the average reader is apt to credit the statement as noting one
more of the strange and uncanny facts which belong to the underworld....
When the press correspondent in telling it adds a touch of the gruesome in
the implication that among the objects frequently found 'clinging to
the east side of the shaft' are the pieces of a dismembered human body
one may suppose that reportorial skill has reached its acme... Such a
story was put forth not long ago ... and was copied in the daily press
throughout the ... country. One may question whether a plain statement
of the truth could obtain more than a fraction of the same extent
of circulation.
( Full Quote [PDF])
McNair concluded that air resistance and
air currents had a large effect on these experiments, a result which is
not too surprising.** Since there was no way to remove the air, these experiments
were not pursued.
* The quote here is from McNair’s original typewritten manuscript dated
1 June 1906. The article appeared, with minor editorial changes,
in the Mining and Scientific Press, July 1906.
** A calculation accessible to upper level physics majors shows that
the balls would already be very near terminal velocity after the
first 1000 feet. Terminal velocity occurs when the forces due to
gravity and the forces due to air resistance balance.
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