Barlow's Bomb

THE CONGRESS Barlow's Bomb

Jaunty Lester Pence Barlow has pondered on how to make a living, how to redistribute wealth, how to make liquor bottles unrefillable. But what has mainly wrinkled his brow has been how to end war. Like a good inventor, he tried to solve his problem the easy way: a death-dealing explosive which would annihilate whole regiments, spoil everyone's stomach for further fighting. Last week little, stocky, 53-year-old Mr. Barlow traveled from his office in Baltimore, Md. to Washington, and bounded into a meeting of the Senate Military Affairs Committee. In a scarily matter-of-fact voice he revealed a formula for an explosive so horrific that the alarmed Senators, before they adjourned, burned the minutes of the meeting in a metal wastebasket.

Senator Nye, who is pretty good himself at making flesh creep, handsomely announced: "Never in 15 years have I seen a Senate committee so thoroughly impressed." He was convinced that Mr. Barlow's bomb would give any nation an "incomparable advantage."

When he was a soldier of fortune in Pancho Villa's revolutionary army, Mr. Barlow began inventing bombs. Thirteen years later he brought suit against the Government for infringement of six bomb patents. In 1932, while his suit was dragging on, he appeared in Washington and began to scare people. He confided in President Hoover and members of Congress that he had a machine which Senator Lynn Frazier later described as "powerful enough to destroy all property and life in a section a quarter of a mile wide and a mile long." So impressed was Senator Frazier that he opposed the Hale Bill to enlarge the Navy, on the ground that Mr. Barlow's invention would make obsolete all existing military and naval armaments.

Not enough people agreed with Senator Frazier, and Mr. Barlow took his plans to Soviet Russia. (He believed that Russia was the only nation which would make use of his invention to force universal disarmament.) In Moscow, too, the idea was considered a dud. Returning, Mr. Barlow turned aside into politics and social planning. He announced he would run for Congress as a Townsendite and an "associate of Huey Long," made high-explosive speeches to Stamford, Conn, friends. He kept his hand in by turning out a liquor bottle which could not be refilled, continued to think up new engines of destruction, press his patent suit.

Four years ago the U. S. Court of Claims decided five of his six patent claims were valid, later decided the Government owed him approximately half a million dollars. Forthwith he wrote Congress that he had now planned an 85,000-ton, shockproof warship which would be immune to serious damage by shell, torpedo, or air bomb.

Meantime, in 1938 Mr. Barlow had gone to work for hardheaded Glenn L. Martin, airplane manufacturer. He was given working quarters in a shed outside the Martin plant, because, he explained, Mr. Martin was afraid he might accidentally blow the plant up. There, at week's end, Mr. Barlow paced restlessly from the blueprints that covered his walls to his desk, on which reposed a spray of pressed violets which his mother had sent him from California. His latest bomb, said he, could be dropped from high altitudes out of reach of anti-aircraft guns, would explode 30 feet from the earth's surface, and by sending out detonation waves act on objects precisely as depth charges act on objects under water. It was a liquid oxygen-carbon formula. His name for it: glmite (after G. L. Martin).

There was no question in his mind as to its deadliness. The only question was, how deadly? He was looking for a field in Texas or Florida where he could tether goats at intervals of 200 to 1,000 feet from a container of 1,000 pounds of glmite. He would then set off his charge, see what happened. He was convinced that nothing would be left of the goats.*

Mr. Barlow had still not received a nickel of his half-million dollars from the Government, awarded him four years ago. Although the Senate had passed two bills to appropriate the money, the House had turned the first one down, had not yet got around to the other.

The Senate Military Affairs Committee cloaked themselves in secret session this week to talk once again to Mr. Barlow. Present were the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, House Naval and Military Affairs Committees, War Secretary Woodring, Navy Secretary Edison. Upshot: Mr. Barlow was asked to demonstrate his bomb in two or three weeks, not in Texas or Florida but at the Glenn L. Martin airport --and with no live targets. Pleased as punch, Mr. Barlow hoped the House had not forgotten it still owed him half a million dollars.

* Shocked, Mrs. Herbert W. Elmore, president of the Washington branch of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, straightway urged a nationwide campaign of protests against glmiting goats or any other animals.

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