Joshua's Trumpet?

ARMY & NAVY

Congressmen got a jolt last month from Inventor Lester Pence Barlow. He told them that he had concocted a liquid oxygen-carbon explosive -- and named it "Glmite" -- similar to the famed German bombs which in Barcelona are supposed to have killed people a quarter-mile away (TIME, March 25). Army and Navy men remained skeptical, but last week both Army and Navy came around; agreed to formulate in writing terms for a scientific test to prove conclusively the effectiveness of Glmite, promised to pay the costs of the experiment.

The Army's willingness to undertake this trial followed the Congressional hearing and an unofficial test which Inventor Barlow staged last fortnight in one corner of the well-guarded grounds of the Glenn L. Martin aircraft plant. His guests were newsmen, a few Congressmen and curious Army and Navy officials. He proceeded to show them how safe Glmite was by setting fire to it, shooting a 30/30 bullet through it, firing charges of it from a trench mortar against a steel plate, lob bing a shellful in the direction of his nervous audience -- who ducked behind a sandbag barricade. None of this rough treatment incited Mr. Barlow's Glmite to explode.

But an eight-ounce charge touched off from a safe distance with an electric detonator shattered a 40-foot telephone pole, blew chunks of kindling 150 feet into the air. When Inventor Barlow put five pounds in a dugout, set it off, earth and sand roared up to the sky, and the "whip-back" of air rushing into the vacuum created by the heat of the blast sucked out the sides of a shack 25 feet away. The force of the explosion was felt 1,000 feet away. The new test will show Army and Navy men whether a bigger charge can, like Joshua's trumpet, make armies tremble and cities crumble.

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