ARE EXPLORERS TO JOIN THE DODO?
There are few who will not admit that exploration is a Good Thing (we
do not here deal with those who question its economic importance, and
so on). In this chapter we offer proofs that exploration can remain
durable after the last island has been discovered.
With so much recent flying over seas previously unknown, and no land
discovered on any of the flights, the commentators are beginning
to worry about the end of the romantic Age of Exploration, and the
possible extinction of the Columbus family. Are there to be no more
explorers, they ask, or, at least, no more Great Explorers?
Waiving the question of whether it matters much if the tribe of
Columbuses does perish, we have encouragement, of a sort, in a
study of the inside history of exploration, by which we see that
nearly all the most famous explorers came into their greatest fame
through misunderstanding, or through the planned or accidental
fruits of publicity. That is good news for those who want us to
have Great Explorers in future. For there is always room for more
misunderstandings, and surely the arts of publicity are not on the
wane. The Columbuses should, therefore, be able to flourish among us
yet awhile. Their last fade-out will come only when mankind ceases to
delight in being humbugged.
For those who want new Columbuses hereafter, there is nothing more
encouraging than the story of Christopher Columbus himself. If there
were any such thing as an abstract greatness in discovery, then surely
_the_ discoverer of America would not have been Christopher, but the
first human being who stepped ashore on the continent, or who first
saw it from a distance (I rule out of court the beasts that were ahead
of the humans, since the institution of fame has never been developed
among them).
This first human discoverer came thousands of years ago, and may have
been a Negrito or some sort of Negroid person. He may have resembled
a kind of Chinaman, or perhaps he was a good deal like some modern
Europeans. (In that case the Nordics would assume, _a priori_, that he
must have been a Nordic, or at least an Asiatic proto-Nordic, in whom
their coming greatness was already foreshadowed.) One more assumption
is that the discovery probably took place across Bering Straits or
along the Aleutian chain, though some contend that it may have been
from island to island across the South Pacific.
But we are really perverting the meaning of “discoverer” by this talk
of Negro or Mongol, for by immemorial practice the use of that word
is confined to Europeans. No place is discovered until some European
finds it. It might be safer to narrow down still farther the meaning
of “discoverer,” for there are books claiming that a kind of European
(in the sense of coming from Europe) really found North America in
very ancient prehistoric times. These would not have been adequate
discoverers, for they probably resembled Eskimos, and no one would
suggest that a place was discovered when the first Eskimo found
it--even if he came from Europe.
We do not arrive at a proper competition in claims of discovery until
we begin to discuss whether the Irish found America. They have enough
political and other prominence--in fact, they are the next most
fashionable whites after the Nordics. Still, merely being Irish is not
enough, for what we really mean by a Great Discoverer is a European
who was hurrahed while living or at least haloed reasonably soon after
he died. The Irish discoverer, if there was one, does not meet these
requirements. The Irish themselves never tried to make much of him
until recently, when they became ambitious for setting up a rival
to Columbus. Greatness does not sit very securely on even the most
deserving dead man unless, as said, he develops a cult soon after his
real or alleged deeds.
After the Irish, we come to more formidable discoverers, for we know
their names and they have the advantage of being Nordic--Gunnbjorn,
who first of known Europeans sighted the American island of Greenland,
probably around the year 900; Eric the Red, who colonized Greenland
following 982; and his son Leif the Lucky, who visited the American
mainland in A.D. 1000. There are no scholars and few intelligent laymen
who dispute the records of Eric and his son Leif, but still most of
them agree that they were not the real discoverers of America, even
though the Papacy followed soon and effectively in their footsteps
by establishing churches in Greenland about 1050, maintaining them
for 400 years, and encouraging the knowledge of the Western World to
spread throughout Europe by way of the learning that bound together the
medieval monasteries.
Christopher Columbus is _the_ discoverer of America chiefly because he
and what he was supposed to have done got the right advance publicity.
Marco Polo and others had reminded Europe afresh of the riches of
the East. Desert raiders, fairly well press-agented for those days,
were making more dangerous the overland routes which had always been
difficult. Prince Henry the Navigator and his group had finally worked
out an eastward seaway by rounding South Africa, but the way was stormy
and tedious. Everybody wanted an easy and cheap eastward route. For
centuries many had been trying and the public interest was constantly
getting more and more inflamed.
Then, at the psychological moment, Columbus sailed westward for
the East, with all his other publicity advantages strengthened by
fashionable royal backing. He struck land, and at first everybody
thought he had discovered a short route to the wealth of the Indies.
A little later doubts arose, about which people argued violently, and
the arguing was quite as good for advertising as the previous harmony
of acclaim. Before the legend died that Columbus had found Asia, other
legends about gold and jewels and fountains of youth had grown up to
take its place. There never was a let-down of publicity until colonies
developed, and America became wealthy in her own right.
As a result of the centuries of advertising that thus went before the
rise of historical scholarship, it is hopeless now to try to disturb
the preeminence of Columbus by publishing the truth about all the
discoverers who preceded him. Folklore has gathered about him until he
is almost as safe in his historical shrine as if he had never existed,
like some god or demigod. When a well-known character is securely
mythical he has such permanence as our world can give. Hercules is more
famous now and his achievements are more widely known than ever they
were in the days when a handful of Greeks believed in him. Little Red
Riding Hood is better known than Queen Elizabeth, more safely immortal
than Mary Baker G. Eddy. If fame depends on any achievement at all, it
depends only on publicity achievement.
Greatness in the field of discovery can be acquired today or tomorrow
by the same publicity methods that worked for Columbus. That such
modern greatness happens to have been secured most often by men who
deserved well and worked honestly, is really beside the point. For
others who deserved as well and worked as honestly are now forgotten,
or else were never known to the public at all.
The most striking case in point is that of Admiral Peary. For
integrity, ability, courage, persistence, and many other admirable
qualities, he had few equals. He discovered or elucidated several laws
of nature that are of permanent value to science, and he widened the
horizon of geography. Theories of the wind circulation of the globe,
for instance, hinge in considerable part on Peary’s work in Greenland.
Now that we are flying, and especially when we begin to fly more with
dirigibles, to understand the winds has become crucially important.
Peary is a world benefactor in helping us to that understanding, but
it is reasonably certain that his fame will not thereby be appreciably
increased. Geographers are nearly unanimous in holding that his
biggest achievement was determining that Greenland is an island. Also,
his demonstration that the north end of Greenland, now called Peary
Land, is free of snow in summer, and that it supports plant and animal
life the year round, was a death blow to the old theory that if lands
were only far enough north they would be sure to be covered with ice.
But in spite of all these things, Peary’s greatness has been made to
depend almost solely on his having been first to reach the North Pole.
With all his real worth, Peary would not have become an immortal had
the North Pole not been a well-advertised place. He rode in on its
publicity.
A side issue is that the public will not usually consider a man great
unless he has done something which it can visualize. Children play with
tops and we have all seen vehicles running on wheels, so we think we
know what is meant by the axis of the earth. We translate axis into
axle, visualize a top or a wheel, and imagine that we understand about
the North Pole. It is one end of the axle on which the earth spins
like a top or wheel. Accordingly, we think we can understand and value
properly the achievement of the man who first got there.
But what most people knew about the North Pole until recently was an
understanding as far from reality as it was clear. By an artificially
simplified theory of the nature of the earth, they had arrived at the
conclusion that this pole had many remarkable qualities beside being
the end of the axle of the earth. It was discussed as if it were the
coldest place on earth, the center from which the cold winds were
distributed, the hardest place to reach, and the one toward which the
magnetic needle pointed. It was supposed to be at least five poles in
one--Cold Pole, Wind Pole, Pole of Inaccessibility, Magnetic Pole, and
North Pole. We now know that the coldest place is more than a thousand
miles from it, the wind center nearly a thousand miles, the hardest
point to reach about four hundred miles away, and that the magnetic
needle points toward a district in Canada that is much closer to the
nearest railway station than it is to the North Pole.
However, during the long time when the North Pole was still supposed
to possess the qualities of all the other poles, it became so famous
and acquired such a hold on the public imagination that if you were
now, by knowledge and argument, to strip away from it one by one
all of its supposed attributes of greatness you would not detract
appreciably from its fame--just as Pike’s Peak remains the most famous
mountain in Colorado although more than twenty peaks in that state
alone are higher--just as Hercules will always be more famous than any
real strong man--just as Columbus will remain the great discoverer of
America no matter how many earlier discoverers history may soundly
establish.
Peary seems to have agreed with Cicero that to be ambitious for the
immortality of your name is among the greatest of human virtues.
Furthermore, he wanted the glory for his associates and for the flag
of his country. So he went to the North Pole and became immortal. It
was not the most difficult of his achievements nor the most important
scientifically. But it had the necessary advance publicity, and the
proper follow-up.
In fact, the North Pole has a superfluity of popular reputation,
enough to make many explorers famous. Byrd will probably become
immortal for having been the first to fly there, and Amundsen for
having been the first to fly there in a dirigible. No motor vehicle
yet devised is likely to travel effectively over the floating ice
north of Spitsbergen, but if such is built it is likely to make its
driver semi-immortal for having been the first to visit the North Pole
by automobile. This Pole is doubtless reachable by submarine, and the
first man who goes there that way will become still another fixture in
history. And so on for several firsts by new methods.
These will all be international immortalities. National immortalities
will fall to the first Frenchman, the first Japanese, the first Siamese.
If you want to find out how much glory a man gets for doing a hard
thing that is little advertised, just check up on the credit Amundsen
received for flying over the Pole of Inaccessibility. That pole is at
least as much harder to reach than the North Pole as the top of Mount
Everest is harder than the highest point yet climbed. But, you will
discover, the applause of the world for Amundsen’s Inaccessibility
Pole achievement was only a faint echo of what he received a few hours
earlier for the North Pole. Although he was the first man to do the
most difficult thing possible on our earth from the point of view of
exploration, he got out of it far less than for being the third man to
visit an easier place that was better advertised.
True enough, this North Pole flying immortality does not depend
entirely upon the publicity of the North Pole. Some of it rests in
considerable part on the publicity value of the airplane. Unless
it be swimming,[1] nothing has a better press now. Just imagine the
vaudeville salary of the first man to swim to the North Pole!
Close beside the North Pole and the airplane in publicity value is
femininity, as used recently, for instance, in the Channel swims. Thus
we may one day have immortality for the first woman who goes to the
North Pole, then for the first mother of a family, and eventually, when
we get a little more advanced, for the first divorcee. And think of the
first visit to the North Pole by Siamese Twins! (A later set of them
could be the first to marry there, perhaps in an airplane.)
If and when the public gets fed up on the North Pole we could no doubt,
by suitable publicity, convince them that the Pole of Inaccessibility
is really more interesting because more difficult. Hereupon vast glory
will come to the first man to fly there in an airplane, to the first to
walk there, the first to motor there, and so on. Then would come the
first debutante to go there, the first mother of a family, and so on,
with no limit other than that set by the arts of publicity.
A further encouraging thing about geographic discovery is that people
are forgetful of details, although they remember generalities.
* * * * *
After more than three hundred years of heralded search, the Northwest
Passage has become permanently famous. Then it was discovered by Sir
John Franklin in 1846, but nobody knew about that and gold medals were
awarded to Sir Robert McClure for discovering it in 1853. The world
resounded with McClure’s glory for a while.
The great public had forgotten about even McClure, but still remembered
that there had been a search for a passage, when, in 1903, Amundsen
sailed west from Norway. Three years later, when the job was done,
some newspaper man misunderstood Amundsen’s announcement that he had
navigated the Northwest Passage and put a story on the wires that he
had discovered it. The public hurrahed for the discovery even louder
than they had done in the case of McClure half a century before, and
most people think even now that Amundsen discovered the Northwest
Passage. Why not, if Columbus discovered America?
That it is not the first discovery, but rather the best advertised
discovery that counts, was proved to me from my own career. For, in so
far as I am known at all, I am generally known as the discoverer of the
“Blond” Eskimos. But the first traveler to report a strangely blond
people in the Arctic was not I, but Nicholas Tunes 256 years ahead of
me--in 1656. This seems to have been in Baffin Island, far from my
locality. But in my own district, without attracting much attention,
European-like Eskimos had been reported in the following order: by Sir
John Franklin in 1824, by Dease and Simpson in 1837, by Captain Charles
Klinkenberg in 1906, by Captain William Mogg in 1908, and lastly by me
in 1911. The report that created a furore was my second, given out in
1912.
That none of these reports about a European-like people in the Arctic
produced an appreciable stir in the world was apparently either because
the public did not know of the possible romance behind them, or else
failed to make the proper connection. They certainly did know of the
romance in 1911, but they failed to see its relation to my report, even
though it was published in the London _Times_, a paper that commands
much attention. But in 1912 the same report was dressed in newspaper
extravagance and joined up by the reporter with the tragic drama of
the colony of 5000 Europeans who disappeared from Greenland in the
Middle Ages. There was better reason for connecting the report of Tunes
with the lost colony than with mine, and at least a reason equal with
mine of 1912, for connecting those of Franklin, Simpson, Klinkenberg
and Mogg, and my own report of 1911, but it simply was not done. The
achievement of making the same discovery was presumably a little less
each time it was made, yet more glory resulted from the last one than
from all the others put together--because the right publicity note was
struck.
The connection once made with a topic of high publicity value
(involving also a misunderstanding similar to the supposition that
Amundsen had discovered the Northwest Passage), the “Blond” Eskimo
story swept the world and has not yet been forgotten after fifteen
years--in fact, shows no signs of fading.[2]
In view of how often America, the Northwest Passage, and the “Blond”
Eskimos were discovered before the hero came along who got the maximum
publicity out of each, we have little reason to be depressed, thinking
that the glamor of discovery is about to fade. When the first man has
climbed Mount Everest, the first woman can do it, and then the first
mother of a family; when the first airplane has flown over Everest,
there is still room for the first dirigible. You can go to Northwest
Australia this year and visit a black family who have never seen a
white man; next year you can capitalize the same family by taking a
woman to see them, for they will never before have seen a white woman.
Then will come the turn of the first mother of a family, who really
should take one of her children with her. There would be a tremendous
thrill in the cannibalism angle. To make the front pages it would not
be necessary to have the baby actually cooked and eaten.
It may seem for the moment absurd that we shall ever be as excited
again as we were recently over the North Pole, the Northwest Passage,
or the “Blond” Eskimos. But the wisest guessers frequently guess wrong,
and especially about news. During the last several years I have read
many estimates of the journalists of New York; none of them have failed
to put Mr. Carr Van Anda high as a judge of news, and most of them have
put him at the very top. Yet, in 1912, Mr. Van Anda said to me that,
with the North Pole found and the Cook-Peary controversy settled, the
Arctic would never again occupy much space on the front pages of the
New York papers. But in 1926 he either himself directed or was present
while someone else directed that the entire front page of the New York
_Times_, along with several of the inside pages, should be given over
to the North Pole, first for the second party to visit it and a few
days later for its third visitors.
I doubt if Mr. Van Anda would prophesy as confidently today as he did
in 1912 that twenty years from now the North Pole will occupy little
space on the front page. And who knows but the public may forget
Amundsen as they did McClure, so that a new discoverer of the Northwest
Passage may ride in on a new wave of hurrahs? Some explorer with a
good press may be able to get the same result sooner by flying the
Passage, or swimming it. A new man may in time get new renown out of
my “Blond” Eskimos as I did out of Franklin’s. The “Tunnit” remains of
Labrador were discovered for perhaps the tenth time in 1926, and the
tenth discovery (if it wasn’t the twentieth) won more glory than any
preceding it. Judging from past records, those “Tunnit ruins” could be
found again with even greater _kudos_ about 1946. And so on for many
thrilling discoveries.
It is, then, the best of discovery methods to find a thing over
again after just enough years so that the public has nearly, but not
quite, forgotten. Next best, as a perpetual device, is to search
again and again for a thing never found. The interest created is not
so intense as in the case of a repeated discovery, but there is the
compensating advantage that you can search perhaps three or four times
more often--you get passable results say once every five years for
the repeated search method; effective rediscoveries need at least
twenty-year gaps.
One of the best examples of perpetual search and resulting publicity is
the quest for an Arctic continent.
Through various theorizing it had been pretty well established a
century back that a great land mass spread across the northern polar
sea. It was the Arctic Continent or Polar Continent. The corner towards
Europe and America had been found and was called Greenland. The corner
towards Asia had been seen by natives looking north from northeastern
Siberia but had as yet no well recognized name.
Just for walking to the North Pole it seemed best to climb upon the
continent at the Greenland corner. But sailing might be easier, and
there was known to be a lot of water north of Alaska. So it appeared
logical to sail up through Bering Straits, coast along the east side
of the land seen by the Chukchis. This would presumably take you into
a deep bay. When you got to the head of it you would just anchor your
ship in some harbor and walk the rest of the way to the Pole.
Meantime the land seen by the Chukchis had also been seen by the
British--by Kellett in the ship _Herald_, so that an island was named
after the ship and a greater land seen to the northwest after the
captain. A modicum of fame resulted from this discovery.
The first attempt to pick up the east coast of Kellett Land and sail
north into the polar bay was by the American De Long in 1879-81.
Instead of sailing much, however, he was caught among eddying floes
that with the autumn frost solidified around his ship and carried him
drifting to the northwest across a corner of the theoretical continent,
amputating Kellett Land--the piece now called Wrangel Island. The
expedition made notable discoveries and was successful in adding to our
knowledge as well as to the record of well-conducted adventures, but it
ended in personal tragedy for De Long and a third of his men. Some of
the interest which the world gave De Long was through the bearing of
his work on the discovery of the Arctic Continent.
A series of notable attempts to walk over Greenland to the North
Pole was made by Admiral Peary. The result was one of the greatest
geographic achievements of the last hundred years, the determination
that Greenland does not run to the Pole, but is an island. De Long
had made a small amputation; Peary now made a large one. The Arctic
Continent had contributed materially to his fame.
The work of many expeditions to the north of central and western
Asia, notably the voyage of Nansen, cut farther into the theoretical
continent and the chance became small it could contain the North Pole.
In 1909 Peary marched from Ellesmere Island to the Pole, the whole
distance over floating ice, and took a sounding at the Pole showing
the water two miles deep. No shore of the dwindling continent was
therefore likely to be very near the Pole. Peary thought, however, that
he had seen land to the northwest of the north tip of Heiberg Island,
which might, of course, be a foreland on the continent. This was named
Crocker Land.
So the two greatest explorers of their time, Nansen and Peary, had
profited materially in popular acclaim and in more enduring reputation
through the bearing of their work on the Arctic land mass concept.
The interest in the elusive polar land had grown enough by 1905 that
an Englishman, Harrison, organized an expedition the chief purpose of
which was to search for the continent to the north of Alaska. He might
have done something, for he was a good man himself and had with him one
of the finest northern travelers, Hubert Darrell, whose quality can be
measured from Hanbury’s book, _Sport and Travel in the Northland of
Canada_, London and New York, 1904, one of the great travel stories,
an account of an expedition shared in by Darrell. But there was now a
whaling fleet at Herschel Island. Whalers and Eskimos alike were sure
that anyone was crazy who tried to travel afoot over the sea ice to the
northwest, and, strangely, were apparently able to convince Darrell.
Harrison stuck to his ideas but could get no one to go with him.
Therefore, his book, _In Search of a Polar Continent_, London, 1908,
has in a way a deceptive title--the search was never started. But it
had a good name. The Polar Continent, through being much sought after
and never found, had become a thing to conjure with.
There was a receptive popular audience when there appeared in
Washington a scientific study by R. A. Harris which, in the opinion
of the author and of many others, came near proving that there was
a continent. The land’s dimensions and the situation of its corners
were pretty well determined by deductions from what he thought to be
reliable tidal observations taken at a few northerly points.
Between wish thinking and mathematics the continent grew substantial
and for the first time had a name, Harris Land. The other names had
been for just corners--Greenland, Kellett, Crocker; this was a name for
the whole land, now shrunken but still spoken of as a continent. In
size it still more or less deserved the name.
Our 1913-18 expedition had somewhat better luck than Harrison’s. The
whalers and Eskimos were not able to talk us into believing that we
could not travel over the sea ice far from land and live by hunting.
Between sledge journeys and the drift of one of our ships (the
_Karluk_, Captain Robert A. Bartlett master), we made further inroads
upon the continent. More serious, we took soundings of 1386 meters
without bottom near some of the farthest points we reached. However, to
the northwest of the Ringnes Islands where, on one occasion, we were
forced to turn back less than 100 miles from shore the soundings were
only around 500 meters, and there seemed possibility of land.
Between driving Harris Land from some of its outposts north of Alaska
and finding what might be signs of it northwest of the Ringnes
Islands--between these achievements our expedition got a whole lot of
_kudos_ out of the Arctic Continent.
A year after we started our work in the sea north of Alaska, Donald
MacMillan attacked the problem and sought the theoretical continent
under the name of Crocker Land. He started out from Cape Thomas
Hubbard, Heiberg Island, whence it had been seen and tentatively
located by Peary. MacMillan returned without seeing land but there
was no assurance that it might not be hidden a little way beyond,
for the expedition had taken no deep soundings near its farthest. It
was, therefore, possible to speculate after the return that perhaps
the farthest point might have been over very shallow water, the land
therefore possibly only a bit farther on, concealed by clouds.
So between our shallow soundings, MacMillan’s absence of them, and
Peary’s report that land had been seen, there was an interest growing
keener with the number of searchers and the publicity of each.
The interest remained keen and there was much talk of the undiscovered
continent when Amundsen, Ellsworth and Nobile flew in 1926 from
Spitsbergen to Point Barrow by way of the North Pole. They saw no land
and would have divided the theoretical continent into approximate
halves but for the saving report that for portions of the journey
between Peary’s farthest (the North Pole) and Alaska the weather had
been so thick that they had not been able to see what lay beneath.
This, said the commentators, still left a chance that they crossed
fairly wide stretches of low snow-covered land. The continent still
lived.
In 1927 Wilkins and Eielson flew 550 miles northwest from Point
Barrow and took at their farthest point the deepest sounding ever
recorded in the polar sea, 5440 meters. The flight itself removed land
possibilities through a wide space. The sounding was a cause of further
discouragement to the geographers, but the public didn’t mind. So far
as they were concerned the Continent was merely elusive, rather clever
at hiding itself.
In 1928 Wilkins and Eielson crossed from Point Barrow to Spitsbergen.
They went some 200 or 300 miles out of their way to avoid the North
Pole, for three assigned reasons--they wanted to avoid the sections
which had been visited by previous explorers; they did not want to
be suspected of a play to that gallery which was still interested in
the North Pole; and they wanted to cross the area within which, for
reasons we have just given in dealing with the Peary, Stefansson and
MacMillan expeditions, there seemed the best chance of finding land.
The newspaper files show there was a great deal of speculation as to
whether they might find the Arctic Continent. There was also talk of
checking up on the observations of Dr. Cook who had reported one or
more lands to the west of the course he described himself as having
followed back from the North Pole in 1908.
Wilkins took a course which was for a time approximately halfway
between the areas explored by our 1913-18 expedition and those seen
by Amundsen. Then he swung toward skirting the district explored by
MacMillan, and so on to Spitsbergen, without seeing land. However,
he was forced to admit that for portions of the flight they, like
Amundsen, had been unable to see what lay beneath. The speculators said
there still remained the possibility of the Arctic Continent. There
was talk that somebody really must go and settle the question of the
Continent.
Between what is reasonably inferred from the soundings and from the
visual report of travelers there is, however, small chance now for an
undiscovered land in the Arctic bigger than Cuba. Islands from that
size down are possible, though not probable. But the interest in what
is now beginning to be called the lost continent still continues. There
will probably be plenty of talk about it next time anybody flies.
Anticipating discussions have already speculated on the chance that the
next flyer may discover “a lost continent the size of Cuba.”
As we admitted in the beginning, there have been in the search for the
continent no such storms of excitement as there were from at least two
of the discoveries of the Northwest Passage, after McClure’s report
(third or fourth discovery)[3] in 1854, and Amundsen’s (fourth or
fifth) in 1906. But on the whole the theoretical continent has given a
pretty consistent performance for a hundred years.
I have myself been in parties, of three in one case and of four in
another, that discovered large islands, rich with vegetation, birds
and animals, which had never been seen before by human eyes, press
agented or otherwise exploited. We were thrilled, of course. It was
one of the great experiences of our lives. But to judge by outward
appearances, there are friends of mine who have been even more thrilled
by “discovering” hamlets in Brittany that were “absolutely unknown to
Americans.” And I think they really had at least an equal right with
us to the thrill, for I imagine that discovering polar countries never
seen by human eyes is today easier than the discovery of a Brittany
village previously never seen by Americans.
Adventure, in the last analysis, is measured by the thrill it gives
to the discoverer, and later to those who hear about it. You can
predispose the world to any desired thrill by suitable advance
publicity. A deliberate campaign would be too long and expensive, so
you should choose for discovery something well advertised already, as,
for instance, the word and idea “ray.” We have long had the rays of the
sun, and they have been very popular. Then there are the X-rays, radium
rays, and many others, until the world is now ready to be thrilled by
anything that is called a ray. It is also important to have a good
adjective for the ray you are going to promote. “Cosmic ray” is the
best to date--see what it has done for Millikan. If you can find a name
a little better than cosmic, people will go daffy over the discovery
of your ray. (Death rays are perennially successful.)
Thus we arrive at a heartening conclusion: the tribe of Great
Discoverers will not become extinct until the Age of Advertising has
passed.