How Weird Squiggles Led from Sheaves of Rice to the Depth of the Seas

Through an amazing chain of events, the Japanese story of how a town squire sacrificed his wealth to save his villagers from a deadly tsunami is intricately woven together with how in 1855 Benjamin Franklin’s great grandson accurately determined the depth of the Pacific Ocean based on the travel time of this same tsunami from Japan to San Francisco, California. This scientific breakthrough would lead to the first known prediction of tsunami wave generation through earthquake detection yet would be ignored by official government agencies with tragic consequences. Immediately following the 1946 tsunami, the Commander of the Coast and Geodetic Survey ignorantly stated, “Less than one in one hundred earthquakes result in tidal waves and you don’t alert every port in the Pacific each time a quake occurs.”