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- CARRBORO -- The fisherman, diving in 30 feet of water in the Caribbean,
was looking for crawfish.
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- He may have found a fortune. In fact,
if Carrboro's David Econopouly is right, he may have found the answer to
a puzzle that has captivated people for centuries.
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- Econopouly, who runs a web-page business
from his home in Carrboro, met the fisherman, who introduced himself only
as Michael, while he was teaching social studies in the Bahamas in the
spring of 1996. Michael told Econopouly a startling tale.
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- Diving for crawfish on a shallow reef,
he said, he'd noticed an unusual mound in the coral. Chipping away the
surrounding growth, he discovered a cannonball. Upon returning to the surface,
Michael obtained a salvage license from the Bahamian government and proceeded
to uncover what was apparently the wreck of a 19th-century Spanish sailing
ship.
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- Among the wreckage were a number of cannons
and cannonballs, which Michael brought up. But there was something odd
about them.
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- No rust. No corrosion. They'd been underwater
for nearly 200 years, but they gleamed like grandma's good silverware.
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- "Your normal iron cannon would have
rusted a long time ago," said Econopouly, whom Michael took to see
the artifacts. "These were a shiny metallic color.
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- "The other remarkable thing was
that the cannons had no fuse holes. They couldn't have fired. So what we
had were these cannons that weren't actually cannons and that had not rusted
after almost 200 years underwater. The question, of course, was why?"
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- Econopouly wanted an answer. He sent
samples from the artifacts to various laboratories for analysis
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- But the results only deepened the mystery.
Some assays showed the cannons to be 99 percent iron -- worthless, from
a financial standpoint.
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- But others detected mind-boggling amounts
of precious metals. One assay detected 37 percent rhodium, which was selling,
at that time, for $3,000 per ounce; another, from the Institut fur Spektrochemic
und Angewandt Spektroskopie in Germany, found a carronade to be 70 percent
platinum group metals.
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- If that was true, the shipwreck could
be worth billions of dollars. If it wasn't true, of course, then the wreck
was little more than a mildly interesting historical artifact.
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- Econopouly, by now thoroughly intrigued,
thought the answer might lie with another part of the cargo the ship had
carried: some 100 barrels of whitish-gray stuff that appeared to be limestone.
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- "That didn't make sense, either,"
Econopouly said. "Limestone was readily available here. Why would
the Spanish waste valuable cargo space hauling 200 tons of limestone across
the Atlantic? Nothing was adding up."
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- Econopouly embarked on what turned out
to be a worldwide search for an answer. He sent letters, made phone calls
and mailed samples to metallurgists and chemists throughout the nation.
Then he waited.
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- Most of the scientists and organizations
he consulted told him that both the metal and the "limestone"
were worthless; their instruments detected nothing of any interest.
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- But finally there came a breakthrough.
A metallurgist in Oklahoma sent Econopouly a tiny bead of precious metal.
He had produced the bead, he wrote, by performing a complex chemical process
using the "limestone."
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- The letter was stunning. The process
he'd used was too expensive to be economically feasible, but even so, using
the "limestone" as as a catalyst, he'd managed to create precious
metal. If he was correct, and on the level, he'd performed the transmutation
of elements: Alchemy.
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- He suggested Econopouly get in touch
with a scientist named Joe Champion, who was working in Arizona to develop
a technique for performing low-energy nuclear transmutation, a method by
which elements are transformed through exposure to low levels of radiation.
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- Champion, after examining the research,
theorized that the "limestone" was an elixer the Spanish had
used to transform base metals into precious ones. The tests on the cannons
showed varied results because the tests themselves affected the results;
lead-based assays enhanced the transmutation process and revealed precious
metals; other testing methods did not.
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