Witching With a Newfangled Twig

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You know how the system works, gang: As long as you do it with a forked stick or a grapevine you're gonna get laughed at and looked at funny. But if you can locate water with a manufactured rig that costs $500 and that you strap right on your body . . . everything's OK. Little boys will look at you with shining eyes, fair maidens will swoon and tight-fisted businessmen will swap bills of large denomination for your services.

Ask George (Hop) Jamieson about those bills of large denomination. He's the fellow with the gen-u-wine, guaranteed, scientific water finder . . . and it's grossing him over $1,000 a week. What's more, he'll gladly help you do the same thing. If you're looking for a hearty outdoor job that pays well (because it saves your customers many times your hefty fee), has a built-in earthy prestige and looks to be downright fun, this may bear investigation.

The heart of the whole operation is a specially-designed and patented magnetometer called an Aquatometer and there both is and isn't any great mystery about how it works.

As you probably know, the earth's magnetic field is far from a serene and evenly-distributed force. It eddies and flows, stretches thin in some spots and clenches into knurled clumps in others . . . depending on soil content and distribution, rock formation and composition and other factors.

Navigators (to their dismay) and prospectors (to their delight) long ago discovered that even a primitive compass can be deflected by large, buried bodies of iron and other ore. Prospectors have since capitalized on this fact by developing the magnetometer. This is—in essence—a highly specialized compass designed specifically to detect localized variations in the planet's magnetic field.

Now this is no hit-or-miss proposition. Some magnetometers are so sensitive that one can be mounted in a large, fast aircraft and used to accurately map—in one day—the major metallic ore deposits hidden under a thousand or more square miles of rugged terrain. This is the well-known MAD, or Magnetic Aerial Detection, gear.

So there's no real secret to the basic principle of Hap Jamieson's Aquatometer. On the other hand, he's not exactly sure why it works either.

Maybe, as water travels in an underground stream, it becomes ionized and this electric "current" either adds or subtracts from the earth's average magnetic field in that area . . . and the Aquatometer detects the difference. Or possibly the instrument doesn't respond to water at all: It might be "seeing" the faults in the rock (through which the water flows) instead.

One thing Hap is certain of, however, is that when the dip needle on his Aquatometer varies one per cent from its preset reference point it is directly over a 5 to 15 gallon per minute flow of water. In fact, the apparatus is so sensitive that Hap (or any operator—there's no "skill" involved) can locate (or with 98% accuracy and—85 times out of 100—predict boththe depth and flow of the vein. 

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