Move over Roentgenium. Here comes another one.
Dr David Conway (William Leslie), along with Dr. Ellis Morton (Tristram Coffin) and Laura Hutchinson (Kathryn Grant), has built a machine that can predict earthquakes. The machine is predicting that a major earthquake will happen in the next 24 hours. They notify the governor who is skeptical. When the earthquake happens it is much larger than anyone expected. After researching the situation the team predicts that there are more earthquakes coming. A lot more.
The team decides they need to get closer to the epicenter of the quakes in order to determine why they are happening. They hope that if they know why, they made be able to formulate a plan to stop them. They set up a make shift lab in Carlsbad Caverns as far down as they can go. After a time the research has gone nowhere but the earthquakes have kept coming.
One of the researchers discovers a rock that has unusual properties. In water it’s dormant but once it is dried it doubles in size and increases in temperature correspondingly adding to its mass by combining with nitrogen in the air until it grows to the point where it explodes. They call it element 112. There appear to be forces that are pushing this element to the surface. They do some experiments on it to determine how volatile it is. They determine that if they do not do something to stop it, element 112 will destroy the planet in a little over 28 days.
"The Night the World Exploded" was released in 1957 and was directed by Fred F. Sears. The movie stars Kathryn Grant, William Leslie and Tristram Coffin. Lots of stock footage of actual disasters was used adding an element of realism to the movie. However, it looks like most of it came from WWII newsreels. Half science fiction movie, half disaster movie. It is a decent little 50’s science fiction film. One I would watch again.
To me the movie was a little reminiscent of “The Monolith Monsters” except water stopped element 112 from growing and plain water started the monolith monsters to grow. I guess nature fought back in strange ways during the 50’s. I suppose this could be a reminder that what we do to the planet can come back and bite us later. (We all need to remember to recycle.)
A real element 112 was discovered in 1996 by Sigurd Hofmann and Victor Ninov. After much controversy over the discovery it was named Copernicum after Nikolaus Copernicus. He was the astronomer that established that the Earth was not the center of the solar system and that the Earth orbited the Sun. The actual element is a highly unstable radioactive element. It is a synthetic element that has only been produced in a lab. The symbol for it is Cn. The most stable isotope has a half-life of approximately 30 seconds. Not exactly like the element in the movie. At the time the movie was made there were only 101 elements in the periodic table. Currently there are 118.