This is only a thumbnail sketch of the astonishing luck which met the photographers and note takers of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory in its first decade. There were similar decades in the nineteenth century, and there were similar jagged crags rising as islands and shorelines around clover-leaf lakes in 1879 and at other times. There were undoubtedly earlier similar sympathetic movements whereby Kilauea had lowered following the end of Mauna Loa outbreaks. But none of this had ever before been measured from day to day. Our staff from 1912 on occupied the trig stations, every day or night when the weather permitted, in order to measure within one foot the level of the live lava up or down. The lava was like the mercury in a barometer and needed incessant watching. This was done with a telescope, by people who dwelt on the edge of the vertical pipe. After 1913 the measurements clearly showed that sinkings were just as important as risings. They proved that the solid overflow matter and slide-rock slopes around the edges of lava lakes and coves measurably were a paste. This containing bank rose and fell at a different rate from that of the gassy liquid which streamed and fountained inside. The compiled results showed that the source of the liquid streaming was always at the west side of the pit bottom and that the streaming was toward fountaining grottos at the east. The liquid might at any time overflow its banks or sink down leaving inner cliffs, by failure of full supply up the west wall crack. All of this may sound highly technical; but notes, photographs, seismograms, records of weather, and unceasing press releases and reports to the sponsors, while difficult for literary description, created a new technique. Science, when one is devising a new approach, consists of observation first, of experiment second, and of explanation or theory third. Something of that order has to be followed in the record of a scientist’s life. The surprising sympathetic lowering of Kilauea following the end of Mauna Loa eruptions was only one of numerous surprises during the first decade of the Observatory. For instance, the temperatures of hot cracks were repeatedly and systematically measured, and nothing sympathetic with lava motion was found. The same may be said about the weather. At the beginning it was supposed that rainfall, air temperature, barometric pressure, and possibly fluctuation of the trade wind, would affect the volcano. However, the only quickly evident effect was the visible vaporing of many cracks on the Kilauea floor which dried up and diminished when the sunshine appeared, becoming dense and increasing in cold or wet weather. This obviously meant that the moisture content of the vaporing cracks, some steam, but mostly moist hot air came from shallow rain water a short distance underground.