"The Man Who Ploughed the Sea" is a

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the old ...

by British writer Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1957. The

story within a story A story within a story, also referred to as an embedded narrative, is a literary device in which a character within a story becomes the narrator of a second story (within the first one). Multiple layers of stories within stories are sometime ...

is narrated by Harry Purvis, who recalls a holiday spent submarining off of the

Florida Keys The Florida Keys are a coral island, coral cay archipelago off the southern coast of Florida, forming the southernmost part of the continental United States. They begin at the southeastern coast of the Florida peninsula, about south of Miami a ...

. While there, he happens to witness a meeting between two wealthy and talented scientists, one of whom has designed a method to extract trace elements from

seawater Seawater, or sea water, is water from a sea or ocean. On average, seawater in the world's oceans has a salinity of about 3.5% (35 g/L, 35 ppt, 600 mM). This means that every kilogram (roughly one liter by volume) of seawater has approximat ...

. He trades his secret to the other in exchange for the other's fancy yacht, but it turns out that the process is not yet commercially viable. The piece was later published as the tenth story in Clarke's collection ''

Tales from the White Hart ''Tales from the White Hart'' is a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the "club tales" style. Thirteen of the fifteen stories originally appeared across a number of different publications; some had n ...

''.

References

External links

* Short stories by Arthur C. Clarke 1957 short stories Tales from the White Hart {{1950s-sf-story-stub