Deciding that formal study had nothing more to offer, L. Ron Hubbard left college in the depths of the Depression, again taking his quest to learn about life out into the world. He said of this period, “...my writing financed research and this included expeditions which were conducted in order to investigate primitive peoples to see if I could find a common denominator of existence which would be workable.”

He directed two expeditions, the Caribbean Motion Picture Expedition, a two-and-a-half month, 5,000-mile voyage aboard the four-masted schooner, Doris Hamlin, and the West Indies Mineralogical Expedition, which completed the first mineralogical survey of the island of Puerto Rico under U.S. rule. Upon his return to the United States, and with scientific grants few and far between, he began to write his way to fame and fortune, supporting his research by becoming one of the most popular writers of the 1930s.

The editor of Thrilling Adventures, one of the more than 30 magazines Ron headlined, wrote in October 1934, “L. Ron Hubbard needs no introduction. From the letters you send in, his yarns are among the most popular we have published. Several of you have wondered, too, how he gets the splendid colour which always characterises his stories of the faraway places. The answer is: He’s been there, brothers. He’s been and seen and done. And plenty of all three.”

“Somehow Ron knew things that twenty-five-year-olds weren’t supposed to know — how men thought, what was in their hearts and the goals they fought for. And he knew the time when you had to take a beating if you were going to win out in the end.” — Richard Kyle Editor, Argosy magazine

While continuing to write for his New York editors — as well as penning screenplays for Hollywood, such as Secret of Treasure Island — he never stopped his vital researches into man.

L. Ron Hubbard was searching for a principle that would lead to the unification of knowledge and explain the meaning of existence — something other philosophers had set out to find in the past with varying degrees of success. In fact, many Western philosophers had given up on the idea that different peoples held anything in common and were no longer even asking questions about the life force or the essence of life. Man had become just another animal, mere flesh and bones.

Yet Mr. Hubbard saw man in a very different light. Although he had no name for it yet, he felt certain that life was more than a random series of chemical reactions, and that some sort of intelligent urge underlay our actions. Organising the tremendous body of data he had acquired — from his travels, research and experiments — he embarked upon a new experimental path, this time to determine how cells functioned. And following an elaborate series of experiments in early 1938, he made a breakthrough of magnitude — he isolated the common denominator of existence: SURVIVE.

That man was surviving was not a new idea. That this was the single basic common denominator of existence was.

The predominant theory of the time held that life was simply a chance chain reaction in a sea of ammonia. Disproving this materialistic belief and forming the basis for all his later work, his findings were compiled into a philosophic manuscript, Excalibur, written during the first weeks of 1938.

Recalling his work on this first of many manuscripts on the subject of life, he noted, “I began to hammer out that secret and when I had written ten thousand words, then I knew even more clearly. I destroyed the ten thousand and began to write again.”

The response of those who read this manuscript was dramatic, and more than a few publishers eagerly sought to publish it. He declined. “Excalibur did not contain a therapy of any kind but was simply a discussion of the composition of life. I decided to go further,” he added.