38 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE 



tion, of location of guns, airplanes and mines by sound, of 

 ordnance, of signaling and of aviation instruments and acces- 

 sories. 



As a result of these conferences there were organized through 

 the cooperative effort of the National Research Council and 

 several of the bureaus of the army and navy, a considerable 

 number of groups of scientific men, each of which was charged 

 with the development of some particular field. For example, 

 Professor -Trowbridge, of Princeton, and Professor Lyn-an, of 

 Harvard, were selected and placed in charge of the develop- 

 ment in this country of the sound-ranging service. They and 

 the group of scientific men whom they associated with them 

 were first given commissions in the Signal Corps, and with 

 Signal Corps authority and funds started development work 

 in sound-ranging at Princeton University and at the Bureau 

 of Standards. This whole group was later transferred to the 

 authority of the Engineer Corps, but its directing personnel 

 remained in the main unchanged and it did extraordinary work 

 in the whole of the fighting of the summer of 1918, locating 

 hundreds of guns by computing the center of the sound wave 

 from observations made on the times of arrival of the wave 

 at from three to seven suitably placed stations. This method 

 had never been used in any preceding war and it proved ex- 

 traordinarily accurate, a gun being located five miles away 

 with an error of less than fifty feet. 



Again it is not an over-statement to say that the most ef- 

 fective part of the anti-submarine work done in the United 

 States grew directly out of that conference, and it grew out 

 of it in this way. As Lord Northcliffe continually reiterated 

 on his trip to the United States in the spring of 1917, the sub- 

 marine problem was at that time the problem of the war, for 

 while Europe might fight with little to eat, it could not fight 

 without iron and oil and other supplies which this country 

 alone could furnish, and in the spring of 1917 civilization 

 trembled in the balance, because the submarine was seriously 

 threatening to destroy all possibilities of transportation trom 



