CONTRIBUTIONS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE 39 



this country to Europe. The English scientists therefore, irf 

 particular, came to this country directed by their government 

 to lay before the American scientists every element of the for- 

 eign anti-submarine program, whether already accomplished 

 or merely projected, and in the conference under consideration 

 a large part of the discussion centered around the submarine 

 problem, which, as Sir Ernest Rutherford repeatedly pointed 

 out, was a problem of physics pure and simple. It was not 

 even a problem of engineering at that time, although every 

 physical problem, in general, sooner or later becomes one for 

 the engineer, when the physicist has gone far enough along 

 with his work. Hence, since the number of physicists was 

 quite limited, the number of men who had any large capacity for 

 handling the problem of anti-submarine experimentation was 

 small. These men were found mostly in university laboratories 

 or in a very few industrial laboratories which employed physi- 

 cists, and we unquestionably had gathered a very representa- 

 tive group of them together in the fifty men assembled in the 

 conference at Washington. The success or failure of our 

 anti-submarine campaign, and with it the success or failure 

 of the war, so far as we were concerned, seemed to depend upon 

 selecting and putting upon this job a few men of suitable train- 

 ing and capacity. 



At the close of that conference a small committee was ap- 

 pointed to select ten men to give up their work and to go to 

 New London to work there night and day in the development 

 of anti-submarine devices. The men chosen were Merritt of 

 Cornell, Mason of Wisconsin, H. A. Wilson of Rice Institute, 

 Pierce and Bridgman of Harvard, Bumstead, Nichols and 

 Zeleny of Yale, and Michelson of Chicago, although Professor 

 Michelson was almost immediately taken off for other work 

 of much urgency and Chicago was represented in a fashion 

 by the writer who was there a portion of each week. This 

 group worked under the authorization of the Secretary of the 

 Navy and with the heartiest of cooperation from the Navy De- 

 partment, although it was at first financed by private funds ob- 



