40 THE NEW WORLD OF SCIENCE 



tained by the National Research Council. In the course of a 

 few months, however, when it had demonstrated its effective- 

 ness it was taken over by the Navy, which spent more than one 

 million dollars on the experimental work at that place. This 

 station with its chief scientific personnel not largely changed 

 became the center of our anti-submarine activity, and with other 

 stations, one at Nahant, Mass., embracing chiefly the physicists 

 of the General Electric Company, the Western Electric Com- 

 pany and the Submarine Signaling Company, one in New York 

 presided over by Dr. Pupin, of Columbia, and one in San Pedro, 

 Calif., which, like the New York station, was organized under 

 the Research Council, made remarkable progress in the rapid 

 development of anti-submarine devices devices which ex- 

 erted a notable influence upon the reduction of submarine 

 depredations, and made it possible even by the fall of 1917, 

 to predict that the submarine menace could be eliminated. 



Unquestionably the most effective device developed in 

 America, and one which played a real role in the elimination 

 of that menace, was one which had the following origin. The 

 French had already developed an apparatus consisting of a 

 sort of great sound lens which brought the incoming pulses 

 together in. the same phase at the center of the lens near the 

 bottom of the hull. This was presented and discussed at length 

 in the conference. A full official report of the device was sent 

 by the French government to the Anti-submarine Board of 

 the Navy, and at a meeting of that board the writer requested 

 to be allowed to take this report to the group of scientists at 

 New London for the sake of a thorough analysis of it, for he 

 felt confident, and so stated at the time, that through such an 

 analysis we would obtain variants of the device which would be 

 an improvement upon it. This procedure was followed and 

 for two days ten men assembled at a hotel in New London 

 and studied that report, drawing up four or five different vari- 

 ants of this device- to develop and try out. .The most success- 

 ful and effective detector which actually got into use in the 

 war was one of these variants of the original French device 



