12 Research and National Purpose 



the ONR way, has paid off in research and development ac- 

 complishments on many occasions. It was this spirit, these rela- 

 tionships and the associated researches that made possible the 

 great emergency effort of the search for the Thresher and the 

 rapid development of the equipment that succeeded on that 

 occasion, and recently was so useful in the search for the lost 

 weapon off the Spanish Coast. 



I would like to point out a few major technical accomplish- 

 ments created under the guidance and leadership of the Office 

 of Naval Research that are particularly striking examples of 

 the way in which this imaginative management has been 

 translated into an improved Navy, and gives promise of further 

 improvements in the years to come. Under ONR sponsorship 

 at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and slightly 

 later at the Lamont Geological Observatory, the Scripps In- 

 stitution of Oceanography, and Hudson Laboratories, as well 

 as in Navy in-house laboratories and by industrial contract, 

 ONR was in large measure responsible for the creation of what 

 may be called "the new sonar": the long-range use of under- 

 water sound for ASW, for probing the oceans, and for general 

 geophysics. ONR's encouragement and cooperation, and its 

 spirit of working with the scientists and engineers to create a 

 new area of science was most important in making this possible. 

 This effort included not only acoustics, as such, but major 

 advances in oceanography and geophysics, and great accom- 

 plishments in the development of modern signal processing 

 technique. Of equal span and length of fetch in time has been 

 ONR's support of marine engineering research which laid the 

 foundations for much of our recent progress in true deep water 

 technology. Of current importance in this effort is its concern 

 with the pioneer U.S. work on "man in the sea," a further step 

 towards the ultimate objective of achieving access to the whole 

 depth of the ocean. 



Another characteristic example, a classic of its kind, is the 

 origin of the concept of Polaris in the course of the Nobska 

 Summer Study at Woods Hole in 1956 where experts in each 

 of the key areas that proved decisive for its feasibility happened 



