OCEANOGRAPHY 1961 — PHASE 3 191 



He says : 



In several parts of the bill — 



this is S. 901— 



research costs and estimates are listed separately and the costs for the instru- 

 ments is far too high with respect to other research costs. I have continuously 

 and consistently supported the idea that useful instruments are likely to orig- 

 inate in the minds of potential users and nowhere else. If industry, or the 

 "systems and instrument" men, are called in too soon, or are given control of 

 instrumentation budgets, waste will result. Therefore, I propose that the sums 

 labeled "instruments" be combined with those labeled "research" and controlled 

 by the research scientists. The man who wants to create an instrument just 

 to create an instrument, assuming or hoping that someone else will adapt that 

 instrument for some useful purpose, is usually harmful. An instrument or 

 instrument system for research is only useful if it provides Information that is 

 wanted and provides it as conveniently as possible. It is the people who want 

 that information who should either create the instruments or decide on their 

 main operating characteristics and contract their construction out to industry. 



Well, now, I agree with Dr. Ewing that there are certain, shall we 

 say, vultures in the instrument industry who — I am speaking not of the 

 geophysical instrument industry, now, but the instrument industry in 

 general — who are hanging around the fringe yapping at the skirts of 

 Government contractors, looking for any kind of business they can 

 pick up. And if that is the only kind of instrument contractor he 

 has ever had contact with, I could not agree with him more in his 

 philosophy. I have encountered some of them, myself. 



To cite one example, one eager beaver approached me one day on 

 the subject of a gravity meter device. I asked him, "What are you 

 going to use it for ?" 



He says, "Just between you and me, I am going to detect some 

 submarines." 



He apparently never heard of Archimedes' principle, according to 

 which a submarine displaces its own weight in water and would not 

 :give a gravity reading at all. 



However, I think that Dr. Ewing's remarks do not apply very well 

 to the geophysical instrument industry, by which I mean people who 

 are building instruments for geophysics, rather than just for the sake 

 of building instruments. We have some representatives of this in- 

 dustry with us this morning, and we will hear from them later. 



I might point out that some of the principal instruments that Dr. 

 Ewing and other university oceanographers use actually come from 

 industry. The magnetometers used were developed by the Gulf Oil 

 Co., the older ones. The newer ones, the proton precession, and so 

 on — the proton precession comes primarily from Varian Associates, 

 which is an instrument manufacturer of high reputation, not entirely 

 geophysical, by any means. The rubidimn vapor instrument comes 

 also from Varian. We have developed one ourselves. And Texas 

 Instruments has developed another type of electron resonance mag- 

 netometer. These are being used in basic research. 



The gravity meters which the universities are using at sea are pri- 

 marily the Graf instrument, which is made by Askania, a German 

 instrument manufacturer, and La Coste, an American geophysical 

 instrument manufacturer. The seismic instruments which the uni- 

 versities are using come almost exclusively from the American geo- 

 physical instrument industry. 



