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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1291 



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 extraordinar- 

 ily 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 effective of the anti-subma- 

 rine work done in the United States grew 

 directly out of that conference, and it 

 grew out of it in this way. As Lord North- 

 oliffe continually reiterated on his trip to 

 the United States in the spring of 1917, 

 the submarine 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 sup- 

 plies which this country alone could fur- 

 nish, and in the spring of 1917 civilization 

 trembled in the balance, because the sub- 

 marine was seriously threatening to de- 

 stroy all possibilities of transportation 

 from this country to Europe. The Eng- 

 lish scientists therefore, in particular, 

 came to this country directed by their gov- 

 ernment to lay before the American scien- 

 tists every element of the foreign anti-sub- 

 marine program, whether already accom- 

 plished or merely projected, and in the 

 conference under consideration a large part 

 of the discussion centered around the sub- 

 marine situation. Now the problem of 

 submarine detection, as Sir Ernest Ruth- 

 erford repeatedly pointed out, was a prob- 

 lem 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, 

 the number of physicists being quite lim- 



ited, the number of men who had any large 

 capacity for handling the problem of anti- 

 submarine experimentation was small. 

 These men existed mostly in university 

 laboratories or in a very few industrial 

 laboratories which employed physicists, 

 and we unquestionably had gathered a 

 very representative group of them to- 

 gether 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 depended 

 upon selecting and putting upon this job 

 a few men of suitable training and capac- 

 ity. 



At the close of that conference a small 

 committee was appointed 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 Tale, 

 and Michelson of Chicago, although Pro- 

 fessor 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 Department, although it 

 was at first financed by private funds ob- 

 tained by the National Research Council. 

 In the course of a few months, however, 

 when it had demonstrated its effectiveness 

 it was taken over by the Navy, which spent 

 more than one million dollars on the ex- 

 perimental work at that place. This sta- 

 tion 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 



