Septembee 26, 1919] 



SCIENCE 



289 



chiefly the physicists of the General Elec- 

 tric Company, the Western Electric Com- 

 pany and the Submarine Signaling Com- 

 pany, 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 exerted a notable 

 influence upon the reduction of submarine 

 depredations, and made it possible even by 

 the fall of 1917, to predict that the sub- 

 marine menace could be eliminated. Un- 

 questionably the most effective device de- 

 veloped in America, and one which played 

 a real role in the elimination of that 

 menace, was one which grew immediately 

 and directly out of the above-mentioned 

 conference. The French had already de- 

 veloped an apparatus consisting of a sort 

 of great sound lens which brought the in- 

 coming pulses together in the same phase 

 at the center of the lens near the bottom 

 of the hull. This was presented and dis- 

 cussed 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 al- 

 lowed to take this report to the group of 

 scientists at New London for the sake of a 

 thorough analysis of it, for he felt confi- 

 dent, 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 as- 

 sembled at a hotel in New London and 

 studied that report, drawing up four or 

 five different variants of this device to de- 

 velop and try out. The most successful 

 and effective detector which actually got 

 into use in the war was one of these vari- 

 ants of the original French device. Many 



of our submarines and destroyers which 

 went across during the summer of 1918 

 were equipped with it, and now it is being 

 still further developed for peace use, 

 rather than for war, for it is possible 

 through it to eliminate the chief terror of 

 the sea, namely collision in fog. And, 

 when it is remembered that the preventing 

 of a single disaster like the sinking of the 

 Titanic or of the Evipress of Ireland more 

 than pays, without any reference to the 

 value of human lives, for all the time and 

 money spent by England, France and the 

 United States combined in developing 

 detecting devices, it will be seen how short- 

 sighted a thing it is for any country to 

 fail to find in some way the funds neces- 

 sary for carrying on research and develop- 

 ment work in underwater detection. For 

 decades and for centuries we have allowed 

 ships to go down year by year needlessly, 

 simply because we have not realized the 

 possibilities of prevention through prop- 

 erly organized scientific research in this 

 field. 



But it has not merely been in sound 

 ranging and in submarine detection that 

 the war has demonstrated the capabilities 

 of science. Every single phase of our war 

 activities has told the same story. Turn, 

 for example, to the development of new 

 scientific devices for use with aircraft. 

 How was that handled? The Science and 

 Research Division of the Signal Corps, or- 

 ganized through the cooperation of the 

 Signal Corps and the National Research 

 Council and later transferred to the Bu- 

 reau of Aircraft Production, had a group 

 of as many as fifty highly trained men, 

 physicists and engineers, who were work- 

 ing in Washington and in the experi- 

 mental station at Langley Field, twelve 

 hours a day, seven days a week, on aviation 

 problems — one group on improvements in 

 accurate bomb dropping, another on im- 



