An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment (review)

In the late 1980s, while working as an engineer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, I spent many a late night alone in the lab. Occasionally an older gentleman would come around the darkened building and ask me what I was working on. He'd listen with genuine interest, contribute a few insights, and then regale me with miniature lectures about far-out ideas, like hanging long cables from geosynchronous satellites. It all sounded a bit nutty, but the man had been right before. He was Allyn Vine, and I knew he was the father of Woods Hole's famous three-person submersible, Alvin, which was named after him. I also had a vague sense that he'd had a longer history in oceanography, but only by gathering snippets from the local culture.

Gary Weir's book, An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment, fills in those snippets with professional history. Vine came to Woods Hole in the 1930s, with his mentor, the geologist Maurice Ewing. During World War II, Vine engineered the bathythermograph (BT), a scientific instrument that allowed naval officers to measure thermal profiles in the ocean and use their bending of sound waves to find enemy submarines. He built an equivalent instrument, the submarine bathythermograph (SBT), which allowed American submarines to evade their hunters using the ocean's subtle acoustics. Vine spent much of the war at sea on submarines, teaching the navy how to use the SBT and to interpret the results. After the war, he took oceanographic measurements during the navy's 1946 Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests at Bikini atoll, helped discover a variety of oceanographic effects of great use to the navy, and had a hand in numerous major naval/oceanographic instrumentation projects. Alvin was but one in a series of endeavors that built American oceanography in collaboration with the navy (it still dives more than two hundred days per year). An Ocean in Common details Vine's work, as well as that of numerous other scientists, many of them inscribed on today's oceanographic world through famous papers, buildings, and ships: Ewing, Columbus Iselin, Roger Revelle, and Mary Sears, to name but a few.

Weir, head of the Naval History branch of the Naval Historical Center, is known for his previous well-respected books on the U.S. submarine industry. An Ocean in Common provides an original, well-documented history of how, during the period 1914-60, the U.S. Navy evolved from relying on what was essentially a craft knowledge of the ocean, derived from experience and centuries of tradition, to dependence on the measurements, tracings, and physical models of scientists. At the same time, oceanographers cultivated their wealthy patron while seeking an independent intellectual and institutional identity. The story follows a familiar pattern in twentieth-century American science: initial navy interest during World War I; scattered, foundation-supported efforts during the 1920s and 1930s that massively coalesced under the National Defense Research Committee in World War II; a period of uncertainty immediately following the war, with support taking off again with large cold war projects sponsored by the Office of Naval Research.

An Ocean in Common presents a compelling, detailed picture of numerous important episodes and figures in the history of oceanography—from the famous BT and SBT stories of World War II to the SOSUS hydrophone nets built to listen for Russian submarines to the dives of the Trieste in the 1960s, which still stand as the deepest humans have ventured in the ocean (more than 35,000 feet). Throughout, Weir emphasizes the personal connections between scientists and naval officers, the codevelopment and cross-pollination of naval and scientific cultures, and the importance of "translators," like Vine, who could move and speak between them. Weir adds valuable chapters to...