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ReseaRch a n d developmenT In T h e na v y 59
located in New London, Connecticut. 71 Late in 1941, the Bureau of Ordnance
set up a third R&D facility—the Underwater Sound Laboratory—at Harvard
University. At the San Diego laboratory, scientists and engineers in the sonar data
division conducted fundamental research on acoustic propagation phenomena,
while their counterparts in the sonar devices division built prototype devices for
specific combat requirements handed down by the Navy. The technical staff at
San Diego also handled a third function, personnel training in sonar technology
and operation. Similar R&D programs were set up at New London and
Harvard. In 1944, when OSRD began preparing to shut down its operations,
the Navy agreed to take over the wartime antisubmarine warfare program. On
1 March 1945, the Bureau of Ships assumed control of the San Diego facility
and renamed it the Naval Electronics Laboratory. The New London facility also
reverted to the bureau, but the Harvard laboratory was transferred to the School
of Engineering at Pennsylvania State College. 72 Two years later, the University
of California, under contract with the Office of Naval Research, established the
Marine Physics Laboratory at San Diego to study ocean acoustics and related
geophysical phenomena.
By the 1960s, academic institutions and contractor-operated facilities, such
as the Marine Physics Laboratory conducted most of the oceanography research
for the Navy. The Navy also closely coordinated this work with studies underway
at the Naval Electronics Laboratory. Unlike their diesel-powered predecessors,
nuclear submarinescould travel much longer distances at greater depths. , which
prompted the Navy to expand deep-sea research and ongoing development of
sonar and other antisubmarine warfare technologies. “Development of such
systems,” wrote the Chief of Naval Research in 1963, “is enormously complicated
by the fact that sound transmission is distorted, reflected, scattered, and absorbed
not only by temperature differences but also by the chemical properties of the sea,
marine life ranging from whales to microscopic plankton, sea surface conditions,
and the nature of the sea floor. In order to overcome and bypass these obstacles,
naval research is attempting to learn about ocean currents from the surface to
the bottom, the daily variations in the temperature structure of the ocean, the
formation and breakup of polar ice, and gravity and magnetic conditions at sea.”
To understand these complex ocean environments, scientists and engineers at
the Naval Electronics Laboratory had initiated in the late 1950s a new program
to develop, build, and operate a series of manned research vehicles for deep-sea
studies. 73 Meanwhile, the laboratory developed and produced many prototype
71 H. C. Mason, “Navy’s Electronics Laboratory,” Sperryscope 16, no. 6, (1963): 11; P. H. Hammond,
“The U.S. Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory,” Journal of Applied Physics 15 (March 1944): 240–42.
72 On the transfer of the Harvard laboratory to the Pennsylvania State College, see footnote 14, above.
73 F. N. D. Kurie and G. P. Harnwell, “The Wartime Activities of the San Diego Laboratory of the University
of California Division of War Research,” Review of Scientific Instruments 18 (April 1947): 207–12, 218; L. D.
Coates, “Chief of Naval Research Details Program,” Data 8 (September 1963): 10. Also on the Navy’s role in
oceanography research during the Cold War, see Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “The Navy’s ‘Sophisticated’ Pursuit
of Science: Undersea Warfare, the Limits of Internationalism, and the Utility of Basic Research, 1945–1956,”
Isis 93 (March 2002): 1–27; Hamblin, Oceanographers and the Cold War: Disciples of Marine Science (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2005); and Gary E. Weir, An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers,
Scientists, and the Ocean Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2001).