Abstract
The development of sonar and wireless telegraphy (W/T) in the Royal Navy are prime examples of institutional research directed to specific short-term goals — research which the Americans call ‘mission-oriented’. Sonar, or asdics as it was known by the Royal Navy until the early 1950s, has never caught the public imagination to the extent that radar has.1 Both have a common origin in electronics, and their development was governed by an intricate web of factors: scientific, bureaucratic, tactical and political. In turn, these new technologies have had a profound impact on modern warfare. As this study will attempt to show, research in a military context is nearly always a mixture of research and development (R & D); the goal is not the elucidation of a basic principle, but an operational device. In this kind of activity, which is intensely complex, once it has been shown that the principle will work, nontechnical factors begin to predominate. If it were an industrial invention, market considerations would take over, but in our present case it will be the military planners who will define the exact need.2
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Notes
There is a considerable amount of confusion about the origins of the word ‘asdics’. The Oxford University Press was prompted on 11 December 1939 to ask the Admiralty about its etymology after Churchill referred to it in the House of Commons. They were told that it was the acronym of Allied Submarine Detection Committee, ‘a body which was formed during the war of 1914–18, and which organised much research and experiment for the detection of submarines’ (in Public Record Office (PRO): ADM 1/9880). However, this Committee has not been identified from the records and none has been found bearing this name. A likely candidate could be the three-day Allied scientific conference on submarine detection devices held in Washington on 14–16 June 1917, which may have resulted in the setting up of an Allied committee, but there is no evidence for this (see ‘The beginning of the New London Experimental Station as recorded in the personal notes of Lt.Col. R.A. Millikan’; and Cdr C.S. McDowell, ‘American anti-submarine work during the war’, deposited at the Library of NUSC, New London, and copies with the author at Oxford). The Millikan paper is also in NRL: Harvey Hayes Papers, box 10, folder 309. See also National Archives, Washington, DC: RG 45 box 267G, Naval Records Collection of the Office Naval Records, file 1911–27, LA-Reports (Antisubmarine, etc.); and PRO-ADM 137–1436, ‘Report by Professor Sir Ernest Rutherford, FRS, and Cdr Cyprian Bridge, RN, on Visit to the United States of America in company with the French Scientific Mission, May 19th to July 9th 1917’, BIR,28208/17). The first reference to this term is in the ‘Weekly report of experimental work at Parkeston Quay’, dated 6 July 1918, and two days later it was reported that at the Anti-Submarine Division’s E & R Weekly meetings: ‘It was decided to call the Supersonic Apparatus by the name of Asdic Apparatus’ (see PRO:ADM 137/2719). No indication is given for the sudden appearance of this term. Wood (note 31), p. 39, has suggested that it stood for the initials of the Admiralty department which initiated this research: Anti-Submarine Division-ics, and the same explanation is given in the 1924 Report of the Torpedo Division of the Naval Staff (see PRO: ADM 186/244). In the US, too, this term was used in 1918 (see Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC): Harvey Hayes Papers, box 5, folder 66B, but in the inter-war period ‘supersonics’ was usually used. F.V. Hunt, the Director of the wartime Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory, coined ‘sonar’ in 1942, an acronym of Sound Navigation and Ranging, and the phonetic analogue of ‘radar’ (Radio Detection and Ranging) was attributed to two US naval officers, E.F. Furth and S.P. Tucker, who coined it in 1940. In wartime England, the system was known as ‘radiolocation’ or ‘RDF’ (Radio Direction Finding), but the term radar was adopted officially in 1943. Sonar replaced asdic (or asdics) in the Royal Navy in the early 1950s. For a further discussion, see W.D. Hackmann, Seek and Strike. Sonar, Anti-Submarine Warfare and the Royal Navy 1914–1954 (London: HMSO, 1984).
John Jewkes, David Sawers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1969) pp. 28–9; Thomas P. Hughes, ‘The Development Phase of Technological Change’, Technology and Culture, XVII (1976) pp. 423–4.
D.S.L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, revised edn (London: Heinemann, 1972) pp. 169–77.
H.W. Melville, The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962) pp. 101–10; E. Pyatt, The National Physical Laboratory (Bristol: Hilger, 1983).
D.K. Allison, New Eye for the Navy: The Origin of Radar at the Naval Research Laboratory (Washington, DC: Naval Research Laboratory, NRL Report 8466, 1981) pp. 6–9; M. Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959) pp. 84–104; H.R. Bartlett, ‘The Development of Industrial Research in America’, in National Resources Planning Board, Research — A National Resource, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: GPP, 1938–41) vol. II, pp. 19–77.
Cardwell, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 175–6.
Kendall Birr, Pioneering in Industrial Research (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1957); George Wise, ‘A New Role for Professional Scientists in Industry: Industrial Research at General Electric’, Technology and Culture, XXI (1980) pp.408–29.
M.D. Fagan (ed.), A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System, 2 vols (Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975, 1978); vol. III (1982) edited by G.E. Schindler, Jr.
Arthur Hezlet, The Electron and Sea Power (London: Peter Davies, 1975) pp. 2–10.
G.J. Kirby, ‘A History of the Torpedo’, Journal of the Royal Naval Scientific Service, XXVII (1972) pp. 30–55, 78–105 (restricted journal).
J.B. Millet, ‘Submarine Signalling by means of Sound’, Engineering, LXXIX (1905) pp. 651–3; same title but more detail in Journal of the Society of Arts, LIV (1906) pp. 642–51; ‘Recent Developments in Submarine Signalling’, Transactions of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, XXII (1914) pp. 107–32; for a biased company history, see H.W. Fay, Submarine Signal Log (Portsmouth, RI: Raytheon Company’s Signal Division, 1962), and O.J. Scott, The Creative ordeal. The Story of Raytheon (New York: Atheneum, 1974). Gray coined ‘hydrophone’ in this context, a word previously used to decribe a waterbag attached to a stethoscope to intensify the sound of the heartbeat.
Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 9–10; PRO:ADM 189/29 and 189/31, Torpedo School Submarine Sound Signalling Section for 1909, pp. 75–7 and for 1911, p. 107.
R.F. Pocock and G.R.M. Garrett, The Origins of Maritime Radio (London: Science Museum, 1972) p. 2.
O.L. Ratsey, ‘As We Were: Fifty Years of ASWE History 1896–1946’, typescript (Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment, Portsdown, 1974) pp. 6–7. Available Naval Historical Library, Empress State Building, London. ASWE has gathered together a number of archives on the early history of W/T.
Ibid., pp. 19–20.
Ibid., pp. 52–4; Hezlet, op. cit. (note 11), pp. 59–82.
Ratsey, op. cit. (note 18), p. 71; Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 6, 74 for reference.
Ratsey, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 39, 47, 59–60.
R.M. MacLeod and E.K. Andrews, ‘The Origins of the D.S.I.R.: Reflections on Ideas and Men 1915–16’, Public Administration, XLVIII (1970) pp. 23–48; ‘The Committee of Civil Research: Scientific Advice for Economic Development’, Minerva, VII (1969) pp. 680–705.
Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 17–21. The seven secretaries drawn from the Admiralty staff were: Cdr Bridge, RN; Fl/Lt/Cdr Lord Edward Grosvenor, RN; Eng/Lt/Cdr C. Hawks, RN; T.H. Hoste; Lt J. James, RNVR; Sir Richard A.S. Paget; J.F. Phillips. Bridge was the BIR liaison officer in France.
DER, Report on the Detection of Submarines by Acoustic Methods (Office of DER, Admiralty, E.R. 01001, December 1918;, pp. 3–8, 56–7.
A.B. Wood, ‘Memorial Issue’, Journal of the Royal Naval Scientific Service, XX (1965), pp. 185–284 (in the journal sequence, or 1–100 in this special memorial issue). The separate sections dealing with 1915–45 were first published separately in the same journal, which is restricted but has declassified articles. For the clashes with Ryan, see p. 23, and also PRO:ADM 212/157.
Hackmann, ‘Underwater Acoustics and the Royal Navy, 1893–1930’, Annals of Science, XXXVI (1979) pp. 255–78.
Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 28–37; E. Egerton, Sir Alfred Egerton, FRS, 1886–1959. A Memoir with Papers (London: privately printed, 1963) pp. 21–2; PRO:ADM 212/158, Sir R. Sothern Holland, Sir H. Ross Skinner, and J. Egerton, ‘Report on the Present Organisation of the Board of Invention and Research’, Admiralty, 21 September 1917, and reactions to this report in ADM 116/1430; see also ADM 116/1806, private correspondence of Sir Eric Geddes 1917–19. See also the earlier report by BIR, ‘Relations of the BIR with other Departments of the Admiralty’, Memorandum dated 22 February 1917 to the First Lord (Balfour), BIR 4907–17.
PRO:ADM 116/3451, ‘Detection of Submerged Submarines 1917–24’; J.K. Gusewelle, ‘The Board of Invention and Research: A Case Study in the Relations between Academic Science and the Royal Navy in Great Britain during the First World War’ (PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine, 1971), pp. 10–23 and elsewhere, is not only too severe in his judgement of the Royal Navy’s antipathy to scientific research but also confuses hydrophones and sonar research.
Ratsey, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 64–5, 80.
St. Andrews University Library: MSS 4644, Memorandum by Fisher, ‘How the Great War was Carried on’, 3 January 1918, cited by R.M. MacLeod and E.K. Andrews, ‘Scientific Advice in the War at Sea, 1915–17: the Board of Invention and Research’, Journal of Contemporary History, VI (1971) p. 34, footnote 51.
Hezlet, op. cit. (note 10), p. 151. For the full account of these sinkings, see R.M. Grant, U-Boats Destroyed (London: Putnam, 1964) pp. 89–90.
Hackmann, op. cit. (note 32), pp. 272–6; French patent 502,913 (1920).
National Archives, Washington, DC: RG 189 ‘Report on an Inter-Allied Conference on the Detection of Submarines by the Method of Supersonics’, Paris, 19–20 October 1918 (Paris Report no. 161 and 161A), and other reports in same file; Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 88–9 for further references.
Wood, op. cit. (note 31), pp. 55–78.
Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 106–7; Ratsey, op. cit. (note 18), ppp. 85–8; PRO:ADM 116/1845, Signal Organisation, Policy and Staffing Matters 1918–22.
F.M. Mason, ‘The History of Anti-Submarine Development’ (including that of HMS Osprey), Portland, April 1938 (manuscript).
Hezlet, op. cit. (note 10), p. 183.
Ratsey, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 129–34.
S.S. Swords, Technical History of the Beginnings of Radar (London: Peter Peregrinus, 1986) pp. 42–81, 174–257; Ratsey, op. cit. (note 18), pp. 141–65; Allison, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 137–52; but technically Swords gives the best summary.
Hackmann, ‘Sonar Research and Naval Warfare 1914–1954: A Case Study of a Twentieth-Century Establishment Science’, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, XVI (1986) pp. 83–110, which is a summary of Hackmann, op. cit. (note 1), but concentrates on the American connection with the Royal Navy’s sonar R & D.
Air Ministry, The Origins and Development of Operational Research in the Royal Air Force (London: HMSO, 1963); Sword, op. cit. (note 50), pp. 253–4.
D.W. Waters, ‘Seamen, Scientists, Historians, and Strategy. Presidential Address, 1978’, British Journal for the History of Science, XIII (1980) pp. 189–210; his review of my book (note 1), ‘ASW: The First 40 Years’, Naval Review, LXXIV (1986) pp. 128–34.
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© 1988 Nicolaas A. Rupke
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Hackmann, W. (1988). Sonar, Wireless Telegraphy and the Royal Navy: Scientific Development in a Military Context, 1890–1939. In: Rupke, N.A. (eds) Science, Politics and the Public Good. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09514-8_5
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