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ALLYN COLLINS VINE
1914-1994
BY FRED NOEL SPIESS
AN ENERGETIC PERSON, yet kind in his relationships with every-
one, bubbling with his own ideas, yet always willing to listen to
those of others, Allyn Collins Vine enjoyed a long career as a
key member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
(WHOI), a career that ended with his quiet, unexpected death
at home in January 1994. From his first summers with Maurice
Ewing at the Oceanographic in the late 1930s, he was a sea-
roving innovator based on Cape Cocl, but as likely to appear
in Washington, D.C., in Hawaii, or somewhere on a Navy ship
as in the corridors of WHOI's Bigelow Builcling or on the
WHOI piers.
Al was born June I, 1914, in Garrettsville, Ohio, the second
of four sons. He enjoyed school and recalled several great
teachers. While his early life in Ohio clid not presage an orien-
tation to the ocean, it clearly had the beginnings of a love of,
en cl aptitude for, creating new crevices. He is credited with
aclolescent raids on the local telephone company junk piles
for wires and electrical equipment to build contraptions such
as burglar alarms. Characteristic of his approach to ocean en-
gineering, his comment on this aspect of his life was that
engineering education today lacks adequate exposure to junk
piles. "Too many engineers are designing from catalogues,
while not enough are doing innovative work," he said. "This
doesn't. . . inspire creativity."
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Completing high school in 1932, Al entered Hiram, a near-
by small liberal arts college, because it was the least expensive
option. Fortunately, it was a very good school. He majored in
. · .
pnys~cs, earning part of his expenses as an assistant, setting up
experiments for his professor. In 1936, upon completion of
his bachelor's degree, he was accepted in the physics graduate
program at Lehigh University. At this point the ocean entered
in the form of his professor, Maurice Ewing. Ewing was in the
early stages of his own role as a leader in marine geophysics
(not a well-known term in those times). Working from his
Lehigh base, Ewing would go with his students for the sum-
mer to the fledgling WHOI, working on the early
developments of reflection seismology en c! seafloor photogra-
phy. Vine, with J. Lamar Worzel and others, spent the summers
of 1937, 1938, and 1939 on the Cape and at sea in Woods
Hole's ship Atlantis, cleveloping the first deep-sea cameras and
learning how to hancIle explosives for seismic studies. In 1940
with war raging in Europe, Ewing's group, among others, be-
gan year-rouncl, National Defense Research Council-sponsorecl
operations at WHOT with antisubmarine problems as the ma-
jor focus. For Al this was a time that determined the course of
the rest of his life. With his master's degree and a full-time
job, he proposed marriage to Adelaide Holton, a young wom-
an he had come to admire while at Hiram, and the two of
them settled in Woods Hole, raising three children, convert-
ing a barn into a comfortable house with a view of Vineyard
Sound, en cl playing their considerable part in the hospitable
Woods Hole community.
The war years brought physicists from many places into
ocean-oriented laboratories in San Diego, New London, and
Woocis Hole, collaborating to understancI the propagation of
sound in the sea and how to use that unclerstanding to im-
prove Alliecl abilities to carry out antisubmarine warfare. Vine
was particularly involved with improving instrumentation to
measure and record the speed of sound (as characterizes! by
water temperature) as a function of depth, in order to under-
stand the performance of ship-mounted sonar systems. The
basic instrument (BT, or bathythermograph) had been de
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ALLYN COLLINS VINE
277
vised by Athelstan Spilhaus for research and was quickly adapt-
ed by Vine and his associates for use from destroyers and other
ships engaged in antisubmarine warfare.
After the United States became involved in the Pacific, a
significant part of that effort quickly moved into the pro-sub-
marine arena. Vine was at the forefront of that change,
modifying the BT to be mounted on submarines, and inge-
niously providing additional displays to help diving officers
know how their boat's buoyancy as well as sound propagation
would change with depth. Most important in this were the
interactions that Vine developed with the operating forces.
Since most submarines were being built on the northeast coast
of the United States, he and his colleagues arranged to ride
nearly every new boat on its initial trials as instructors, ensur-
ing that crews went to the Pacific with full understanding of
the environmental factors that would help them to be effec-
tive, and even in many instances, to survive.
While his instrumentation development and sound propa-
gation studies were the tangible engineering activities of his
World War IT period, a much more important and enduring
contribution came in the form of the friendships that he fos-
tered between members of the science community and the
submarine operators. He epitomized the atmosphere of coop-
eration and mutual concern between the civilian ocean
cri `=n re comm~nim and working submariners, an atmosphere
V ~ ^ _ _ A ~ ~ ~
that prevailed on into the Cold War era.
It was this cooperation that accelerated the exploitation of
the "convergence zone" effect in underwater sound propaga-
tion. In 1947 Vine and his close friend Bill Schevill realized
that the permanent deep sound channel, already studied for
several years by Ewing, Worzel, and others as a means for long-
range sound transmission, also meant that sound from
near-surface sources would be strongly focused at range inter-
vals of about 70 km. After a few confirming controlled
experiments, according to Al, "we started working with the
submarines listening to each other in snorkeling, and so for
the first time they could count, they could plan on listening to
other people's submarines . . . thirty-five miles away, seven to
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
miles away. This changed the tactics, because you didn't go to
general quarters just because you heard someone. They might
not be in sight for another hour or two." Not long after, major
sonar system and weapon development projects were under
way at the primary Navy in-house laboratories.
In the late 1950s the National Research Council Committee
on Oceanography carried out a major study to chart the course
of that discipline for the decade of the 1960s. Vine's stature in
the community can be measured by the fact that he was cho-
sen to chair the pane! producing the chapter on engineering
requirements for ocean exploration. This group underscored
the needs for small, deep-diving research submersibles and
manned, spar-buoy laboratories (inspiration for Scripps' Float-
ing Instrument Platform, or FLIP), moving ideas of the 1950s
into reality a few years later. Still another development that he
espoused narrow-beam echo sounding array systems led in
the 1960s to development of the swath mapping equipment
that has revolutionized studies of seafloor morphology.
Vine's persistent pushing to put oceanographers down into
the medium that they study began to pay off in the early 1960s.
First, as an outgrowth of Ed Wenk's 1950s engineering stud-
ies, J. L. Reynolds decided to build a deep-diving aluminum
submarine, which the Navy (in the person of Captain C. B.
Momsen, Jr., of the Office of Naval Research) in turn planned
to lease. Primarily at Vine's urging, WHOI was chosen to be
the operator of the craft Aluminaut for the oceanographic
research community. With typical pragmatic concern for the
usefulness of this new tool, Al and his colleagues built a full-
scale mockup of the forward part of the sub and immediately
suggested alterations, eventually adopted, to make it more ef-
fective. When lease arrangements with Reynolds fell through,
Momsen was able to shift the allocated funds to WHOI for
construction of a smaller, shallower-operating, but more ma-
neuverable craft, and the Oceanographic became the
developer as well as the operator, with Vine playing his usual
part as critical adviser. His role in bringing this new instru-
ment into being was immortalized by his colleagues, who
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ALLYN COLLINS VINE
279
insisted that it be christened Alvin. Typically, at the time of
the christening ceremony, Al was at sea diving in the new
French bathyscaphe, Archimede, in the Puerto Rico Trench.
Beyond these many specific contributions, Al played the
role of adviser on unnumbered committees en c! studies, often
being the participant who would ask what at first seemed to be
an irrelevant question, or make the key irreverent remark, that
would turn the discussion in some new and fruitful direction.
No matter what the venue, he could be counted on to have
some sort of bright idea. His style is best captured in a passage
from Kaharl's book about Alvin 'mine always had an idea.
He passed them out like a gentleman farmer with a bumper
tomato crop, neecling no credit for the sauces they went into.
He was just glad to grow them, the strikingly perfect ones and
the bruisers." Unlike many idea generators, however, he also
was always ready to listen, to learn about what others were
cloing, and to let them tell of their bright thoughts as well.
Beyond having new icleas, he also had a knack for coming up
with the quotable phrase, such as "Even rescue submarines
don't pack them in as tightly as we did on double dates in a
mode! A roadster," or "The one chance in a thousand that
happens nine times out of ten."
His wide-ranging contributions were recognizes! in 1972
with the awarding of a Navy Oceanographic Commendation
and in 1982 with his election to the National Acaclemy of En-
gineering for "contributions to oceanographic engineering
and design of creep submersibles for research." He wit! always
be remembered as a kind, trusting, very imaginative person
who made our science fun.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
allyn collins
