colleague’s viewpoint of f. v. hunt

3
Colleague's viewpoint of F. V. Hunt Harvey Brooks Harvard University,Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 (Received 27 April 1973) The influence of Ted Hunt on the career and interestsof this author, while both were working at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory, is detailed. Outlined are the researchprojects and breakthroughs which, through Ted's inspiration and his ever-present guidancewhile director of the laboratory, set the pattern for most of the antisubmarine research to date. Subject Classification:05.60; 10.85, 10.60. I was around Harvard for nearly two years and had al- ready earned my Ph.D. before ! encountered Ted Hunt on more than a casual basis. It was the imminence of World War II that brought us together, when Ted was looking around for a theoretician to help him analyze some of the underwater acoustics ideas that he was think- ing about as possibilities for submarine detection. Through a series of steps I drifted into what was later to become theHarvard UnderwaterSound Laboratory (HUSL), starting in the basement of Cruft Laboratory whither Ted's ONR acoustics project returned after the war. I never took a course with Ted, nor was ! ever associated with him formally as student to teacher. Yet he was one of my most important teachers, and had an enormous in- fluence on my own interests and career. It was partly because of the HUSL experience that I chose to go into industry after the War, but also later because of Ted's powers of persuasion that ! was enticed back into academic life in 1950. HUSL started off very modestly as Ted Hunt's "anony- mous research," project ARFVH, during the spring of 1941. This small project appears never to have figured largely in the planning of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Rather it gradually inserted itself into the wartime laboratory complex as a stepchild of Division 6, making its way through the originality, bold- ness, and excellence of its technical ideas and propos- als-ideas that sprang largely from Ted's fertile imagi- nation, his ability to communicate enthusiasm to others, and his remarkable knack of bringing more out of people than they thought themselves capable of. Though HUSL ultimately grew to a laboratory with a staff of 450 people, it was always run largely in the style of a professor working with a few graduate students, with Ted the ever present teacher and intellectual mentor. The laboratory had a remarkable esprit which remains as a strong mem- ory to this day with all of us who worked at HUSL. As an organization it was remarkably free of the trappings of status. Everybody felt himself or herself a part of the team and a key contributor. Responsibility was distri- buted on the basis of contributions, and nobodyworried much about degrees or previous training. I am indebted to the late Hugo Schuck, one of the ear- liest staff members of HUSL, for much of my detailed recollection about the early days of HUSL. Having got his feet in the door of NDRC, Ted began a recruiting trip around the country in the spring of 1941 and had assembled a staff of nine by the end of the spring. From the very beginning of the laboratory one of the dominant technical themes was the electronic steering of acoustic beams, and during the summer of 1941 Ted put me to work reading all of G. W. Pierce's old patents on mag- netorestriction and making calculations on one wild and ingenious idea after another for automatically forming and steering beams using the elastic properties of trans- ducer materials. This was interesting and challenging, a theme to which Ted frequently returned during his career, but not much came of it at that time, except that I learned acoustics and electronics under Ted's constant prodding and tutelage. The first real break came on 7 October 1941, when the idea that ultimately led to BDI (bearing deviation indicator) first arose. It is hard to decide just who thought up the trick that worked. I do 'not think it was Ted himself, but I doubt if it would have happenedwith- out Ted's breathing down our necks. A month later Ted was suggesting a simple modification of the standard Navy QC gear to tes.t out the concept, but the manufac- turer of this gear was not about to see it tampered with. , So the lab began building its own piezoelectric trans- ducers, and by 7 December 1941, the day of the Japa- nese attack on Pearl Harbor, the first successful test of the so-called SLC (simultaneous lobe comparison) con- cept was completed on the converted yacht GALAXY in Boston Harbor. Within a year an adapter kit had been built for the QC gear and was being installed on Navy destroyers. Because of initial difficulties with industry, the lab set up its own production line under Nelson Butz and Lew Hathaway to produce the supplementary elec- tronic chassis to Navy specifications. I think it was really the initial success of the SLC concept that really put the lab in business, and thereafter it grew steadily, as each success was used to entice more money out of Division 6. The SLC idea was typical of many of Ted's inventions. It was simple, but fundamental, in concept, but it could also be implemented by a relatively simple modification of existing equipment. It was the kind of idea that every- body afterwards thought they knew about all along. It was so simple it hardly seemed like an invention, but it took Ted's energy and vision to turn it into a short- term payoff idea and sell it to the Navy. Many of the most important inventions made at HUSL were of this character. They could be grafted onto existing Navy equipment and got into field use on a relatively short time schedule. At the same time Ted was able to uti- 1245 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June 1975 Copyright ¸ 1975 by the Acoustical Society of America 1245 Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 142.150.190.39 On: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 11:16:40

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Page 1: Colleague’s viewpoint of F. V. Hunt

Colleague's viewpoint of F. V. Hunt Harvey Brooks

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 (Received 27 April 1973)

The influence of Ted Hunt on the career and interests of this author, while both were working at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory, is detailed. Outlined are the research projects and breakthroughs which, through Ted's inspiration and his ever-present guidance while director of the laboratory, set the pattern for most of the antisubmarine research to date.

Subject Classification: 05.60; 10.85, 10.60.

I was around Harvard for nearly two years and had al- ready earned my Ph.D. before ! encountered Ted Hunt on more than a casual basis. It was the imminence of

World War II that brought us together, when Ted was looking around for a theoretician to help him analyze some of the underwater acoustics ideas that he was think-

ing about as possibilities for submarine detection. Through a series of steps I drifted into what was later to become the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory (HUSL), starting in the basement of Cruft Laboratory whither Ted's ONR acoustics project returned after the war. I never took a course with Ted, nor was ! ever associated with him formally as student to teacher. Yet he was one of my most important teachers, and had an enormous in- fluence on my own interests and career. It was partly because of the HUSL experience that I chose to go into industry after the War, but also later because of Ted's powers of persuasion that ! was enticed back into academic life in 1950.

HUSL started off very modestly as Ted Hunt's "anony- mous research," project ARFVH, during the spring of 1941. This small project appears never to have figured largely in the planning of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC). Rather it gradually inserted itself into the wartime laboratory complex as a stepchild of Division 6, making its way through the originality, bold- ness, and excellence of its technical ideas and propos- als-ideas that sprang largely from Ted's fertile imagi- nation, his ability to communicate enthusiasm to others, and his remarkable knack of bringing more out of people than they thought themselves capable of. Though HUSL ultimately grew to a laboratory with a staff of 450 people, it was always run largely in the style of a professor working with a few graduate students, with Ted the ever present teacher and intellectual mentor. The laboratory had a remarkable esprit which remains as a strong mem- ory to this day with all of us who worked at HUSL. As an organization it was remarkably free of the trappings of status. Everybody felt himself or herself a part of the team and a key contributor. Responsibility was distri- buted on the basis of contributions, and nobody worried much about degrees or previous training.

I am indebted to the late Hugo Schuck, one of the ear- liest staff members of HUSL, for much of my detailed recollection about the early days of HUSL. Having got his feet in the door of NDRC, Ted began a recruiting trip around the country in the spring of 1941 and had assembled a staff of nine by the end of the spring. From

the very beginning of the laboratory one of the dominant technical themes was the electronic steering of acoustic beams, and during the summer of 1941 Ted put me to work reading all of G. W. Pierce's old patents on mag- netorestriction and making calculations on one wild and ingenious idea after another for automatically forming and steering beams using the elastic properties of trans- ducer materials. This was interesting and challenging, a theme to which Ted frequently returned during his career, but not much came of it at that time, except that I learned acoustics and electronics under Ted's

constant prodding and tutelage.

The first real break came on 7 October 1941, when the idea that ultimately led to BDI (bearing deviation indicator) first arose. It is hard to decide just who thought up the trick that worked. I do 'not think it was Ted himself, but I doubt if it would have happened with- out Ted's breathing down our necks. A month later Ted was suggesting a simple modification of the standard Navy QC gear to tes.t out the concept, but the manufac- turer of this gear was not about to see it tampered with.

,

So the lab began building its own piezoelectric trans- ducers, and by 7 December 1941, the day of the Japa- nese attack on Pearl Harbor, the first successful test of the so-called SLC (simultaneous lobe comparison) con- cept was completed on the converted yacht GALAXY in Boston Harbor. Within a year an adapter kit had been built for the QC gear and was being installed on Navy destroyers. Because of initial difficulties with industry, the lab set up its own production line under Nelson Butz and Lew Hathaway to produce the supplementary elec- tronic chassis to Navy specifications. I think it was really the initial success of the SLC concept that really put the lab in business, and thereafter it grew steadily, as each success was used to entice more money out of Division 6.

The SLC idea was typical of many of Ted's inventions. It was simple, but fundamental, in concept, but it could also be implemented by a relatively simple modification of existing equipment. It was the kind of idea that every- body afterwards thought they knew about all along. It was so simple it hardly seemed like an invention, but it took Ted's energy and vision to turn it into a short- term payoff idea and sell it to the Navy. Many of the most important inventions made at HUSL were of this character. They could be grafted onto existing Navy equipment and got into field use on a relatively short time schedule. At the same time Ted was able to uti-

1245 J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June 1975 Copyright ̧ 1975 by the Acoustical Society of America 1245

Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 142.150.190.39 On: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 11:16:40

Page 2: Colleague’s viewpoint of F. V. Hunt

1246 H. Brooks: Colleague's viewpoint 1246

lize this steady stream of simple, inexpensive, and operationally useful inventions to enlist support for work on much more "far-out" ideas; the practical inventions legitimized the long-range work, and won for the labo- ratory an unusual degree of freedom and trust in the rest of its activities.

Early in 1942, Admiral Louis McKeehas of the Mine Warfare branch of the Bureau of Ordnance came to

HUSL with a very secret project, a proposal to develop an acoustic homing torpedo for use as an antisubmarine weapon. Only it couldn't be called a torpedo because that would threaten the monopoly of the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, which had exclusive responsibility for all torpedo development in the Navy, and had been turning out voluminous reports for 15 years demonstrat- ing beyond a shadow of a doubt that an acoustic homing torpedo was theoretically impossible. Of course, this was just the sort of adversary situation which Ted rel- ished thoroughly. He needled and prodded a small sub- group in HUSL, who were "in the know," to try one idea after another. At first the natural thing to do was to try to apply the SLC concept, but after experimenting with a number of very ingenious but impractical ideas we went back to the old magnetostriction patents of Pierce and developed a much simpler scheme of two separate transducers or "ears" on either side of the torpedo nose. I think it was always a disappointment to Ted that he couldn't build further on the SLC invention and thus put a distinctive HUSL trademark on what had come to be

called project Fido. Nevertheless, it was only a year later, on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, that the first successful homing run of as air-dropped experi- mental torpedo against a simulated target was achieved, and by late 1943 or 1944 the first German submarine had been sunk by a production "Mark 24 mine." The perfection and production of the weapon was accom- plished by Bell Laboratories and Western Electric. The big contribution of HUSL was in showing that the job was technically possible and our early success in demon- strating a relatively simply hand-made experimental de- vice was an important factor in inducing the Navy to continue with the development work and authorize tooling for production.

The Mark 24 mine became the ancestor of all sub-

sequent U.S. development of homing torpedoes. In fact virtually all the basic homing techniques and control concepts for both active and passive homing torpedoes were worked out at HUSL on experimental torpedoes be- fore the end of the war, and the developments were carried on after the war at the Ordnance Research Lab-

oratory set up under Eric Walker at Penn State for the specific purpose of continuing the HUSL torpedo work.

In the meanwhile Ted had not gotten beam steering out of his head. He had a vision of as ultimate system ca- pable of detecting and identifying asy submarine at any depth out to the maximum radius permitted by propaga- tion. He stimulated Van Vleck and myself to work out a general theory for rotating beam electric scans in early 1942, and Leon Wood and others conceived the hardware which might realize the assumptions of the general theory. Whenever we became discouraged at the com-

plexity of the task, Ted goaded us to renewed enthusi- asm; he was always sure the job could be done. This was, of course, the beginning of QHB scanning sonar, which later became the standard equipment in the Navy, though it never saw service in World War II.

Ted was an incurable optimist in technological matters. He always had visions way beyond the state of the art, and the rest of us were always proving how impossible it all was. We were usually right, but only temporarily; his optimism always turned out to be justified in the long run. In fact this incurable optimism kept many a sub- sequently successful project alive during its "dog days" when the practitioners and the sponsors despaired of success.

Ted was not a tidy bureaucratic administrator, though he had a very orderly mind, and was always catching people up for being inconsistent with their own pro- claimed principles. His administrative methods some- times drove tidy people to distraction. Once a project was underway at HUSL, Ted would offer the engineer at the bench an inexhaustible stream of comments and sug- gestions, as he wandered around the laboratory looking over people's shoulders; and even when HUSL had grown to a staff of 450 Ted knew almost everything that was going on, in detail and on almost a day-to-day basis. His shrewd needling would often change the course of the individual's thinking considerably, and his actions as well. But therein lay trouble, because the project leader might go for several weeks before he discovered that the pieces of the work for which he was responsible were no longer proceeding in accordance with a previously agreed-upon strategy. It was not that the boss con- sciously undercut his project supervisors. It was just that when he saw an engineer at work he could not resist

inventing, and the recipient of his helpful suggestions found it difficult to distinguish between technical conver- sation and boss's orders. This made for many technical surprises that kept people on their toes, but it occasion- ally led to waste motion and briefly bitter arguments.

Yet, despite what some regarded as administrative chaos, the laboratory had a remarkable spirit of cohe- sion and a real sense of purpose, which allowed argu- ments and misunderstandings to flare briefly and then be quenched. The lab was also often electric with intellec-

tual tension, and competitiveness between diffe rent groups. Despite wartime compartmentalization for security pur- poses, everybody somehow seemed to find out the essen- tials of what was going on and to share directly or vi- cariously in the successes and failures of each project.

One of the interaction mechanisms was a weekly Tues- day evening seminar, addressed sometimes by an out- side speaker and sometimes by as HUSL staffer. Attend- ance at the seminar was voluntary, but the opportunity to learn what was going on and the general atmosphere of excitement and challenge usually assured a good audi- ence. It was Ted's personal interventions in the dis- cussion after the talk, with his enthusiasms and search- ing questions, that set the tone for the meetings. The questions he posed to the speakers were usually a little off the beaten track, challenging the well-worn grooves

J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June 1975

Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 142.150.190.39 On: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 11:16:40

Page 3: Colleague’s viewpoint of F. V. Hunt

1247 H. Brooks: Colleague's viewpoint 1247

of thought and assumption that had gathered like bar- nacles around the topic under discussion. He had a re- markable capacity to strip a complex technical issue down to its essentials, so that everybody could under- stand it and even start inventing on the spot.

As I remarked earlier, Ted was never one to put much weight on formal academic credentials either- in recruit- ing or in managing HUSL. There was somewhat of a paradox in this because, as a faculty member at Harvard, he was very insistent that students meet established re- quirements and was generally opposed to any exceptions to the rules to take account of allegedly "special eases." A basically kind and sympathetic man, he never let his sympathies interfere with insistence on living up to aca- demic rules and enforcing rigorous standards. Yet in HUSL he assembled talent from unusual sources--musi-

cians who had fiddled around with hi-fi in their spare time, bankers who were ham radio operators, ministers who had majored in physics in College, Boston socialites prepared to carry out some of the more mundane tasks of the laboratory in order to be a part of the war effort.

Everybody's ideas and suggestions were taken seriously; the value accorded a technical proposal was seldom re- lated to its source in the organization, and many sue- eessful developments started from suggestions made by a mechanic or a draftsman rather than an engineer or physicist. The important thing was to get on with the job and not worry about who got the credit, and Ted had no patience with the "not invented here" syndrome when- ever it reared its head.

I think it fair to say that, largely because of Ted's in- spiration, the work at HUSL during the war set the tone and the pattern for most of the antisubmarine research that took place during the 25 years after the war. HUSL's influence on the field was out of all proportion to its relative size. Almost all the postwar laboratories working in homing torpedoes or underwater acoustics have had leaders or key staff members who began their careers under Ted's tutelage at HUSL, and his personal inspiration and guidance has strongly influenced antisub- marine warfare research and invention during the post- war years.

J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol. 57, No. 6, Part I, June 1975

Redistribution subject to ASA license or copyright; see http://acousticalsociety.org/content/terms. Download to IP: 142.150.190.39 On: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 11:16:40