MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

E E C S

MIT's Building 20: The Magical Incubator

Story, Anecdote, or Reminiscence

A Bigger Hammer

Martin Klein
nielk@aol.com

Doc Edgerton had a pressure vessel in Building 20 which he used to simulate pressure in the deep ocean. The vessel was made from an old 16-inch battleship gun shell which had very thick steel walls. Doc used the pressure vessel to test housings for special strobes and cameras built to go seven miles down in the ocean. These devices, built for Jacques Cousteau, were lowered on a long nylon rope to within a few feet of the sea bed. To a young, impressionable student, the whole lab in Building 20 had an eerie quality. There was a big compressor and huge guages with scales up to 20,000 pounds/square inch. The compressor and hydraulic pumps made all sorts of wonderful sounds. But the most amazing part was the heavy end cap used to seal the housing. Doc would heft the thing and screw it in (using left handed threads). First he tighted it with a steel bar. Next he picked up a big SLEDGE HAMMER and started wacking on the bar. I can still close my eyes and hear the steel ringing and the wonderful look of joy on his face. He was in his glory. Footnote: In order to position the cameras near the sea-bed, Doc used a precision timed pinger with the direct arrival and echoes observed on a PGR (Precision Graphic Recorder). Doc noticed that the pinger pulses penetrated the sea bed. This started him toward developing a "mud penetrator", a sonar for looking through sediments. Later he pointed the pinger sideways and was able to find local shipwrecks. In 1963 he and Ed Curley found the Vineyard Lightship in Buzzard's Bay. After working in the Strobe Lab, I was working at E.G.&G. (then called Edgerton, Germesahusen & Grier) in Boston. With a team at E.G.&G., I went on to develop the first commercial towed side scan sonar instruments. In 1968 I formed my own company, Klein Associates, Inc. to continue development of the sonars. The side scan sonars have been used to help find most of the famous shipwrecks including the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Atocha, the Breadalbane, etc.
URL of this page: http://www-eecs.mit.edu/building/20/anecdotes/39.html
Author: Martin Klein | Created: Feb 20, 1998 | Modified: Mar 12, 1998
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