Page 28: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2011)

28MTR November/December 2011share ideas with. It was really wonderful, so I worked in Docs lab for a while. Doc had a company called Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier, Inc (EG&G). Doc had been part of the Manhattan project and had helped take pic- tures of the atomic bombs. Those pictures of bombs going off, those are actually pictures that Edgerton took. His company EG&G then had an ocean technology divi- sion to make these cameras and pingers so I went to work there. I started working on these devices, and then the year after I graduated in ?62 the submarine Thresher sank off the coast of Boston. It was a tragic event, but it was a watershed event. The Thresher sank in deep water, and I got involved in the first deep-water search ever done. So here was this kid, I have just come out of school, and I start working with the bathyscaphe Trieste. The Trieste had made the dive to a depth of seven miles in 1960 with Don Walsh and Jaques Piccard. The Trieste by this time was owned by the U.S. Navy and was called in to search for the Thresher. I was called in, again as a young engineer, to make a side scan sonar and sub-bottom profiler for the bathyscaphe. I got to not only work on this project, but I got to dive in the bathyscaphe. I got to know the pioneers in deep-sea work and it launched me on a career that although I am now retired, still goes on. I still have a fas- cination for the ocean and for the people who work in the ocean. So I have been very blessed to be close to this field, to make discoveries and to work with a lot of amazing people.MTR: It must have been quite the experience to work on the Thresher Project during the early years of deep- sea exploration. With the technology in its infancy it had to have been challenging. MK:Its funny, MIT is a tough place. You work very hard and you really don?t realize how much they are preparing you for challenges and here I was thrust into this. Its years later that I really realize the challenges, the things we accomplished. We built whole pieces of equipment in a week or two. We were using what was then the latest tech- nology. There were no computers. There were no inte- grated circuits or analog circuits, resistor capacitors. So it was a mix of ancient technology and what at the time wasvery modern technology. There were many challenges. One was that the Trieste went deep. Making things work in deep water is tough. I learned a lot from Edgerton him- self. I also learned a lot from Sam Raymond who went on to found Benthos. Learning how to work in the deep ocean was a challenge. Doc himself had a pressure vessel at MIT. Sam also had a pressure vessel at Benthos so we could take things to great pressure and test them. We could squeeze them and make them crush. There were also electronic challenges. We were dealing with very low- level signals and you are in a very noisy environment in a submersible. There is a lot of machinery so trying to get very sensitive low level sonar signals and other signals out of the noise was a tremendous challenge. There are high levels of humidity in a submersible. Its like your in a cloud its damp so the equipment has to take tremendous punishment. It also has to be small. The equipment had to fit through an 18 inch diameter shell to get in. One of the first things we did was take a piece of plywood and cut an 18-inch hole and everything we made had to go through that hole including us. The people on the Trieste liked me because they were all these giant guys and I was a little guy so I could tuck myself in the cornerwhile I worked on the sub. MTR: For those not familiar with the story of the Thresher could you give us a little backdrop? MK:The Thresher was a nuclear sub on a test dive. Its funny you asked me the question because I have been involved with a lot of shipwrecks. You try to detach your- self emotionally, but I still find it hard to this day. I still get chills. People like to talk about shipwrecks and treas- ures, but 129 brave people were in that thing. There was some kind of a pipe failure and it began to sink. The hull imploded and it sank in 8400 ft. of water. The Navy was involved in the search. One of the sobering things for me was it wasn?t found with my equipment. The sonar?s we were making back then could see things but they didn?t have clear images. We were turning an echo sounder side ways and the beam was wide and frequency was low. We were getting blobs but we weren?t getting pictures. It was after the Thresher search that I became determined to make side scan sonar that could really make pictures of things on the sea floor, so a shipwreck would look like a shipwreck and an airplane would look like an airplane. Something I am very proud of is this little tiny group at EG&G did make equipment that in fact made pictures where ships look like ships and so forth. MTR: It sounds like you have also been able to meet and work with interesting groups in the field. MK: Back in those days Doc Edgerton introduced me to a group in Boston called the Boston Sea Rovers. He was a member and scuba diver. They were, and are an amazing group of people. In order to test our equipment we had to go out in Boston Harbor or the Charles River. We worked MTR#9 (18-33):MTR Layouts 11/28/2011 9:51 AM Page 28