| Abstrakt: |
In the early 1900’s, two major events made it essential to develop an appropriate means for detecting unseen underwater objects. First, the Titanic disaster in 1912 involved a large submerged, unseen, and silent iceberg. This obstructive and destructive iceberg caused the sinking of the Titanic and resulted in the loss of many lives and of valuable treasure. The second event was the threat to the Allied powers by German U-boats during World War I. The threat of possible defeat at sea was sufficient impetus for the French and English Admiralties to form a joint committee in 1917. The Anti-Submarine Detection and Investigation Committee (ASDIC) found ways to counter the German naval developments. Paul Langevin, a former colleague of Pierre Curie and Marie Curie, applied techniques developed in their laboratories in 1880 to formulate a crude ultrasonic system to detect submarines. These techniques used beams of sound waves of very high frequency, which were nondivergent and under directional control. |
