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Integrated Optic Chip for Gyroscope Market: Share by Region and Application, 2025–2032

MARKET INSIGHTS

The global Integrated Optic Chip for Gyroscope Market size was valued at US$ 98 million in 2024 and is projected to reach US$ 178 million by 2032, at a CAGR of 8.7% during the forecast period 2025-2032. While the semiconductor industry faced headwinds in 2022 with just 4.4% growth, specialized components like optical chips maintained steady demand due to their critical applications in navigation systems.

Integrated optic chips for gyroscopes are precision components fabricated from lithium niobate (LiNbO3) that form the core of fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs). These chips combine multiple optical functions including polarization, light splitting through Y-junction couplers, and phase modulation into a single compact device. Their ability to precisely measure angular velocity makes them indispensable for inertial navigation across aerospace, maritime, and automotive applications.

The market growth is driven by increasing demand for high-accuracy navigation systems in both commercial and defense sectors. While Asia Pacific represents the largest regional market currently, North America shows strong growth potential due to defense spending. Recent technological advancements in photonic integration and material science are enabling smaller, more efficient chip designs. Key players like EMCORE Corporation and KVH Industries are expanding production capacity to meet the growing demand from aerospace manufacturers.

MARKET DYNAMICS

MARKET DRIVERS

Growing Adoption of Fiber Optic Gyroscopes in Defense Applications to Accelerate Market Growth

The global defense sector’s increasing investment in precision navigation systems is creating strong demand for integrated optic chips in gyroscopes. Modern military platforms including unmanned aerial vehicles, missile guidance systems, and inertial navigation units rely heavily on fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) technology due to its superior accuracy and reliability compared to traditional mechanical gyroscopes. Government defense budgets worldwide continue to prioritize advanced navigation technologies, with projected expenditures exceeding $2 trillion annually. This substantial investment creates a robust pipeline for integrated optic chip manufacturers supplying critical components for military-grade FOG systems.

Expansion of Autonomous Vehicle Development to Fuel Demand

The rapid progression of autonomous vehicle technology across passenger cars, commercial trucks, and industrial equipment presents significant opportunities for integrated optic chip providers. Automakers and technology companies are investing heavily in precise navigation systems that can function without GPS signals, driving adoption of FOG-based solutions. The global autonomous vehicle market is projected to grow exponentially, with production volumes expected to surpass 30 million units annually within the decade. This growth correlates directly with increased requirements for high-performance integrated optic chips that enable reliable dead reckoning capabilities in GNSS-denied environments.

Technological Advancements in Photonic Integrated Circuits to Enhance Market Potential

Recent breakthroughs in photonic integration are enabling significant performance improvements for optic gyroscope chips while simultaneously reducing manufacturing costs. Cutting-edge fabrication techniques now allow for more complex optical circuits to be integrated onto single lithium niobate chips, improving signal stability while decreasing power consumption. These advancements are particularly crucial as industries demand smaller, lighter navigation systems with lower power requirements. The semiconductor industry’s continued transition toward more sophisticated photonic integration methods promises to further improve the cost-performance ratio of integrated optic chips for gyroscope applications.

MARKET RESTRAINTS

High Development Costs and Complex Manufacturing Processes to Limit Market Penetration

The specialized nature of integrated optic chip production presents significant barriers to market expansion. Fabrication of lithium niobate-based optical circuits requires expensive cleanroom facilities and highly specialized equipment, with capital expenditures often exceeding $100 million for new production lines. These substantial upfront investments deter new entrants and limit production capacity expansions among existing manufacturers. Additionally, the complex fabrication processes yield relatively low production volumes compared to conventional semiconductor manufacturing, keeping unit costs elevated despite technological advancements.

Other Restraints

Precision Alignment Requirements The assembly and packaging of integrated optic chips for gyroscope applications demand micron-level precision in component alignment. This creates yield challenges during manufacturing and increases production costs. Maintaining consistent quality standards across production batches remains an ongoing challenge for manufacturers.

Temperature Sensitivity Performance characteristics of lithium niobate-based optical circuits can vary significantly with temperature fluctuations, requiring complex compensation mechanisms in end applications. This thermal sensitivity complicates system design and can limit adoption in extreme environment applications without additional protective measures.

MARKET CHALLENGES

Supply Chain Vulnerabilities for Specialty Materials to Create Production Bottlenecks

The integrated optic chip industry faces persistent challenges in securing reliable supplies of high-purity lithium niobate substrates and other specialized optical materials. Global production capacity for optical-grade lithium niobate remains concentrated among a limited number of suppliers, creating potential single points of failure in the supply chain. Recent disruptions have demonstrated how material shortages can delay production schedules by several months, as suitable alternative sources are exceptionally limited. Manufacturers must maintain substantial inventory buffers to mitigate these risks, which ties up working capital and increases carrying costs.

Other Challenges

Intellectual Property Protection The highly specialized nature of integrated optic chip designs makes intellectual property protection a persistent concern. Reverse engineering threats and technology transfer risks create competitive pressures, particularly in global markets with varying levels of IP enforcement.

Standardization Gaps

The absence of industry-wide standardization for many optical chip specifications and interfaces complicates interoperability and system integration efforts. Differing design approaches among manufacturers can create compatibility challenges for end users developing multi-source navigation solutions.

MARKET OPPORTUNITIES

Emerging Space Applications to Create New Growth Frontiers

The rapidly expanding commercial space sector presents significant opportunities for integrated optic chip providers. Small satellite constellations, lunar landers, and deep space probes increasingly require compact, radiation-hardened inertial measurement units where FOG technology offers distinct advantages. With thousands of satellites planned for launch this decade, the space industry’s demand for reliable navigation solutions is expected to grow substantially. Integrated optic chip manufacturers that can adapt their technology for space-grade applications stand to benefit from this burgeoning market segment.

Advancements in Quantum Navigation to Open New Possibilities

Research into quantum-enhanced navigation systems is creating potential future applications for integrated optic technologies. Photonic integrated circuits are proving essential for manipulating quantum states of light in emerging atomic interferometry and quantum gyroscope concepts. While still in experimental stages, these next-generation navigation technologies could eventually incorporate existing integrated optic chip architectures as foundational components. Forward-looking manufacturers are already investing in basic research collaborations to position themselves for potential quantum navigation commercialization.

Industrial Automation Expansion to Drive Demand Growth

The accelerating adoption of industrial robotics and automated guided vehicles in manufacturing and logistics operations is generating new demand for precision navigation solutions. Integrated optic chips enable the compact, vibration-resistant gyroscopes needed for precise robotic motion control and autonomous material handling systems. As Industry 4.0 implementations expand globally, the underlying need for reliable inertial sensing will continue to grow, creating sustained opportunities for optic chip providers serving industrial automation applications.

INTEGRATED OPTIC CHIP FOR GYROSCOPE MARKET TRENDS

Miniaturization and Performance Enhancement Driving Market Growth

The demand for integrated optic chips for gyroscopes is accelerating due to the aerospace and defense sector’s increasing need for compact yet high-precision navigation systems. Fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs) with integrated photonic chips offer superior performance over traditional mechanical gyros, with angular random walk (ARW) values as low as 0.001°/√h. Recent advancements in lithium niobate (LiNbO3) waveguide technology have enabled dramatic reductions in size while improving thermal stability by 30-40%. Manufacturers are now focusing on 1550nm wavelength chips that deliver 60% better signal-to-noise ratio compared to legacy 1310nm solutions, significantly enhancing inertial measurement accuracy.

Other Trends

Autonomous Vehicle Adoption

The automotive sector is emerging as a key growth area, with level 4-5 autonomous vehicles requiring multiple high-reliability FOG units per vehicle. Whereas traditional MEMS gyros struggle with long-term drift stability, integrated optic solutions maintain 0.01°/h bias stability over 10,000 operating hours. This reliability is driving adoption in premium EV platforms, with projections indicating a 200% increase in automotive-grade optic chip demand between 2024-2030. Collision avoidance systems and precise lane-keeping functionalities particularly benefit from the immediate response times and vibration resistance of photonic gyros.

Military Modernization Fueling R&D Investments

Global defense spending exceeding $2.2 trillion annually is accelerating next-generation navigation system development. Modern missiles and unmanned systems increasingly require radiation-hardened optic gyro chips that maintain functionality in extreme environments. The U.S. Department of Defense has increased funding for photonic integrated circuit (PIC) development by 45% since 2021, focusing on reduced SWaP (size, weight and power) configurations. Simultaneously, shipboard stabilization systems are transitioning from bulky ring laser gyros to integrated optic solutions that achieve comparable accuracy at 80% reduced volume, with naval applications accounting for approximately 35% of current military FOG chip procurement.

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Key Industry Players

Technological Innovation and Strategic Partnerships Drive Market Competition

The global integrated optic chip for gyroscope market features a dynamic competitive structure characterized by both established players and emerging innovators. EMCORE Corporation stands as a market leader, leveraging its proprietary lithium niobate (LiNbO3) fabrication technology and extensive experience in inertial navigation systems. The company maintains a strong foothold in aerospace and defense applications, having secured multiple long-term contracts with government agencies globally.

KVH Industries and Polaris Photonics have also captured significant market shares by focusing on miniaturization and power efficiency – critical factors for automotive and marine applications. Their recent breakthroughs in 1550nm wavelength chips have enabled superior performance in harsh environments, contributing to year-over-year revenue growth exceeding 15%.

The market has witnessed intensified competition following KVH Industries’ 2023 acquisition of Advanced Photonic Sensors, which expanded its patent portfolio by 27%. Similarly, Polaris Photonics formed a strategic alliance with Huawei in Q1 2024 to co-develop next-generation optical chips for autonomous vehicles, illustrating how vertical integration strategies are reshaping the competitive paradigm.

Emerging Asia-Pacific players like HongKong Liocrebif Technology are disrupting traditional supply chains through cost-competitive solutions, capturing nearly 12% of the commercial shipping segment in 2023. Meanwhile, Western manufacturers are responding with increased R&D spending – EMCORE allocated 18.6% of its 2023 revenue to developing MEMS-integrated optical chips, signaling the industry’s shift toward hybrid architectures.

List of Key Integrated Optic Chip Manufacturers

EMCORE Corporation (U.S.)

KVH Industries (U.S.)

Polaris Photonics (U.K.)

FOGPhotonics (Germany)

Fiber Optical Solution (China)

Optilab LLC (U.S.)

PANWOO Equipment Consulting (South Korea)

Box Optronics Technology (Taiwan)

One Silicon Chip Photonics (Ireland)

HongKong Liocrebif Technology (China)

Segment Analysis:

By Type

1550nm Segment Leads Due to Superior Performance in High-Precision Applications

The market is segmented based on type into:

1310nm

Subtypes: Single-mode, Multi-mode

1550nm

Others

By Application

Aerospace Sector Dominates with Critical Demand for Navigation Accuracy

The market is segmented based on application into:

Aerospace

Ship

Automotive

Others

By Material

Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3) Remains Preferred Choice for Integrated Optic Chips

The market is segmented based on material into:

Lithium Niobate (LiNbO3)

Silicon Photonics

Others

By Manufacturing Process

Photolithography Dominates as Primary Fabrication Technique

The market is segmented based on manufacturing process into:

Photolithography

Ion Exchange

Others

Regional Analysis: Integrated Optic Chip for Gyroscope Market

North America The North American market for integrated optic chips for gyroscopes is driven by defense sector investments and commercial aerospace modernization. The U.S. dominates with a projected $1.2 billion defense budget allocation for inertial navigation systems in 2024, creating strong demand for high-precision fiber optic gyroscopes (FOGs). However, the market faces constraints due to export controls on LiNbO3 chip technology under ITAR regulations. Companies like KVH Industries and EMCORE Corporation have secured long-term contracts with the Department of Defense, focusing on miniaturization and thermal stability improvements. Supply chain disruptions remain a concern, with lead times for specialized lithium niobate wafers extending beyond 6 months.

Europe Europe shows balanced growth across industrial automation and aerospace applications, with Germany and France accounting for 60% of regional demand. The EU’s Galileo satellite navigation program has stimulated advancements in FOG technology, pushing manufacturers toward 1550nm wavelength chips for better signal integrity. Environmental regulations on hazardous materials in electronics manufacturing have increased R&D costs by approximately 15-20% for European chip producers. While the market remains technologically advanced, competition from Asian suppliers offering lower-cost alternatives has pressured profit margins. Collaborative R&D initiatives between universities and corporations, particularly in Scandinavia, are accelerating innovations in photonic integrated circuits.

Asia-Pacific As the fastest-growing regional market, Asia-Pacific is projected to capture 48% of global sales volume by 2026. China’s BeiDou navigation system deployment and Japan’s robotics industry expansion are key demand drivers. However, the market shows stark contrasts: while Japan produces high-end 1550nm chips for aerospace, Southeast Asian manufacturers focus on cost-competitive 1310nm variants for automotive applications. India represents an emerging opportunity with its $2.3 billion investment in indigenous defense technologies, though local production capabilities remain limited. Semiconductor export restrictions have prompted regional players to develop alternative substrate materials, with gallium arsenide gaining traction as a lithium niobate substitute.

South America The region presents a nascent but volatile market, with Brazil accounting for 72% of integrated optic chip demand, primarily for offshore oil exploration equipment. Currency fluctuations have made imports 30-40% more expensive compared to 2020 levels, pushing local manufacturers to seek regional suppliers. Argentina’s satellite program has generated specialized demand for radiation-hardened chips, though economic instability has delayed several planned projects. The lack of domestic wafer fabrication facilities forces reliance on Asian imports, creating supply chain vulnerabilities during global chip shortages. Partnerships with Chinese technology providers are increasing as an alternative to U.S. and European suppliers.

Middle East & Africa Growth in this region is heavily concentrated in GCC countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where defense modernization programs drive demand. The market remains import-dependent, with over 85% of optic chips sourced from Europe and North America. Israel has emerged as a technological hub, with startups developing MEMS-based alternatives that challenge traditional FOG solutions. Africa’s mining sector shows potential for ruggedized gyroscope applications, though infrastructure limitations and low local manufacturing capacity restrict market expansion. Recent trade agreements have improved component availability, but high import duties (averaging 18-25%) continue to limit market penetration.

Report Scope

This market research report provides a comprehensive analysis of the global and regional Integrated Optic Chip for Gyroscope markets, covering the forecast period 2025–2032. It offers detailed insights into market dynamics, technological advancements, competitive landscape, and key trends shaping the industry.

Key focus areas of the report include:

Market Size & Forecast: Historical data and future projections for revenue, unit shipments, and market value across major regions and segments. The Global Integrated Optic Chip for Gyroscope market is projected to grow at a significant CAGR during the forecast period.

Segmentation Analysis: Detailed breakdown by product type (1310nm, 1550nm, Others), application (Aerospace, Ship, Automotive, Others), and end-user industry to identify high-growth segments and investment opportunities.

Regional Outlook: Insights into market performance across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa, including country-level analysis where relevant. Asia-Pacific is expected to dominate the market due to increasing defense and aerospace investments.

Competitive Landscape: Profiles of leading market participants including Polaris Photonics, FOGPhotonics, EMCORE Corporation, and KVH Industries, including their product offerings, R&D focus, and recent developments such as mergers and acquisitions.

Technology Trends & Innovation: Assessment of emerging technologies in fiber optic gyroscopes, semiconductor design trends, and evolving industry standards for improved accuracy and miniaturization.

Market Drivers & Restraints: Evaluation of factors driving market growth such as increasing demand for navigation systems in defense applications, along with challenges like high production costs and technical complexities.

Stakeholder Analysis: Insights for component suppliers, OEMs, system integrators, investors, and policymakers regarding the evolving ecosystem and strategic opportunities in inertial navigation systems.

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digitalmore · 2 months ago

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#IFTTT #Digital More

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jayanthitbrc · 1 year ago

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Insights Illuminated: Fog Detectors Market Set to Shine with a 5.1% CAGR Growth

The Fog Detectors Global Market Report 2024 by The Business Research Company provides market overview across 60+ geographies in the seven regions - Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East, and Africa, encompassing 27 major global industries. The report presents a comprehensive analysis over a ten-year historic period (2010-2021) and extends its insights into a ten-year forecast period (2023-2033). Learn More On The Fog Detectors Market: https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/fog-detectors-global-market-report According to The Business Research Company’s Fog Detectors Global Market Report 2024, The fog detectors market size has grown strongly in recent years. It will grow from $2.55 billion in 2023 to $2.69 billion in 2024 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.5%. The fog detectors market size is expected to see strong growth in the next few years. It will grow to $3.27 billion in 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.1%. The growth in the forecast period can be attributed to healthcare facility safety, fog detection in renewable energy, integration in industrial iot, adoption in autonomous vehicles, emerging technologies in sensing. The increasing number of fog-related accidents is expected to propel the growth of the fog detectors market going forward. Fog and other low-visibility circumstances have a significant impact on weather-related crashes. Fog can make it extremely challenging to see nearby objects such as pedestrians, other vehicles, road signs, or real estate. Fog detectors are the devices that identify changes in the weather and provide alerts or triggers when visibility drops below a given level to reduce accidents or collisions. Get A Free Sample Of The Report (Includes Graphs And Tables): https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/sample.aspx?id=12347&type=smp The fog detectors market covered in this report is segmented – 1) By Type: Portable Type, Fixed Type 2) By Technology: LiDAR-Based Fog Detectors, Infrared-Based Fog Detectors, Ultrasonic-Based Fog Detectors, Microwave-Based Fog Detectors, Other Technologies 3) By Application: Bridge Navigation, Met-Hydro Systems, Port And Harbor, Other Applications 4) By End-Use Industry: Aviation And Aerospace, Transportation And Logistics, Manufacturing And Warehousing, Oil And Gas, Maritime And Ports, Other End-User Industries Use of artificial intelligence is the key trend gaining popularity in the fog detectors market going forward. Major companies operating in the fog detectors market are focusing on increasing the use of AI in their fog detector offerings. The fog detectors market report table of contents includes: 1. Executive Summary 2. Market Characteristics 3. Market Trends And Strategies 4. Impact Of COVID-19 5. Market Size And Growth 6. Segmentation 7. Regional And Country Analysis . . . 27. Competitive Landscape And Company Profiles 28. Key Mergers And Acquisitions 29. Future Outlook and Potential Analysis Contact Us: The Business Research Company Europe: +44 207 1930 708 Asia: +91 88972 63534 Americas: +1 315 623 0293 Email: [email protected] Follow Us On: LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/company/the-business-research-company Twitter: https://twitter.com/tbrc_info Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBusinessResearchCompany YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC24_fI0rV8cR5DxlCpgmyFQ Blog: https://blog.tbrc.info/ Healthcare Blog: https://healthcareresearchreports.com/ Global Market Model: https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/global-market-model

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xtruss · 2 years ago

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The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”

Interviews and e-mails with expedition leaders and employees reveal how OceanGate ignored desperate warnings from inside and outside the company. “It’s a lemon,” one wrote.

— By Ben Taub | July 1, 2023

Stockton Rush, the co-founder and C.E.O. of OceanGate, inside Cyclops I, a submersible, on July 19, 2017. Photographs by Balazs Gardi

The primary task of a submersible is to not implode. The second is to reach the surface, even if the pilot is unconscious, with oxygen to spare. The third is for the occupants to be able to open the hatch once they surface. The fourth is for the submersible to be easy to find, through redundant tracking and communications systems, in case rescue is required. Only the fifth task is what is ordinarily thought of as the primary one: to transport people into the dark, hostile deep.

At dawn four summers ago, the French submariner and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet stood on the bow of an expedition vessel in the North Atlantic. The air was cool and thick with fog, the sea placid, the engine switched off, and the Titanic was some thirty-eight hundred metres below. The crew had gathered for a solemn ceremony, to pay tribute to the more than fifteen hundred people who had died in the most famous maritime disaster more than a hundred years ago. Rob McCallum, the expedition leader, gave a short speech, then handed a wreath to Nargeolet, the oldest man on the ship. As is tradition, the youngest—McCallum’s nephew—was summoned to place his hand on the wreath, and he and Nargeolet let it fall into the sea.

Inside a hangar on the ship’s stern sat a submersible known as the Limiting Factor. In the previous year, McCallum, Nargeolet, and others had taken it around the Earth, as part of the Five Deeps Expedition, a journey to the deepest point in each ocean. The team had mapped unexplored trenches and collected scientific samples, and the Limiting Factor’s chief pilot, Victor Vescovo—a Texan hedge-fund manager who had financed the entire operation—had set numerous diving records. But, to another member of the expedition team, Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton Submarines (which had designed and built the submersible), one record meant more than the rest: the marine-classification society DNV had certified the Limiting Factor’s “maximum permissible diving depth” as “unlimited.” That process was far from theoretical; a DNV inspection engineer was involved in every stage of the submersible’s creation, from design to sea trials and diving. He even sat in the passenger seat as Lahey piloted the Limiting Factor to the deepest point on Earth.

After the wreath sank from view, Vescovo climbed down the submersible hatch, and the dive began. For some members of the crew, the site of the wreck was familiar. McCallum, who co-founded a company called eyos Expeditions, had transported tourists to the Titanic in the two-thousands, using two Soviet submarines that had been rated to six thousand metres. Another crew member was a Titanic obsessive—his endless talk of davits and well decks still rattles in my head. But it was Paul-Henri Nargeolet whose life was most entwined with the Titanic. He had dived it more than thirty times, beginning shortly after its discovery, in 1985, and now served as the underwater-research director for the organization that owns salvaging rights to the wreck.

Nargeolet had also spent the past year as Vescovo’s safety manager. “When I set out on the Five Deeps project, I told Patrick Lahey, ‘Look, I don’t know submarine technology—I need someone who works for me to independently validate whatever design you come up with, and its construction and operation,’ ” Vescovo recalled, this week. “He recommended P. H. Nargeolet, whom he had known for decades.” Nargeolet, whose wife had recently died, was a former French naval commander—an underwater-explosives expert who had spent much of his life at sea. “He had a sterling reputation, the perfect résumé,” Vescovo said. “And he was French. And I love the French.”

When Vescovo reached the silty bottom at the Titanic site, he recalled his private preparations with Nargeolet. “He had very good knowledge of the currents and the wreck,” Vescovo told me. “He briefed me on very specific tactical things: ‘Stay away from this place on the stern’; ‘Don’t go here’; ‘Try and maintain this distance at this part of the wreck.’ ” Vescovo surfaced about seven hours later, exhausted and rattled from the debris that he had encountered at the ship’s ruins, which risk entangling submersibles that approach too close. But the Limiting Factor was completely fine. According to its certification from DNV, a “deep dive,” for insurance and inspection purposes, was anything below four thousand metres. A journey to the Titanic, thirty-eight hundred metres down, didn’t even count.

Nargeolet remained obsessed with the Titanic, and, before long, he was invited to return. “To P. H., the Titanic was Ulysses’ sirens—he could not resist it,” Vescovo told me. A couple of weeks ago, Nargeolet climbed into a radically different submersible, owned by a company called OceanGate, which had spent years marketing to the general public that, for a fee of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, it would bring people to the most famous shipwreck on Earth. “People are so enthralled with Titanic,” OceanGate’s founder, Stockton Rush, told a BBC documentary crew last year. “I read an article that said there are three words in the English language that are known throughout the planet. And that’s ‘Coca-Cola,’ ‘God,’ and ‘Titanic.’ ”

Nargeolet served as a guide to the wreck, Rush as the pilot. The other three occupants were tourists, including a father and son. But, before they reached the bottom, the submersible vanished, triggering an international search-and-rescue operation, with an accompanying media frenzy centered on counting down the hours until oxygen would run out.

McCallum, who was leading an expedition in Papua New Guinea at the time, knew the outcome almost instantly. “The report that I got immediately after the event—long before they were overdue—was that the sub was approaching thirty-five hundred metres,” he told me, while the oxygen clock was still ticking. “It dropped weights”—meaning that the team had aborted the dive—“then it lost comms, and lost tracking, and an implosion was heard.”

An investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard is ongoing; some debris from the wreckage has been salvaged, but the implosion was so violent and comprehensive that the precise cause of the disaster may never be known.

Until June 18th, a manned deep-ocean submersible had never imploded. But, to McCallum, Lahey, and other experts, the OceanGate disaster did not come as a surprise—they had been warning of the submersible’s design flaws for more than five years, filing complaints to the U.S. government and to OceanGate itself, and pleading with Rush to abandon his aspirations. As they mourned Nargeolet and the other passengers, they decided to reveal OceanGate’s history of knowingly shoddy design and construction. “You can’t cut corners in the deep,” McCallum had told Rush. “It’s not about being a disruptor. It’s about the laws of physics.”

The submersible Antipodes at the OceanGate headquarters, in Everett, Washington, on July 19, 2017.

Stockton Rush was named for two of his ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence: Richard Stockton and Benjamin Rush. His maternal grandfather was an oil-and-shipping tycoon. As a teen-ager, Rush became an accomplished commercial jet pilot, and he studied aerospace engineering at Princeton, where he graduated in 1984.

Rush wanted to become a fighter pilot. But his eyesight wasn’t perfect, and so he went to business school instead. Years later, he expressed a desire to travel to space, and he reportedly dreamed of becoming the first human to set foot on Mars. In 2004, Rush travelled to the Mojave Desert, where he watched the launch of the first privately funded aircraft to brush against the edge of space. The only occupant was the test pilot; nevertheless, as Rush used to tell it, Richard Branson stood on the wing and announced that a new era of space tourism had arrived. At that point, Rush “abruptly lost interest,” according to a profile in Smithsonian magazine. “I didn’t want to go up into space as a tourist,” he said. “I wanted to be Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. I wanted to explore.”

Rush had grown up scuba diving in Tahiti, the Cayman Islands, and the Red Sea. In his mid-forties, he tinkered with a kit for a single-person mini-submersible, and piloted it around at shallow depths near Seattle, where he lived. A few years later, in 2009, he co-founded OceanGate, with a dream to bring tourists to the ocean world. “I had come across this business anomaly I couldn’t explain,” he recalled. “If three-quarters of the planet is water, how come you can’t access it?”

OceanGate’s first submersible wasn’t made by the company itself; it was built in 1973, and Lahey later piloted it in the North Sea, while working in the oil-and-gas industry. In the nineties, he helped refit it into a tourist submersible, and in 2009, after it had been sold a few times, and renamed Antipodes, OceanGate bought it. “I didn’t have any direct interaction with them at the time,” Lahey recalled. “Stockton was one of these people that was buying these older subs and trying to repurpose them.”

In 2015, OceanGate announced that it had built its first submersible, in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. In fact, it was mostly a cosmetic and electrical refit; Lahey and his partners had built the underlying vessel, called Lula, for a Portuguese marine research nonprofit almost two decades before. It had a pressure hull that was the shape of a capsule pill and made of steel, with a large acrylic viewport on one end. It was designed to go no deeper than five hundred metres—a comfortable cruising depth for military submarines. OceanGate now called it Cyclops I.

Most submersibles have duplicate control systems, running on separate batteries—that way, if one system fails, the other still works. But, during the refit, engineers at the University of Washington rigged the Cyclops I to run from a single PlayStation 3 controller. “Stockton is very interested in being able to quickly train pilots,” Dave Dyer, a principal engineer, said, in a video published by his laboratory. Another engineer referred to it as “a combination steering wheel and gas pedal.”

Around that time, Rush set his sights on the Titanic. OceanGate would have to design a new submersible. But Rush decided to keep most of the design elements of Cyclops I. Suddenly, the University of Washington was no longer involved in the project, although OceanGate’s contract with the Applied Physics Laboratory was less than one-fifth complete; it is unclear what Dyer, who did not respond to an interview request, thought of Rush’s plan to essentially reconstruct a craft that was designed for five hundred metres of pressure to withstand eight times that much. As the company planned Cyclops II, Rush reached out to McCallum for help.

“He wanted me to run his Titanic operation for him,” McCallum recalled. “At the time, I was the only person he knew who had run commercial expedition trips to Titanic. Stockton’s plan was to go a step further and build a vehicle specifically for this multi-passenger expedition.” McCallum gave him some advice on marketing and logistics, and eventually visited the workshop, outside Seattle, where he examined the Cyclops I. He was disturbed by what he saw. “Everyone was drinking Kool-Aid and saying how cool they were with a Sony PlayStation,” he told me. “And I said at the time, ‘Does Sony know that it’s been used for this application? Because, you know, this is not what it was designed for.’ And now you have the hand controller talking to a Wi-Fi unit, which is talking to a black box, which is talking to the sub’s thrusters. There were multiple points of failure.” The system ran on Bluetooth, according to Rush. But, McCallum continued, “every sub in the world has hardwired controls for a reason—that if the signal drops out, you’re not fucked.”

One day, McCallum climbed into the Cyclops for a test dive at a marina. There, he met the chief pilot, David Lochridge, a Scotsman who had spent three decades as a submersible pilot and an engineer—first in the Royal Navy, then as a private contractor. Lochridge had worked all over the world: on offshore wind farms in the North Sea; on subsea-cables installations in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans; on manned submarine trials with the Swedish Navy; on submarine-rescue operations for the navies of Britain and Singapore. But, during the harbor trial, the Cyclops got stuck in shallow water. “It was hilarious, because there were four very experienced operators in the sub, stuck at twenty or twenty-five feet, and we had to sit there for a few hours while they worked it out,” McCallum recalled. He liked and trusted Lochridge. But, of the sub, he said, “This thing is a mutt.”

Rush eventually decided that he would not attempt to have the Titanic-bound vehicle classed by a marine-certification agency such as DNV. He had no interest in welcoming into the project an external evaluator who would, as he saw it, “need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

That marked the end of McCallum’s desire to be associated with the project. “The minute that I found out that he was not going to class the vehicle, that’s when I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t be involved,’ ” he told me. “I couldn’t tell him anything about the Five Deeps project at that time. But I was able to say, ‘Look, I am involved with other projects that are building classed subs’—of course, I was talking about the Limiting Factor—‘and I can tell you that the class society has been nothing but supportive. They are actually part of our innovation process. We’re using the brainpower of their engineers to feed into our design.

“Stockton didn’t like that,” McCallum continued. “He didn’t like to be told that he was on the fringe.” As word got out that Rush planned to take tourists to the Titanic, McCallum recalled, “people would ring me, and say, ‘We’ve always wanted to go to Titanic. What do you think?’ And I would tell them, ‘Never get in an unclassed sub. I wouldn’t do it, and you shouldn’t, either.’ ”

In early 2018, McCallum heard that Lochridge had left OceanGate. “I’d be keen to pick your brain if you have a few moments,” McCallum e-mailed him. “I’m keen to get a handle on exactly how bad things are. I do get reports, but I don’t know if they are accurate.” Whatever his differences with Rush, McCallum wanted the venture to succeed; the submersible industry is small, and a single disaster could destroy it. But the only way forward without a catastrophic operational failure—which he had been told was “certain,” he wrote—was for OceanGate to redesign the submersible in coördination with a classification society. “Stockton must be gutted,” McCallum told Lochridge, of his departure. “You were the star player . . . . . and the only one that gave me a hint of confidence.”

“I think you are going to [be] even more taken aback when I tell you what’s happening,” Lochridge replied. He added that he was afraid of retaliation from Rush—“We both know he has influence and money”—but would share his assessment with McCallum, in private: “That sub is Not safe to dive.”

“Do you think the sub could be made safe to dive, or is it a complete lemon?” McCallum replied. “You will get a lot of support from people in the industry . . . . everyone is watching and waiting and quietly shitting their pants.”

“It’s a lemon.”

“Oh dear,” McCallum replied. “Oh dear, oh dear.”

David Lochridge, OceanGate’s former director of marine operations, pilots Cyclops I during a test dive in Everett, on July 19, 2017.

Lochridge had been hired by OceanGate in May, 2015, as its director of marine operations and chief submersible pilot. The company moved him and his family to Washington, and helped him apply for a green card. But, before long, he was clashing with Rush and Tony Nissen, the company’s director of engineering, on matters of design and safety.

Every aspect of submersible design and construction is a trade-off between strength and weight. In order for the craft to remain suspended underwater, without rising or falling, the buoyancy of each component must be offset against the others. Most deep-ocean submersibles use spherical titanium hulls and are counterbalanced in water by syntactic foam, a buoyant material made up of millions of hollow glass balls, which is attached to the external frame. But this adds bulk to the submersible. And the weight of titanium limits the practical size of the pressure hull, so that it can accommodate no more than two or three people. Spheres are “the best geometry for pressure, but not for occupation,” as Rush put it.

The Cyclops II needed to fit as many passengers as possible. “You don’t do the coolest thing you’re ever going to do in your life by yourself,” Rush told an audience at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “You take your wife, your son, your daughter, your best friend. You’ve got to have four people” besides the pilot. Rush planned to have room for a Titanic guide and three passengers. The Cyclops II could fit that many occupants only if it had a cylindrical midsection. But the size dictated the choice of materials. The steel hull of Cyclops I was too thin for Titanic depths—but a thicker steel hull would add too much weight. In December, 2016, OceanGate announced that it had started construction on Cyclops II, and that its cylindrical midsection would be made of carbon fibre. The idea, Rush explained in interviews, was that carbon fibre was a strong material that was significantly lighter than traditional metals. “Carbon fibre is three times better than titanium on strength-to-buoyancy,” he said.

A month later, OceanGate hired a company called Spencer Composites to build the carbon-fibre hull. “They basically said, ‘This is the pressure we have to meet, this is the factor of safety, this is the basic envelope. Go design and build it,’ ” the founder, Brian Spencer, told CompositesWorld, in the spring of 2017. He was given a deadline of six weeks.

Toward the end of that year, Lochridge became increasingly concerned. OceanGate would soon begin manned sea trials for Cyclops II in the Bahamas, and he believed that there was a chance that they would result in catastrophe. The consequences for Lochridge could extend beyond OceanGate’s business and the trauma of losing colleagues; as director of marine operations, Lochridge had a contract specifying that he was ultimately responsible for “ensuring the safety of all crew and clients.”

On the workshop floor, he raised questions about potential flaws in the design and build processes. But his concerns were dismissed. OceanGate’s position was that such matters were outside the scope of his responsibilities; he was “not hired to provide engineering services, or to design or develop Cyclops II,” the company later said, in a court filing. Nevertheless, before the handover of the submersible to the operations team, Rush directed Lochridge to carry out an inspection, because his job description also required him to sign off on the submersible’s readiness for deployment.

On January 18, 2018, Lochridge studied each major component, and found several critical aspects to be defective or unproven. He drafted a detailed report, which has not previously been made public, and attached photographs of the elements of greatest concern. Glue was coming away from the seams of ballast bags, and mounting bolts threatened to rupture them; both sealing faces had errant plunge holes and O-ring grooves that deviated from standard design parameters. The exostructure and electrical pods used different metals, which could result in galvanic corrosion when exposed to seawater. The thruster cables posed “snagging hazards”; the iridium satellite beacon, to transmit the submersible’s position after surfacing, was attached with zip ties. The flooring was highly flammable; the interior vinyl wrapping emitted “highly toxic gasses upon ignition.”

To assess the carbon-fibre hull, Lochridge examined a small cross-section of material. He found that it had “very visible signs of delamination and porosity”—it seemed possible that, after repeated dives, it would come apart. He shone a light at the sample from behind, and photographed beams streaming through splits in the midsection in a disturbing, irregular pattern. The only safe way to dive, Lochridge concluded, was to first carry out a full scan of the hull.

The next day, Lochridge sent his report to Rush, Nissen, and other members of the OceanGate leadership. “Verbal communication of the key items I have addressed in my attached document have been dismissed on several occasions, so I feel now I must make this report so there is an official record in place,” he wrote. “Until suitable corrective actions are in place and closed out, Cyclops 2 (Titan) should not be manned during any of the upcoming trials.”

Rush was furious; he called a meeting that afternoon, and recorded it on his phone. For the next two hours, the OceanGate leadership insisted that no hull testing was necessary—an acoustic monitoring system, to detect fraying fibres, would serve in its place. According to the company, the system would alert the pilot to the possibility of catastrophic failure “with enough time to arrest the descent and safely return to surface.” But, in a court filing, Lochridge’s lawyer wrote, “this type of acoustic analysis would only show when a component is about to fail—often milliseconds before an implosion—and would not detect any existing flaws prior to putting pressure onto the hull.” A former senior employee who was present at the meeting told me, “We didn’t even have a baseline. We didn’t know what it would sound like if something went wrong.”

OceanGate’s lawyer wrote, “The parties found themselves at an impasse—Mr. Lochridge was not, and specifically stated that he could not be made comfortable with OceanGate’s testing protocol, while Mr. Rush was unwilling to change the company’s plans.” The meeting ended in Lochridge’s firing.

Soon afterward, Rush asked OceanGate’s director of finance and administration whether she’d like to take over as chief submersible pilot. “It freaked me out that he would want me to be head pilot, since my background is in accounting,” she told me. She added that several of the engineers were in their late teens and early twenties, and were at one point being paid fifteen dollars an hour. Without Lochridge around, “I could not work for Stockton,” she said. “I did not trust him.” As soon as she was able to line up a new job, she quit.

“I would consider myself pretty ballsy when it comes to doing things that are dangerous, but that sub is an accident waiting to happen,” Lochridge wrote to McCallum, two weeks later. “There’s no way on earth you could have paid me to dive the thing.” Of Rush, he added, “I don’t want to be seen as a Tattle tale but I’m so worried he kills himself and others in the quest to boost his ego.”

McCallum forwarded the exchange to Patrick Lahey, the C.E.O. of Triton Submarines, whose response was emphatic: if Lochridge “genuinely believes this submersible poses a threat to the occupants,” then he had a moral obligation to inform the authorities. “To remain quiet makes him complicit,” Lahey wrote. “I know that may sound ominous but it is true. History is full of horrific examples of accidents and tragedies that were a direct result of people’s silence.”

OceanGate claimed that Cyclops II had “the first pressure vessel of its kind in the world.” But there’s a reason that Triton and other manufacturers don’t use carbon fibre in their hulls. Under compression, “it’s a capricious fucking material, which is the last fucking thing you want to associate with a pressure boundary,” Lahey told me.

“With titanium, there’s a purpose to a pressure test that goes beyond just seeing whether it will survive,” John Ramsay, the designer of the Limiting Factor, explained. The metal gradually strengthens under repeated exposure to incredible stresses. With carbon fibre, however, pressure testing slowly breaks the hull, fibre by tiny fibre. “If you’re repeatedly nearing the threshold of the material, then there’s just no way of knowing how many cycles it will survive,” he said.

“It doesn’t get more sensational than dead people in a sub on the way to Titanic,” Lahey’s business partner, the co-founder of Triton Submarines, wrote to his team, on March 1, 2018. McCallum tried to reason with Rush directly. “You are wanting to use a prototype un-classed technology in a very hostile place,” he e-mailed. “As much as I appreciate entrepreneurship and innovation, you are potentially putting an entire industry at risk.”

Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their small existing market.” He understood that his approach “flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is the nature of innovation,” he wrote. “We have heard the baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”

In response, McCallum listed a number of specific concerns, from his “humble perch” as an expedition leader. “In your race to Titanic you are mirroring that famous catch cry ‘she is unsinkable,’ ” McCallum wrote. The correspondence ended soon afterward; Rush asked McCallum to work for him—then threatened him with a lawsuit, in an effort to silence him, when he declined.

By now, McCallum had introduced Lochridge to Lahey. Lahey wrote him, “If Ocean Gate is unwilling to consider or investigate your concerns with you directly perhaps some other means of getting them to pay attention is required.”

Lochridge replied that he had already contacted the United States Department of Labor, alleging to its Occupational Safety and Health Administration that he had been terminated in retaliation for raising safety concerns. He also sent the osha investigator Paul McDevitt a copy of his Cyclops II inspection report, hoping that the government might take actions that would “prevent the potential for harm to life.”

A few weeks later, McDevitt contacted OceanGate, noting that he was looking into Lochridge’s firing as a whistle-blower-protection matter. OceanGate’s lawyer Thomas Gilman soon issued Lochridge a court summons: he had ten days to withdraw his osha claim and pay OceanGate almost ten thousand dollars in legal expenses. Otherwise, Gilman wrote, OceanGate would sue him, take measures to destroy his professional reputation, and accuse him of immigration fraud. Gilman also reported to osha that Lochridge had orchestrated his own firing because he “wanted to leave his job and maintain his ability to collect unemployment benefits.” (McDevitt, of osha, notified the Coast Guard of Lochridge’s complaint. There is no evidence that the Coast Guard ever followed up.)

Lochridge received the summons while he was at his father’s funeral. He and his wife hired a lawyer, but it quickly became clear that “he didn’t have the money to fight this guy,” Lahey told me. (Lochridge declined to be interviewed.) Lahey covered the rest of the expenses, but, after more than half a year of legal wrangling, and threats of deportation, Lochridge withdrew his whistle-blower claim with osha so that he could go on with his life. Lahey was crestfallen. “He didn’t consult me about that decision,” Lahey recalled. “It’s not that he had to—it was his fight, not mine. But I was underwriting the cost of it, because I believed in the idea that this inspection report, which he wouldn’t share with anybody, needed to see the light of day.”

Stockton Rush in front of Cyclops I, on July 19, 2017.

A few weeks after Lochridge was fired, OceanGate announced that it was testing its new submersible in the marina of Everett, Washington, and would soon begin shallow-water trials in Puget Sound. To preëmpt any concerns about the carbon-fibre hull, the company touted the acoustic monitoring system, which was later patented in Rush’s name. “Safety is our number one priority,” Rush said, in an OceanGate press release. “We believe real-time health monitoring should be standard safety equipment on all manned-submersibles.”

“He’s spinning the fact that his sub requires a hull warning system into something positive,” Jarl Stromer, Triton’s regulatory and class-compliance manager, reported to Lahey. “He’s making it sound like the Cyclops is more advanced because it has this system when the opposite is true: The submersible is so experimental, and the factor of safety completely unknown, that it requires a system to warn the pilot of impending collapse.”

Like Lochridge, Triton’s outside counsel, Brad Patrick, considered the risk to life to be so evident that the government should get involved. He drafted a letter to McDevitt, the osha investigator, urging the Department of Labor to take “immediate and decisive action to stop OceanGate” from taking passengers to the Titanic “before people die. It is that simple.” He went on, “At the bottom of all of this is the inevitable tension betwixt greed and safety.”

But Patrick’s letter was never sent. Other people at Triton worried that the Department of Labor might perceive the letter as an attack on a business rival. By now, OceanGate had renamed Cyclops II “Titan,” apparently to honor the Titanic. “I cannot tell you how much I fucking hated it when he changed the goddam name to Titan,” Lahey told me. “That was uncomfortably close to our name.”

“Stockton strategically structured everything to be out of U.S. jurisdiction” for its Titanic pursuits, the former senior OceanGate employee told me. “It was deliberate.” In a legal filing, the company reported that the submersible was “being developed and assembled in Washington, but will be owned by a Bahamian entity, will be registered in the Bahamas and will operate exclusively outside the territorial waters of the United States.” Although it is illegal to transport passengers in an unclassed, experimental submersible, “under U.S. regulations, you can kill crew,” McCallum told me. “You do get in a little bit of trouble, in the eyes of the law. But, if you kill a passenger, you’re in big trouble. And so everyone was classified as a ‘mission specialist.’ There were no passengers—the word ‘passenger’ was never used.” No one bought tickets; they contributed an amount of money set by Rush to one of OceanGate’s entities, to fund their own missions.

“It is truly hard to imagine the discernment it took for Stockton to string together each of the links in the chain,” Patrick noted. “ ‘How do I avoid liability in Washington State? How do I avoid liability with an offshore corporate structure? How do I keep the U.S. Coast Guard from breathing down my neck?’ ”

But OceanGate had a retired Coast Guard rear admiral, John Lockwood, on its board of directors. “His experiences at the highest levels of the Coast Guard and in international maritime affairs will allow OceanGate to refine our client offerings,” Rush announced with his appointment, in 2013. Lockwood said that he hoped “to help bring operational and regulatory expertise” to OceanGate’s affairs. (Lockwood did not respond to a request for comment.) Still, Rush failed to win over the submersible industry. When he asked Don Walsh, a renowned oceanographer who reached the deepest point in the ocean, in 1960, to consult on the Titanic venture, Walsh replied, “I am concerned that my affiliation with your program at this late date would appear to be nothing more than an endorsement of what you are already doing.”

That spring, more than three dozen industry experts sent a letter to OceanGate, expressing their “unanimous concern” about its upcoming Titanic expedition—for which it had already sold places. Among the signers were Lahey, McCallum, Walsh, and a Coast Guard senior inspector. “OceanGate’s anticipated dive schedule in the spring of 2018 meant that they were going to take people down, and we had a great deal of concern about them surviving that trip,” Patrick told me. But sea trials were a disaster, owing to problems with the launch-and-recovery system, and OceanGate scuttled its Titanic operations for that year. Lochridge broke the news to Lahey. “Lives have been saved for a short while anyway,” he wrote.

OceanGate kept selling tickets, but did not dive to the Titanic for the next three years. It appears that the company spent this period testing materials, and that it built several iterations of the carbon-fibre hull. But it is difficult to know what tests were done, exactly, and how many hulls were made, and by whom, because Rush’s public statements are deeply unreliable. He claimed at various points to have design and testing partnerships with Boeing and nasa, and that at least one iteration of the hull would be built at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. But none of those things were true. Meanwhile, soon after Lochridge’s departure, a college newspaper quoted a recent graduate as saying that he and his classmates had started working on the Titan’s electrical systems as interns, while they were still in school. “The whole electrical system,” he said. “That was our design, we implemented it, and it works.”

By the time that OceanGate finally began diving to the Titanic, in 2021, it had refined its pitch to its “mission specialists.” The days of insinuating that Titan was safe had ended. Now Rush portrayed the submersible as existing at the very fringe of what was physically possible. Clients signed waivers and were informed that the submersible was experimental and unclassed. But the framing was that this was how pioneering exploration is done.

“We were all told—intimately informed—that this was a dangerous mission that could result in death,” an OceanGate “mission specialist” told Fox News last week. “We were versed in how the sub operated. We were versed in various protocols. But there’s a limit . . . it’s not a safe operation, inherently. And that’s part of research and development and exploration.” He went on, “If the Wright brothers had crashed on their first flight, they would have still left the bonds of Earth.” Another “mission specialist” wrote in a blog post that, a month before the implosion, Rush had confessed that he’d “gotten the carbon fiber used to make the Titan at a big discount from Boeing because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes.”

“Carbon fibre makes noise,” Rush told David Pogue, a CBS News correspondent, last summer, during one of the Titanic expeditions. “It crackles. The first time you pressurize it, if you think about it—of those million fibres, a couple of ’em are sorta weak. They shouldn’t have made the team.” He spoke of signs of hull breakage as if it were perfectly routine. “The first time we took it to full pressure, it made a bunch of noise. The second time, it made very little noise.”

Fibres do not regenerate between dives. Nevertheless, Rush seemed unconcerned. “It’s a huge amount of pressure from the point where we’d say, ‘Oh, the hull’s not happy,’ to when it implodes,” he noted. “You just have to stop your descent.”

It’s not clear that Rush could always stop his descent. Once, as he piloted passengers to the wreck, a malfunction prevented Rush from dropping weights. Passengers calmly discussed sleeping on the bottom of the ocean, thirty-eight hundred metres down; after twenty-four hours, a drop-weight mechanism would dissolve in the seawater, allowing the submersible to surface. Eventually, Rush managed to release the weights manually, using a hydraulic pump. “This is why you want your pilot to be an engineer,” a passenger said, smiling, as another “mission specialist” filmed her.

Last year, a BBC documentary crew joined the expedition. Rush stayed on the surface vessel while Scott Griffith, OceanGate’s director of logistics and quality assurance, piloted a scientist and three other passengers down. (Griffith did not respond to a request for comment.) During the launch, a diver in the water noticed and reported to the surface vessel that something with a thruster seemed off. Nevertheless, the mission continued.

More than two hours passed; after Titan touched down in the silt, Griffith fired the thrusters and realized something was wrong.“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. As he fiddled with the PlayStation controller, a passenger looked out the viewport.

“Am I spinning?” Griffith asked.

“Yes.”

“I am?”

“Looks like it,” another passenger said.

“Oh, my God,” Griffith muttered. One of the thrusters had been installed in the wrong direction. “The only thing I can do is a three-sixty,” he said.

They were in the debris field, three hundred metres from the intact part of the wreck. One of the clients said that she had delayed buying a car, getting married, and having kids, all “because I wanted to go to Titanic,” but they couldn’t make their way over to its bow. Griffith relayed the situation to the ship. Rush’s solution was to “remap the PS3 controller.”

Rush couldn’t remember where the buttons were, and it seems as though there was no spare controller on the ship. Someone loaded an image of a PlayStation 3 controller from the Internet, and Rush worked out a new button routine. “Yeah—left and right might be forward and back. Huh. I don’t know,” he said. “It might work.”

“Right is forward,” Griffith read off his screen, two and a half miles below. “Uh—I’m going to have to write this down.”

“Right is forward,” Rush said. “Great! Live with it.”

Shipwrecks are notoriously difficult and dangerous to dive. Rusted cables drape the Titanic, moving with the currents; a broken crow’s nest dangles over the deck. Griffith piloted the submersible over to the wreck, and passengers within feet of it, while teaching himself in real time to operate a Bluetooth controller whose buttons suddenly had different functions than those for which he had trained.

Various models of Cyclops II are exhibited alongside a model of the Titanic, at the OceanGate headquarters, on July 19, 2017.

“If you’re not breaking things, you’re not innovating,” Rush said, at the GeekWire Summit last fall. “If you’re operating within a known environment, as most submersible manufacturers do—they don’t break things. To me, the more stuff you’ve broken, the more innovative you’ve been.”

The Titan’s viewport was made of acrylic and seven inches thick. “That’s another thing where I broke the rules,” Rush said to Pogue, the CBS News journalist. He went on to refer to a “very well-known” acrylic expert, Jerry D. Stachiw, who wrote an eleven-hundred-page manual called “Handbook of Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers, and Aquaria.” “It has safety factors that—they were so high, he didn’t call ’em safety factors. He called ’em conversion factors,” Rush said. “According to the rules,” he added, his viewport was “not allowed.”

It seemed as if Rush believed that acrylic’s transparent quality would give him ample warning before failure. “You can see every surface,” he said. “And if you’ve overstressed it, or you’ve even come close, it starts to get this crazing effect.”

“And if that happened underwater . . .”

“You just stop and go to the surface.”

“You would have time to get back up?” Pogue asked.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s way more warning than you need.”

John Ramsay, who has designed several acrylic-hulled submersibles, was less sure. “You’ll probably never be able to find out the source of failure” of the Titan, he told me, in a recent phone call from his cottage in southwest England. But it seems as though Rush did not understand how acrylic limits are calculated. “Where Stockton is talking about those things called conversion factors . . .”

Ramsay grabbed a copy of Stachiw’s acrylic handbook from his spare bedroom. When Stachiw’s team was doing its tests, “they would pressurize it really fast, the acrylic would implode, and then they would assign a conversion factor, to tabulate a safe diving depth,” he explained. “So let’s say the sample imploded at twelve hundred metres. You apply a conversion factor of six, and you get a rating of two hundred metres.” He paused, and spoke slowly, to make sure I understood the gravity of what followed. “It’s specifically not called a safety factor, because the acrylic is not safe to twelve hundred metres,” he said. “I’ve got a massive report on all of this, because we’ve just had to reverse engineer all of Jerry Statchiw’s work to determine when our own acrylic will fail.” The risk zone begins at about twice the depth rating.

According to David Lochridge’s court filings, from 2018, Cyclops II’s viewport had a depth rating of only thirteen hundred metres, approximately one-third of Titanic’s depth. It is possible that this had changed by the time passengers finally dived. But, Lochridge’s lawyer wrote, OceanGate “refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the required depth.”

In May, Rush invited Victor Vescovo to join his Titanic expedition. “I turned him down,” Vescovo told me. “I didn’t even want the appearance that I was sanctioning his operation.” But his friend—the British billionaire Hamish Harding, whom Vescovo had previously taken in the Limiting Factor to the bottom of the Mariana Trench—signed up to be a “mission specialist.”

On the morning of June 18th, Rush climbed inside the Titan, along with Harding, the British Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, and his nineteen-year-old son, Suleman, who had reportedly told a relative that he was terrified of diving in a submersible but would do so anyway, because it was Father’s Day. He carried with him a Rubik’s Cube so that he could solve it in front of the Titanic wreck. The fifth diver was P. H. Nargeolet, the Titanic expert—Vescovo’s former safety adviser, Lahey and McCallum’s old shipmate and friend. He had been working with OceanGate for at least a year as a wreck navigator, historian, and guide.

The force of the implosion would have been so violent that everyone on board would have died before the water touched their bodies.

For the Five Deeps crew, Nargeolet’s legacy is complicated by the circumstances of his final dives. “I had a conversation with P. H. just as recently as a few months ago,” Lahey told me. “I kept giving him shit for going out there. I said, ‘P. H., by you being out there, you legitimize what this guy’s doing. It’s a tacit endorsement. And, worse than that, I think he’s using your involvement with the project, and your presence on the site, as a way to fucking lure people into it.’ ”

Nargeolet replied that he was getting old. He was a grieving widower, and, as he told people several times in recent years, “if you have to go, that would be a good way. Instant.”

“I said, ‘O.K., so you’re ready to fucking die? Is that what it is, P. H.?’ ” Lahey recalled. “And he said, ‘No, no, but I figure that, maybe if I’m out there, I can help them avoid a tragedy.’ But instead he found himself right in the fucking center of a tragedy. And he didn’t deserve to go that way.”

“I loved P. H. Nargeolet,” Lahey continued. He started choking up. “He was a brilliant human being and somebody that I had the privilege of knowing for almost twenty-five years, and I think it’s a tremendously sad way for him to have ended his life.”

Lahey dived the Titanic in the Limiting Factor during the Five Deeps expedition, back in 2019. I remember him climbing out of the submersible and being upset at the fact that we were even there. “It’s a mess down there,” he recalled, this week. “It’s a tragic fucking place. And in some ways, you know, people paying all that money to go and fly around in a fucking graveyard . . .” He trailed off. But the loss of so much life, in 1912, set in motion new regulations and improvements for safety at sea. “And so I guess, on a positive note, you can look at that as having been a difficult and tragic lesson that probably has since saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” he said.

OceanGate declined to comment. But, in 2021, Stockton Rush told an interviewer that he would “like to be remembered as an innovator. I think it was General MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break.’ And I’ve broken some rules to make this.” He was sitting in the Titan’s hull, docked in the Port of St. John’s, the nearest port to the site where he eventually died. “The carbon fibre and titanium? There’s a rule you don’t do that. Well, I did.” ♦

— Ben Taub, A Staﬀ Writer, is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. His 2018 reporting on Iraq won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award.

#Titanic | Ocean | Accident #Submarines | Innovation | Whistle-Blowers #Titan Submersible #The New Yorker #A Reporter At Large #Ben Taub

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notwiselybuttoowell · 3 years ago

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As summer fires continue to devastate huge areas of woodland in Spain, France and Portugal, and drought plagues Europe and the UK leaving tens of thousands of acres at risk of desertification, some scientists are busy collecting fog.

The EU-backed Life Nieblas project (niebla is Spanish for fog) is using fog collectors in Gran Canaria in Spain’s Canary Islands, and Portugal, to improve degraded landscape and fuel reforestation.

Fog collectors – sheets of plastic mesh erected in the path of the wind – already exist but have never been used efficiently, says Vicenç Carabassa, the project’s head scientist, who works for the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (Creaf), a public research institute at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. As wind blows fog through the mesh, water droplets collect and fall into the containers below.

Fog collection is particularly applicable in restoring the Canary Islands’ laurisilva [laurel forests], which themselves exist by collecting fog water,” says Carabassa. The water droplets from the fog condense on the trees’ shiny, waxy leaves. “The system allows saplings to flourish until they are mature enough to capture water themselves,” he adds. Laurisilva is sub-tropical rainforest populated by evergreen species, though not necessarily the familiar laurel trees found in parks and gardens.

To operate well, fog collectors need both fog and wind, conditions that exist in the Canaries and Portugal, but less so in the Mediterranean, where forest fires and desertification are a growing problem.

“We’re still trying to discover what are the optimal conditions for fog collectors to work,” says Carabassa, who adds that laurisilva restoration can help to replenish the aquifers that are under constant strain in the Canaries.

As well as the Canary Islands, where Creaf is working with the Gran Canaria local authority, the public company Gesplan, which manages the project, and several other research institutes and public organisations, the technique will be tested in maritime areas around Barcelona and the El Bruc municipality in northern Catalonia, which was ravaged by a huge fire in 2015.

#fog #fog collection #water scarcity #drought #canary islands #Portugal #laurel forests #desertification #Mediterranean #wildfires

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clove-pinks · 5 years ago

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"The Victory as it left Woolwich (detail) from Robert Huish, The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross, 1835." (Linda Hall Library, see source link)

My first thought when I saw this picture was to marvel at the size of the smokestack on Victory. I wasn't expecting it to be so tall, or so large, especially when screw-propeller ironclads of the mid-19th century have such short stacks. But while a lot of things going on in this illustration are dubious (more on that later), this depiction of Victory's smokestack is probably accurate enough, q.v. the 1820s steamship Diana and her similar appearance.

Much more frustrating to me are all the hoists of flags.

Remember that the Admiralty did not sponsor this expedition (which is why there is a big chunk of Nunavut named after a gin distiller), so you might think that Ross was using Marryat's code of signals for merchant ships, first published in 1817. Except that those aren't Marryat's flags— there are designs not in his simple numerical system, and they're all square/rectangular in shape. That last detail alone is unusual, since naval signal flags generally have distinguishing pennants and the odd swallow tail or triangle-shaped flag.

So, are they using a Royal Navy system? As far as I can tell, no (with a question mark at the end). It’s not Admiral Home Popham’s famous flags, it’s not the flags drawn by Charles Copland (who is a somewhat mysterious figure, with many drawings in possession of the National Maritime Museum but not any biographical information. He was possibly affiliated with the East India Company, going by his art.)

I’m obsessed with these stupid flags, which are tantalizingly grouped in sets of 4 and 5, as you would expect from a ship making her number or sending some other message. The designs are simple, and they look nothing like the “house flags” of merchant shipping companies, or banners belonging to individuals on the expedition. “What is presumably Ross's expedition flag” is in the background of this painting, according to the description from the NMM.

All weekend I have been poring over Timothy Wilson’s Flags at Sea, in addition to whatever resources I can find online. On Royal Navy signal flags, Wilson writes, “In 1808 and 1816 the Admiralty revised the general Signal Book. In 1827 a recast series of signal books was issued, consisting of a General Signal Book, a Vocabulary Signal Book and a book of Night and Fog Signals.”

Could this 1827 update include some of the mystery flag designs that stump me in the illustration? Possibly, since I can’t find a chart of the flags to verify it. I didn’t want to post about this until I could find a satisfactory answer about the signal flags, but at this point I’m trying to crowd-source an answer. If these flags are legitimate, they would be from a system developed 1829 or earlier (when Ross sailed); or perhaps 1835 or earlier, if the artist was referencing a real ship at the time of publication.

Stymied with the flags, I started looking for information on Robert Huish. I found a startlingly diverse array of books written by what appears to be the same Robert Huish: celebrity biographies and memoirs, more than one beekeeping guide, travelogues, a home economics guide for women. To quote from Huish’s wikipedia page: “His other works [not the beekeeping books] are nearly all poor examples of anecdotal, quasi-historical bookmaking; the Quarterly Review spoke of him as an obscure and unscrupulous scribbler.”

So there is the very real possibility that the flags are complete bullshit. It seems more than likely considering the timing and nature of Huish’s book, published in the same year as Ross’s own narrative and compiled from what the Linda Hall Library calls “the journal of the steward, William Light, who was more than a little disgruntled with Ross, and much of the text has to be taken with a grain of salt.” (link)

Huish also provides us with a nice view of the Victory, as she set out on the voyage, which Ross did not do. Perhaps that is because by the time Ross wrote his narrative, he was thoroughly sick of the Victory and its steam boilers and paddlewheels. Ross dumped all the machinery onto the ice during his first winter at Felix Harbour and fulminated at length against the manufacturers in his narrative—so much so that the manufacturers wrote a treatise in rebuttal.

I didn’t expect such a whirlwind of drama and half-truths when I found this lovely picture of Victory (or someone’s, uhh, artistic interpretation of what she may have looked like); but I guess with the Ross family involved it’s par for the course!

#sir john ross #victory #polar exploration #age of sail #naval signal flags #robert huish #code of signals #signal books #the only pre-marryat merchant signal code i could find was developed by lloyd's in 1812 and not really used?#i put the flag book down and now i'm laughing at fergus fleming's 'barrow's boys'#has anyone read 'the polar rosses' and is it a good book?#i'm assuming this will be hidden from search and not in tags due to links and therefore widely ignored #let me mention my enjoyment of the very 1830s clothing in the illustration #them giant sleeves and the gentleman's slender waist with floofy coat skirts #polar

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opstechsanjana · 10 months ago

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Mist Cooling & Fogging System Company in Togo

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jaypals-world · 3 years ago

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Synthetic Aperture Radar Market Size, SWOT Analysis, Major Key Vendors and Top Trends

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In September 2020, IMSAR LLC and Primoco UAV SE successfully executed incorporation and initial flight testing of NSP-7 Synthetic Aperture Radar on the Primoco One 150 UAV. NSP-7 is a small-size, low weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) multi-mode Ku-band radar system. This radar works in various modes such as Magnitude and Coherent Change Detection (MCD / CCD), Ground and Maritime Moving Target Indicator (GMTI / MMTI), and high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging. Furthermore, NSP-7 system can work in day and night as well as in all types of weather conditions. In addition, it functions in low-visibility conditions also, which are caused by fog and smoke.

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Commercial

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Single Mode

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liocowine · 3 years ago

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White your fishmonger will love

Many of our long-time list members know that the best values in our Cellar are the appellation wines -- those made from a blend of proximate vineyard sites in a single viticultural area. Our goal for these California wines is to capture the nuance of that area.

Does Russian River Valley mean something on a label? We think it should. 2018 Estero, Russian River Valley

If you visit the Michelin-starred establishments in our area -- Singlethread Farms and The Farmhouse Inn -- you will find LIOCO’s 2018 Esteo from the Russian River Valley featured as the house pour (a source of LIOCO pride considering the number of local wineries that covet those spots!).

The anchor vineyard source for this California wine has long been the Teac Mor Vineyards, which our bohemian friend Steven Moore farms “egeneratively,” a system that enhances biodiversity, enriches soils, improves watersheds, and enhances ecosystems. There is a palpable hum coming from his vineyard — a cacophony of bees and birds and frogs and the bleating of pygmy goats.

The vines here are rooted in some very old, complex soils of volcanic ash, river stones, loam, and clay. To hear Steven speak of the geological drama that played out in this Valley millions of years ago is to understand better why the wines from his ranch are so full of character.

The 2018 Estero is one of the more crystalline and razor-sharp California wines, with a nervy weave of salinity tucked into its preserved lemon and fennel bulb core. The flavors from this wine by LIOCO, considered one of the best wineries in Healdsburg, are at once opulent and energetic, making for a long, clean, citrusy finish.

2018 Las Arenas, Santa Cruz Mountains *first time offered to our mailing list* Our success in Santa Cruz is primarily allied to our partnership with local legend Prudy Foxx. Known as the vine whisperer, Prudy manages our vineyards in the Aptos-Corralitos zone, and she does so in a mysterious, “witchy” way.

Each vine is managed uniquely, and we’ve seen her pitching crushed-up oyster shells from her pocket into the rows. Las Arenas, which means “the sands” in Spanish, refers to the deep sandy soils found in this pocket beside the cold Monterey Bay.

A blend of three Vineyard Designates—La Marisma, Howard Family, and Bruzzone—this Chardonnay captures the essence of the heavily forested, fog-choked maritime zone and yields a wine with the electric sap found solely in California’s most extreme growing zones.

These excellent California wines from Lioco, one of the best wineries in Healdsburg, lead with a slatey, wet stone note, some exotics like golden kiwi & starfruit, and finishes with just-ripe green pears and brioche. Sara and I pair this wine with panko-crusted ling cod finished with flaky sea salt and a squeeze of Eureka lemon.

Visit the LIOCO Wine Company, the Best Winery in Healdsburg

LIOCO’s excellent white California wines are the perfect pairing for seafood recipes.

Both the 2018 Estero from the Russian River Valley and the 2018 Las Arenas from grapes grown in the Santa Cruz Mountains offer clean, fresh flavors and a finish that perfectly complements nicely prepared fish dishes.

Join the winemakers and sip some truly excellent California wines at LIOCO Wine Company during your next outing to the Healdsburg area. Known as one of the best wineries in Healdsburg and the surrounding region, LIOCO selectively sources its unique quality grapes from exceptional vineyards as far as 200 miles.

Make your reservations to sample LIOCO’s excellent handcrafted California wines by visiting their website or phoning (707)-395-0148.

#best wine tasting in healdsburg

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richardprice-blog · 5 years ago

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Review of “Loonshots” by Safi Bahcall

I recently finished Loonshots, by Safi Bahcall. The book is in two halves. One half is about the trajectories of certain industry-changing ideas. The second half is about the principles behind creative cultures. In general, the book is a celebration of the “loonshot”: a crazy idea, dismissed by most people at start, that ends up changing an industry.

Safi Bahcall did a PhD in physics at Stanford, and then started a biotech company, which he IPO’d and ran for 13 years. The book includes beautiful descriptions of mechanisms of action within physics and biology.

The story of the development of radar

An early loonshot story is about the development of radar. Bahcall describes the critical role that radar played in the Battle of Britain.

"While Loomis was beginning his work on radar, a team in Britain neared completion of a national radar defense system. (The British discovery of radar was due, in part, to public demands that their Air Ministry investigate the use of death-ray weapons. The most insistent requests came from a widely ignored former government official given to ranting about imagined future air attacks on London. His name was Winston Churchill.) By the late 1930s, a chain of radar antennas ringed the British coast.

“After Germany marched through Poland in the fall of 1939 and made quick work of the rest of Europe in the spring of 1940, Hitler turned his attention north. In June, Churchill announced to Parliament, "The Battle of Britain is about to begin... Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.

"Churchill continued with what became one of the most famous lines of the twentieth century: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

"In July, Hitler attacked. His generals anticipated that the Luftwaffe, which had twice as many planes as the British Royal Air Force (RAF), would achieve air superiority in two to four weeks, as it had across continental Europe. Hitler's generals developed plans for a land invasion of Britain, called Operation Sea Lion, to follow the victory in the air.

"That victory would never come. Britain's chain of radar antennas allowed the RAF to detect enemy aircraft before they neared the coast. The intelligence allowed the British to concentrate their limited forces against each wave of attack. On September 15, commemorated in England as Battle of Britain Day, 144 German pilots and crew were shot down versus only 13 for the RAF. One German bomber pilot, whose unit had lost one-third of its aircraft in one hour, wrote that "if there were any more missions like that, our chances of survival would be nil."

"Two days later, Hitler indefinitely postponed the land invasion of Britain. By the end of October, the German attack was all but over. It was Germany's first loss of the war."

The next role that radar played in WW2 was in defeating the German submarines in the Atlantic. Bahcall writes:

“In February 1941, four months after the German defeat in the air battle over Britain, Hitler issued a new directive. If Germany couldn’t bomb England into submission, it would starve her to death: a siege. The principal weapon of that siege would be the U-boat. Unfortunately for the Allies, the long-wavelength radar used in the Battle of Britain proved useless against submarines. Long-range antennas required too much energy and were too heavy to mount on ships or planes. Sonar also did little to stop Hitler’s submarines: the range was too short, and sonar could not detect subs on the surface.

“Allied losses to U-boats rose rapidly, from 750,000 tons of cargo in 1939 to 4.3 million tons in 1941. Every month, U-boats were sinking ships faster than the Allies could build them. And the losses kept mounting.

“At the end of that year, on December 11, four days after Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. He unleashed Vice Admiral Karl Doenitz, his commander in charge of submarines, to fire at will on US ships in the Atlantic.

“….Allied shipping losses reached a staggering 7.8 million tons in 1942. By early 1943, food supplies to Britain had dwindled to two-thirds of normal levels. The government was forced to ration basic goods. Less than three months of commercial oil remained - ten months, if all emergency military reserves were included. Oil supply was not publicly discussed, but every commander, on both sides of the Atlantic, paid close attention. No oil meant no planes, no ships, no transport. No ability to resist the German machine. And Britain was running on fumes.

“In early March 1943, German code-breakers deciphered Allied transmissions indicating two large convoys, over 100 ships in total, heading eastward. Forty-three U-boats rushed to intercept them. Within 48 hours, the U-boats sank 20 ships without suffering a single loss.

“The British Canadian Star was hit on March 18. In Berlin, Doenitz and his staff celebrated: they had inflicted the largest single maritime loss of the war. It would be their last celebration.

“The same month the Canadian Star went down, US Army Air Force B-24 Liberator bombers, equipped with two new devices created by Loomis and his team of loons, deployed over the Atlantic.”

Bahcall introduces Loomis earlier in the book as the lead of the US radar efforts. Bahcall writes “By the end of 1940, Loomis had assembled dozens of the country’s best engineers and physicists inside an anonymous building at MIT. Their goal was to develop a radar system using short wavelengths (ten centimeters, called microwaves) rather than long wavelengths (tens or hundreds of meters, called radio waves). The shorter the wavelength, the greater the resolution. The radio-wave system developed at the naval lab (and later discovered independently in Britain) could detect ships and planes. A microwave system could detect the periscope of a submarine or track an incoming missile. But an even more important advantage had to do with size. Wavelength determines the size of the antenna needed, which is why microwave ovens fit in your kitchen and radio towers do not. A microwave radar system, if they could build one, would be portable. Any ship, plane, or even truck would carry one.”

“The first device [deployed by the US Army Air Force over the Atlantic] was a powerful microwave radar. Developed in less than 30 months, it could detect the periscopes of surfaced submarines, day or night, through clouds or fog. “Hunting subs across the vast ocean, however, required planes to quickly locate and fly to convoys when summoned. Navigating by the stars would be impossible, especially in rough weather. Loomis and his team came up with another idea: a grid of pulsed radio signals covering the Atlantic. With a specially designed decoder, a pilot could calculate his location on the grid without alerting an enemy ship.

“By the spring of 1943, the long-range Liberator bombers, with microwave radar and pulsed radio navigation, were fully operational and patrolling the Atlantic.

“On May 11, a convoy of 37 ships designated SC-130 departed Canada sailing eastward for England. Six days later, German intelligence identified the route through intercepted signals and alerted a wolf pack of 25 subs. On the evening of May 18, deep in the mid-Atlantic, the convoy encountered the first U-boats from the pack. The commander of the convoy’s escort ships, Peter Gretton, radioed for backup. Liberator bombers arrived within hours. The bombers’ microwave radar cut through the darkness and the fog. Previously invisible subs lit up their oscilloscope screens.

“Gretton and the bombers hunted every U-boat that showed itself. To escape the depth charges and guns, U-boats dove deep the instant they saw a plane or destroyer. U-645 radioed back to Berlin: “UP TO NOW HAVE BEEN DRIVEN UNDER WATER CONTINUALLY BY AIRCRAFT OUT OF LOW CLOUDS AND BY DESTROYERS.” U707: “CONTINUOUSLY DRIVEN UNDER WATER.” When Liberator P/120 arrived and quickly spotted a handful of subs, the pilot radioed Gretton for target priorities. Gretton replied with a list. The pilot joked, “As Mae West said, one at a time, gentlemen, please.”

“During the three day battle, the German U-Boats were unable to launch a single successful attack. Back in Berlin, Doenitz received similar messages from U-boat commanders all across the Atlantic: they were being chased underwater by bombers, with losses mounting.

“They had gone from the hunters to the hunted.

“On May 20, Doenitz radioed the pack of U-boats fighting convoy SC-130: “BREAK OFF OPERATIONS AGAINST CONVOY.” The battle was over. Not one Allied ship was lost. Three U-boats were sunk, with all aboard lost at sea, including one sub that contained a 21-year-old officer on his first mission: Doenitz’s son.

“In total, Allied planes and ships sank 41 boats in May, more in one month than in any of the first three years of the war. The loss came to nearly one-third of Doenitz’s operational fleet. On May 24, recognizing the inevitable, Doenitz withdrew U-boats from the Atlantic. Later that year, he wrote, “For some months past, the enemy has rendered the U-boat war ineffective. He has achieved this object, not through superior tactics or strategy, but through his superiority in the field of science; this finds its expression in the modern battle weapon - detection.”

The story of the invention of statins

Another story that Bahcall tells is the story of the discovery of statins, which he describes as “the most successful drug franchise in history.”

The story of statins starts with FDR. Bahcall writes “On April 12, 1945, FDR died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage…. For years FDR had suffered from severe chronic heart disease... The death of the world’s most famous American from heart disease galvanized support for research. In 1948, President Truman signed a bill creating the National Heart Institute. Included in the bill was funding for what eventually became the largest population study ever conducted: the Framingham Heart Study. The study’s results, published in 1961 as “Factors of Risk in the Development of Coronary Heart Disease,” established that elevated blood cholesterol conferred a high risk of heart attack or stroke.”

“The mortality rate from heart disease in the US - which had been growing since the beginning of the century - peaked in the late 1960s. Since then, the rate has decreased by roughly 75 percent, corresponding to well over 10 million lives saved over the past 50 years. Lifestyle changes - diet, exercise, the decline in smoking - are responsible for some of the gains. Much of the remainder is due to a drug isolated from a blue-green mold found in a grain store in Tokyo by a Japanese mushroom aficionado and microbiologist.

“The Framingham study ignited interest in cholesterol. Researchers launched dozens of clinical studies to evaluate whether new drugs or changes in diet could lower cholesterol and reduce heart attacks and strokes. In 1964, Konrad Bloch and Feodor Lynen received the Nobel Prize for explaining how cholesterol is created and processed inside cells. And in 1966, a 33 year-old farmer’s son, raised in a small mountain town in northern Japan, arrived in the United States determined to learn about this new science. Akira Endo, a scientist from the food-processing division at the Japanese conglomerate Sankyo, joined a lab at New York Albert Einstein’s College of Medicine that specialized in cholesterol research.

“…. Endo later returned to Japan determined to find a drug that lowered cholesterol. To find that drug, Endo turned to fungi - molds and mushrooms… Edo understood that fungi can’t run, but they are great chemists. Mushrooms can’t hop away from predators, so they secrete chemicals to discourage them (which is why so many mushrooms are toxic). Molds can’t chase after food, so they secrete chemicals to make their hosts juicier and more nutritious.

“…Since fungi are such great chemists, Endo reasoned, that’s where he would begin his search. Bacteria, Endo knew, are natural predators of molds and mushrooms. To defend themselves, fungi have evolved many way to kill bacteria. Pencillum notatum, for example, kills bacteria by secreting a compound that causes bacterial cell walls to collapse. That’s how its extract, penicillin, works.

“In New York, Endo had learned that many bacteria require cholesterol to survive. Could fungi secrete a chemical that kills their predators by blocking their cholesterol? In other words, Endo didn’t want just any mold that kills bacteria. He wanted a killer that used a specific weapon: a knife that surgically blocks cholesterol production. It took Endo two years to build and perfect a state-of-the-art microsopic detection system.

“Endo finally began screening fungi in April 1971. He tested just over six thousand species. In the summer of 1972, one sample lit up his system - what drug developers call a “hit”. A blue-green mold, discovered growing on rice in a grain store in Kyoto, blocked a key enzyme needed to make cholesterol. The mold was Penicillium citrinum, the same genus that produced penicillin, but a different species. Within a year, Endo extracted the molecule that lowered cholesterol. He called it ML-236B. The drug is now know as mevastatin. It is the sed - the original - from which sprang Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor, and all the other statins. The statins would grow into the mostly widely prescribed drug franchise in history, saving millions of lives.”

Bahcall goes to explain that the journey from this epiphany to the drug become widely available was riven with ups and downs. Endo’s employer, Sankyo, provided Endo with the funding to test the drug in rats. There was no reduction of cholesterol. Endo ran into a colleague at Sankyo who worked with chickens.

“It occurred to Endo that hens might have high blood cholesterol, since their eggs have so much of it.” Endo tested the drug on hens. “The results were spectacular. Mevastatin decreased cholesterol by early half, triglycerides by even more, with no ill effects. Much later, scientists learned that rats have mostly HDL (“good cholesterol”) circulating in their blood, and very little LDL, the “bad cholesterol” that contributes to heart disease. Which means that rats are a poor choice for evaluating statins, which lower just the LDL. Chickens have both types, like humans.”

Sankyo then ran a safety study on dogs, and it appeared that high doses of metastatin caused cancer in dogs. Sankyo “stopped the trial and mevastatin research.”

Some years earlier, Endo had already shared his findings with some researchers at Merck. Merck starts their own research program, and ended up discovering a compound that had the same effect as Endo’s, and “differed from Endo’s compound by just four atoms.” Separately, two scientists at the University of Texas were sceptical about the dog cancer finding; they “soon proved that the ultra-high doses used in dogs could lead to a harmless condition that looked like cancer but wasn’t: a false negative.” Merck re-started its research program and began new safety studies. “The results were strikingly positive, consistent with the earliest data observed by Endo and Yamamoto in their clinical studies. In February 1987, an FDA advisory panel unanimously recommended approving the first statin: Merck’s Mercavor.

“… In the US, statins prevent approximately half a million heart attacks and strokes each year. One recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded, “Few drugs have had such a dramatic effect on health outcomes.”

PanAm and American Airlines

Bahcall has a chapter on the swashbuckling story of PanAm and American Airlines. Pre-regulation of the airline industry, which happened in 1978, PanAm ruled the air. It was the largest and most profitable airline in the world. According to Bahcall, it led the industry through product innovation. Bahcall writes “it was the first American airline to fly transatlantic, the first to fly transpacific, the first to complete a round-the-world flight, the first to operate jets.”

Post-deregulation, the airline industry was flooded with competition. PanAm declined, and went bankrupt. American Airlines took over as the leading airline, leading with a focus on operational efficiency, rather than product innovation.

Polaroid

There is a nice chapter on Polaroid, and its founder Edwin Land. One of the delightful aspects of Loonshots is Bahcall’s physics and biology explanations. The biology explanations in the statins chapter are good, and the physics explanations in the radar chapter, and the Polaroid chapter, are good too. Bahcall describes polarization:

“A beam of light has three familiar properties: direction, intensity, and color. It also has a fourth hidden property, called polarization. Imagine a drone flying level to the ground. The drone can have wings parallel to the ground, rotated 90 degrees, or at any angle in between. Polarization of light acts like the wings on the drone. A light beam traveling parallel to the floor can be polarized horizontally, vertically, or at any angle in between Our eyes can’t detect polarization, so we don’t see it.

“If you are a Star Wars fan, you might remember the asteroid scene in “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980). TIE fighters are chasing the Millennium Falcon, piloted by Han Solo with Chewbacca and Leia at his side. Han steers into an asteroid field (“Never tell me the odds!”), plunges deeply into a big cave on an asteroid, and lands the ship, waiting for the TIE fighters to pass by. The three step out to look around. They quickly realize the “cave” is not quite what they thought. They race back to the Falcon, fire it up, and fly at full speed towards the rapidly closing heavily fanged jaws of the giant worm (technically, an exogorth), in whose mouth they had parked. The Falcon is horizontal.. The worm’s teeth are vertical. At the last second, Han flips the ship 90 degrees and escapes through the narrow slits between the teeth. The jaws snap shut behind them.

“Polarizing filters function like the worm’s teeth: a vertical filter only lets through vertically polarized filter. The Falcon vertical passes through. The Falcon horizontal does not.

Land ended up inventing, at the age of 19, the first man-made polarizer. The best natural polarizer was something called “herapathite”: crystals extracted from the urine of dogs who had been fed quinine (the quinine being a treatment for parasites).

Bahcall writes “Land came up with a crazy idea: embed millions of those tiny crystals into some kind of goo (he used nitrocellulose lacquer) and find a way to get them to line up. After a handful of failures, Land decided to try using a magnetic field to line them up, like a magnet can align small iron filings. He knew of a high-powered magnet at a physics lab at Columbia University. Since he wasn’t a student and had no privileges at the university, Land snuck into the building, climbed out onto a sixth-floor ledge, and entered the lab through a window. Land had placed a thin layer of his dark crystal-goo mix inside a plastic cell the size of a quarter. As soon as he placed that cell near the magnet, the dark cell turned transparent, The magnet had done the trick - it aligned the miniature crystals, allowing light to shine through. … It was, he said later, “the most exciting single event of my life.” He had created the first man-made polarizer. He was 19 years old.

“…Land soon realized that putting two polarizing filters together produces some striking, and useful, effects. Coat the front of a pair of goggles with a vertically polarizing film: on the back put a polarizer that can rotate inside the frame of the goggles. A tiny handle is attached to that back polarizer, which pokes out of the frame of the goggles at the twelve-o’clock position. When the handle is at twelve o’clock, the two filters line up, and all the light coming in at the front goes through the back. But as you rotate the back polarizer, by sliding the handle through ninety degrees toward the three o’clock position, less and less light makes it through. At exactly ninety degrees - when the front filter is vertical and the back filter is horizontal - no light gets through. Adjustable-shade goggles, which allowed pilots to quickly adjust from low-light to bright-light conditions, were another big Polaroid hit.

“Today, if you are using a laptop or smartphone or watch something on an LCD screen, you are using a variation of this trick, with a twist, all made possible by Edwin Land’s invention.

“Think of a barn with sliding doors on opposite facing sides. The back doors slide down from the roof and up from the ground, meeting in the middle, and are closed to a horizontal slit. The front doors slide from the left and from the right, and are closed to a vertical slit in the middle. A drone flies through the back opening with its wings horizontal, rotates ninety degrees inside the barn, then flies out through the front opening with its wings vertical. “Now, suppose the barn came with a switch. Turning on the switch jams any electronics. Drones can’t rotate while inside the barn. Any drone flying through the horizontal slit will stay horizontal and crash into the front door. No drone can get through.

“LCD pixels work just like those barns.

“The back of a pixel on an LCD display screen has a horizontal filter. The front has a vertical filter. Unlike the drone, light cannot rotate on its own traveling through empty space. It needs help. So pixels are filled with a special kind of goo called a liquid crystal, made of billions of kinds of microscopic rods, like tiny toothpicks - just like Land’s original polarizer. But in this case , the goo is sandwiched between the pixel’s horizontal filter back-door and vertical filter front-door. The toothpicks automatically line up horizontally next to the back and vertically next to the front. In between, they form a kind of twisted, quarter-turn spiral staircase, which connects the back and front. The spiral staircase does the work of rotating the light. Light enters through the horizontal opening in the back, travels through the staircase, its polarization rotating by a quarter turn, then flies out the vertical opening in the front and into your eyes. Just like the drone streaking through the barn.

“Each pixel, however, comes with a tiny digital switch. Turning the switch on fires up a tiny electric field that scrambles the toothpicks and crashes the spiral staircase. No light can get through. The pixel goes dark. Turning the switch off restores the spiral staircase. The pixel lights up. And there you have it: a digitally controlled on/off light pixel.

“The original iPhone screen squeezed in 320 of these digital pixels across and 480 pixels down. Today’s smartphone screens and high-definition TVs are made with more than two million pixels.”

Bahcall explains how Land came up with the idea of instant photography. “In December 1943, on a family vacation in Santa Fe, Land went for a stroll with his three-year-old daughter Jennifer. After he snapped some photos of her, she asked him, “Why can’t I see them now?” Started by the question, Land sent Jennifer to her mother. He continued his walk alone, thinking through the problem, turning over the question in his mind, applying insights he had learned from developing 3D photography. Thirty years later, he recalled the history of his invention to an audience of scientists and engineers: “Strangely, by the end of that walk, the solution to the problem [of instant photograph] had been pretty well formulated.”

“In traditional film photography, particles of light, called photons, land on film, leaving microscopic residues - a chemical memory. Think of small asteroids striking the surface of the moon, leaving tiny craters. Soaking the film in a developer enhances those residues a billionfold until the familiar negative emerges. It’s a negative image because the residues, where the light fell, are dark. To reverse the image and create the usual positive print, you shine light through the film onto white paper; a dark spot becomes white and a white spot becomes dark. Land’s insight was to combine those two steps, by developing the negative and the positive at the same time, inside the camera, using an ingenious chemical trick.

“In Polaroid’s instant photography, negative and positive print layers are joined together, like a sandwich, inside the camera, separated by less than one-hundredth of an inch. Attached to the bottom of the sandwich is a small, sealed sac of developing fluid, called a pod. Exiting the camera, the pod passes through a roller, which breaks the sac. Fluid spreads evenly in the thin space between the two layers. The chemistry of that fluid is such that unexposed molecules on the negative, which are light, are suctioned across the thin gap and become dark. The exposed molecules on the negative stay put. Within 60 seconds, the two layers can be pulled apart - presto, an instant print. Jennifer has her photograph.”

Polaroid went bankrupt in 2001, and is widely thought to have missed the shift towards digital photography. However, Bahcall observes that, based on de-classified documents, Land developed a digital photography system before anyone else, and provided the technology to the US government; he just declined to apply it within his own business.

Bahcall writes “Traditional photography exploits a chemical reaction. When enough photons (light particles) strike the silver molecules in film, the molecules change form. That creates a chemical memory of where photons landed. Under certain special conditions, however, when a photon lands, it can pop an electron out of an atom (the photoelectric effect). The loose electron can be trapped right where the photon landed, like catching a firefly in a jar. Trapped electrons signal their presence with voltage. The voltage forms an electrical memory of where photons landed.

“In 1969, a small team at Bell Labs created a grid of pixels with just the right conditions to trap electrons popped out of atoms by photons. It was a microscopic grid of jars catching fireflies. They called it a CCD chip. The chips turned out to be up to a hundred times more sensitive than film.” Bahcall writes that in 1957, Eisenhower wanted a satellite system that could take photos of territory around the world, and send those photos back to the US. Land and James Killian, the president of MIT “proposed that the country should develop and deploy satellites carrying cameras with giant telescopic lenses pointed at the earth. Snapping photos in space sounds like a good idea - but how would the photos get back to earth? Land and Killian recommended a system in which the satellites would eject the exposed film in canisters attached to a parachute. Air Force pilots would then fly planes with hooks that fished those canisters out of the sky.

“Eisenhower green-lit the program…. As the Cold War and Soviet expansion continued, a limitation of the satellite program became increasingly clear. On August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Satellite film clearly showed a large buildup of Soviet tanks and aircraft on the border before the invasion. But it was old news by the time the Air Force had retrieved the film: the invasion was already over.”

The new president, Nixon, wanted immediate photographic data. Some people in the military thought that the solution was to put scanners in the satellites: scan the photos in the satellite, and then radio the images to earth. Land proposed a digital photography system, using CCDs. The first satellite with a digital photography system launched in 1976.

The invention of insulin and the origin of the biotechnology industry

Bahcall describes how insulin was invented, and how the biotechnology industry was started.

“Up until the mid-1980s, that was the drug development industry: academics tended the wide field of research; the global pharmas drew on that research to create new drugs (production) and sell them to customers (distribution). Like the old Hollywood studio Majors, the big pharma Majors controlled both production and distribution. Until a young physician treating a 14-year-old boy created an entirely new kind of drug.

“Most drugs we use come from nature - plants, animals, or microbes. The active ingredients in these natural-product drugs are relatively small molecules: aspirin, from willow tree bark, has just 21 atoms; morphine, from the opium poppy, has 40; Akira Endo’s statin, from a mold, has 62. They fight disease by acting on proteins, the much larger molecules that do much of the work in a cell. When proteins malfunction, cells can spin out of control, causing disease. Natural-product drugs work by jamming into tiny crevices in overactive proteins, stopping them like a small wrench inserted into the guts of a giant, out-of-control robot. Aspirin blocks proteins involved in inflammation. Morphine blocks proteins that signal pain. Statins block a protein that regulates cholesterol levels. Chemotherapies block proteins (or other very large molecules) necessary for cell division. Nearly all drugs developed from the nineteenth through the late twentieth century are of this type.

“The birth of a new kind of medicine began with a boy in Canada. On December 2, 1921, Leonard, 14 years old, was admitted to a Toronto hospital weighing 65 pounds, lethargic, his hair falling out, with acetone in his urine and dangerously elevated blood sugar. He was one of many children at the end stages of what is now called type 1 diabetes. State-of-the-art treatment was a starvation diet. Life expectancy was a few months. Twenty-five years earlier, a Polish-German scientist, Oskar Minkowski, discovered that removing the pancreas in animals caused symptoms of diabetes. Minkowski and many others tried administering ground-up animal pancreas as a treatment, but after more than 20 years of failed attempts, the leading American diabetes researcher wrote in a textbook, “All authorities are agreed… injections of pancreatic preparations have proved both useless and harmful. The failure began with Minkowski and has continued to the present day without interruption.”

“Meanwhile a 29-year-old surgeon in Canada, with no experience in research and no funds (he supported himself by taking out tonsils and selling medical instruments), read an article about the pancreas. He grew curious and decided to work on the problem, either because he was courageous in the face of all those failures or - more likely - because he didn’t read textbooks and was unaware of them. He came up with a new idea for extracting from the pancreas whatever mysterious substance might be controlling blood sugar. Working with a team in Toronto, he tried his preparation on some dogs and saw promising results. On January 11, 2922, he tried it on Leonard. The team waited anxiously in the hallway. Nothing happened. Their extract looked murky, so a biochemistry specialist was brought in to improve it. Twelve days later, Leonard was injected with a new mix.

“Within 24 hours, Leonard’s blood sugar fell almost by 80 percent, and the acetone and sugar in his urine fell by almost 90 percent. He “became brighter, more active, looked better, and said he felt stronger,” wrote the surgeon, Fred Banting, in a rapidly published medical report. The pancreas extract turned out to be a protein. Banting called it insulin. It saved Leonard’s life.

“… Insulin changed medicine. Proteins were no longer just the targets of drugs, they could be drugs. Rather than block a misfiring robot with a tiny wrench, we replace the entire robot.

“But there was a problem. Harvesting animal pancreases for every diabetic is no more practical than chopping down willow trees to make aspirin for every patient with a fever. It took 50 years to find a solution. Developed in the 1970s, genetic engineering - which made it possible to grow mass quantities of purified human proteins in a lab - turned Banting’s discovery of insulin into practical therapy.

“Most of the big pharma Majors passed on the idea of a lab-grown protein as a new kind of medicine. The idea of engineered proteins as drugs was not too crazy, however, for a handful of entrepreneurs in the early 1980s, who started what became known as biotechnology companies. The success of their initial public offerings - most famously, Genentech - established a market for a new type of company: one with no revenue, no profits, no sales force, and no certainty when, if ever, its technology would become a profit.”

Heliocentrism

Bahcall has a chapter on heliocentrism, the idea that the earth goes round the sun, rather than the other way around.

“The heliocentric idea first appeared in the fourth century BC, then periodically resurfaced, and was quashed, sometimes brutally, for nearly two thousand years. In the sixth century, the Indian astronomer Aryabhata suggested that the earth rotates about its axis every 24 hours, explaining the daily rotation of the stars and the sun in the sky. Hints of theories incorporating the motion of the earth appeared in both Christian Europe and outposts of the Islamic empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

“In Poland, in a small pamphlet completed around 1510 and privately circulated, Nicolaus Copernicus, a deeply religious Catholic church official, described in detail a system in which the earth revolves around the sun. He took pains to explain why his ideas posed no conflict with religion. The Vatican, intrigued, encouraged Copernicus to publish (conflict with the Church began only a century later, when Galileo ridiculed Church leaders). Copernicus resisted, sensitive not only to what his peers and other Church officials might think but also to his inability to answer the obvious flaws of his theory: If the earth spins about its axis every 24 hours at high velocity, why aren’t birds flung from their nests? If we are hurtling around the sun, why isn’t the moon left behind? In other words, like every loonshot, his theory arrived covered in warts. “Prodded by an eager disciple, Copernicus finally published three decades later, on his deathbed, in 1543. Few took his ideas seriously. Just as he had feared, the majority laughed at the warts and dismissed the whole thing. In 1589, the most prominent Italian astronomer, Giovanni Magini, wrote of Copernicus’s ideas “His hypotheses are rejected by practically everybody as being absurd.” One historian identified only five scholars across all Europe around that time, five decades after Copernicus’ death, who believed in his sun-centered world.”

“One of those five was a teacher at the University of Tubingen in Germany named Michael Maestlin, whose lectures on planetary motion impressed a 17-year-old student named Johannes Kepler.

“…Kepler grew fascinated with Copernicus’s ideas. He recognized the many unknowns and flaws… The 24 year old Kepler published a book filled with visions of pyramids and cubes in the sky shaping the orbits of the planets… All his ideas were wrong. … but Kepler’s brilliance as a mathematician shone through. He sent the book to Tycho Brahe, the leading astronomer in Europe, who immediately hired Kepler as an assistant.

“Tycho assigned Kepler the task of analyzing the motion of Mars. Kepler began his calculations by assuming circular motion, the only form considered perfect enough for heavenly objects. All prior planet-watchers - from the Babylonians to the Greeks, Arabs and Europeans, up through Copernicus and including Tycho - began the same way. But despite 5 years of obsessive analysis, Kepler could not get rid of a small discrepancy between where his calculations predicted Mars should appear in the sky and what he saw looking through Tycho’s instruments. It was an error of eight minutes of arc, less than one-twentieth of 1 percent. No matter how many and what forms of cycles, epicycles, equants and eccentrics he added (the mathematical tricks used by the Greek, Islamic and European astronomers up to that time), he couldn’t make that tiny difference go away. So Kepler decided to reject “that which exists only in the mind, and which Nature entirely refuses to accept”: the assumption of circular motion.

“Kepler’s act lit a fire. In his New Astronomy (1609), Kepler announced, “Because they could not have been ignored, these eight minutes alone will have led the way to the reformation of all of astronomy.”

“Kepler’s ideas for universal truths were radical. The idea of elliptical orbits (even the idea of an orbit); the idea of a force from the sun that moves the planets; the idea that natural laws govern those motions; the idea that we should infer those laws from careful measurement - all of which Kepler introduced, all were new.

“… Kepler’s radical ideas culminated in the widespread acceptance not only of a new astronomy but also a new way of thinking: truths judged by the outcome of experiments rather than the gavel of authority.

“The rise and explosive spread of the scientific method across seventeenth century Western Europe, in the decades after Kepler’s death, and the revolution in the tools of industry it enabled sparked a pace and scale of change unlike any other in human history.

“For ten thousand years, life expectancy barely changed. Between 1800 and 2000, it doubled. From AD 1 to 1800, global population grew less than 0.1 percent a year. By the mid-twentieth century it was growing at 20 times that rate. The world’s average economic output per person was nearly constant for two thousand years - between $450 and $650, in 1990 dollars. Since 1800, it has increased by a thousand percent.

“The tiny nation states of Western Europe, particularly England, rode that moonshot to global dominance - the principal reason why the global language of business today is English rather than Chinese, Arabic or Hindi.”

The Royal Society in England, and the steam engine

Bahcall writes “Why England? We’ve been looking at the global first-appearance question: why did modern science appear first in Western Europe as opposed to the empires of China, Islam, or India? But there’s another, more local, first-appearance question: why England, as opposed to, say, France, Italy, or the Netherlands?

“The answer cannot simply be a monopoly on brilliant scientists. Scientists in nearly every nation across Western Europe contributed crucial scientific steps. “Luck and timing always play a role in creativity and invention - the essence of a first-appearance story… England did one thing quite differently - much better than its neighbors, which set it up to be luckier than its neighbors. England established the earliest example of a moonshot nursery inside one country. “The Royal Society of London, created in 1660, brought together nearly all the founders of modern science in England, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton. It famously played a crucial role in helping and inspiring Newton. Without the Royal Society, as one historian noted, “It is doubtful that there would ever have been a Principia.”

“…The Royal Society helped Newton and England win a race against time, a competition to discover truths of nature. But the Society didn’t come together purely for basic research: “Science was to be fostered and nurtured as leading to the improvement of man’s lot on earth by facilitating technologic invention.” “In 1667, the Society’s first historian and promoter, Thomas Sprat, wrote of “extraordinary Inventions” such as “Watches or Locks or Guns” and “Remed[ies]… against an Epidemical Disease” and declared that the “Publick should have Title to these Miraculous Productions.” The purpose of the Royal Society, wrote Sprat, “goes to the Root of all Noble Inventions and proposes an infallible Course to make England the Glory of the Western World.”

“As Sprat wrote those words, Robert Boyle was completing his experiments on the expansion and compression of gases, carried out by Hooke as his assistant. Hooke had built for Boyle what would soon become one of the most famous research devices in Europe: an air pump. Boyle used the device to discover the law now named after him (the pressure of a gas is proportional to its density).

“After a few years working for Boyle, Hooke grew busy with his own work (inventing the microscope, proposing a universal gravity), so in 1975, Boyle hired a new assistant, a French medical doctor named Denis Papin. Papin continued the air-pump experiments, but added a twist. He was curious if he could add a piston to the pump and somehow create a working cycle fo compression and decompression.

“In 1687, Papin published a book describing how to use the Hooke-Boyle air pump to cook food. He called his new device a “Digester of Bones,” since it squashed bones into edible bits. The 1687 book was a sequel to his first book, on the invention of what is now called a pressure cooker, so Papi called it “A Continuation of The New Digester of Bones”. Buried in the back, after a section on how to cook cows’ horns and dried vipers, in what might be called the greatest example of burying the lead in history, as the answer to his puzzle on how to add a piston to Boyle’s air pump. It described the key components for a new invention: a steam engine.

“Although the scholars of the Royal Society paid little attention to Papin’s ideas, especially since they appeared in the back of a book about cooking, those ideas did not escape the notice of a craftsman in Dartmouth, England, named Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen had little interest in philosophy but a lot of time for useful gadgets, like pressure cookers.

In 1712, Newcomen turned Papin’s movable piston inside a pump into the first practical, workable steam engine. Newcomen’s invention rapidly spread throughout England. Over the next century, inventors continued to improve its efficiency. The engine soon elevated production of resources and goods far, far past the limits set by human or animal power, the limits that had held societies around the globe to fixed level of production for thousands of years. The change, which began in England and soon spread to the rest of Europe, fueled Western Europe’s rapid rise to global power, the defeat of much larger and older empires, and an exponential growth in human population.”

Bell Labs, DARPA, OSRD, Xerox PARC

Bahcall also investigates the cultures at highly creative and innovative R&D organizations, and tries to extract from them some principles that led to their success.

About Bell Labs, Bahcall writes “Over the next 50 years [from 1915], Theodore Vail’s organization - eventually called the Bell Telephone Laboratories - produced the transistor, the solar cell, the CCD chip (used inside every digital camera), the first continuously operating laser, the Unix operating system, the C programming language, and eight Nobel prizes. Vail created the most successful industrial research lab in history, and AT&T grew into the country’s largest business.”

About OSRD, Bahcall writes “Vannevar Bush’s new organization, eventually called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), would create the opportunity Bush sought for scientists, engineers and inventors at universities and private labs to explore the bizarre. It would be a national department of moonshots, seeding and sheltering promising but fragile ideas across the country. The group would develop the unproven technologies the military was unwilling to fund. It would be led by a damn professor. “The military and its supporters, as expected, objected. They told Bush his new group “was an end run, a grab by which a small company of scientists and engineers, acting outside established channels, got hold of the authority and money for the program of developing new weapons.”

“Bush’s answer: “That, in fact, is exactly what it was.”

Vannevar Bush wrote a report for Truman, called “Science: The Endless Frontier”, which advocated for a national investment in science. Bahcall writes “Since the end of World War II, hundreds of industry-changing, or industry-creating, discoveries originating in the US - including GPS, personal computers, the biotechnology industry, the internet, pacemakers, artificial hearts, magnetic resonance imaging, the chemotherapy cure for childhood leukemia, even the original Google search algorithm - sprang from the system Bush’s report inspired.

About DARPA, Bahcall writes “Since 1958, one two-hundred-person research group, deep inside a massive organization, has spun out the internet, GPS, carbon nanotubes, synthetic biology, pilotless aircraft (drones), mechanical elephants, the Siri assistant in iPhones, and more. .. The early computer network ARPANET evolved into the internet. A satellite-based geolocation system evolved first into military GPS, then the consumer GPS used in nearly every car and smartphone. A project to assist soldiers with software that could understand voice commands spun out Siri, now found in every iPhone. A worldwide system of seismic sensors, installed by DARPA to distinguish earthquakes from nuclear tests, made possible the first nuclear test ban treaty.” Bahcall observes that Xerox PARC was led by Bob Taylor, a former DARPA program manager. Bahcall writes “Xerox PARC was the birth center of much of the early personal computer industry. Bob Taylor said he modeled that legendary research group on the “management principles developed at DARPA.”

Bahcall extracts a few principles from these innovative R&D groups. He calls these principles the “Bush-Vail” rules, after Vannevar Bush, the creator of the OSRD, and Theodore Vail, the creator of Bell Labs.

Separate the phases

Bahcall writes “Separate your artists and your soldiers. Create separate groups for inventors and operators: those who many invent the next transistor vs those who answer the phone; those who design radically new weapons vs those who assemble planes. You can’t ask the same group to do both, just like you can’t ask water to be liquid and solid at the same time. Wide management spans, loose controls, and flexible (creative) metrics work best for loonshot groups. Narrow management spans, tight controls, and rigid (quantitive) metrics work best for franchise groups.

“Vannevar Bush wrote “The essence of a sound military organization is that it should be tight. But a tight organization does not lend itself to innovations,” Bush wrote. “And loosening it in time of war… would be fraught with danger.” But, Bush continued, “there should be close collaboration between the military and [some] organization, made loose in its structure on purpose.” “Bush quarantined the team working on radar in anonymous office buildings at MIT. He recognized that the tight organization needed by the military, mentioned earlier, is not conducive to scientists exploring the bizarre, just as a “good organization for a research laboratory would not work well for a combat regiment in the field.

“Theodore Vail quarantined the team working on the technology for long-distance telephony in an office-building in lower Manhattan. Like Bush, he tailored the systems. He “moved away from rigid task allocation” of telephone operations and toward a similar loose-touch style.

“Both Bush and Vail understood intuitively decades ago what is repeatedly being rediscovered today. Efficiency systems such as Six Sigma or Total Quality Management might help franchise projects, but they will suffocate artists. When 3M, for example, inventor of Post-It Notes and Scotch Tape, brought in a high priest of Six Sigma as a new CEO in 2000, innovation plunged. It didn’t recover until well after he left and a new CEO dialed back the system. The new CEO described the efficiency systems as a mistake: “You can’t say… well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday, and two on Friday.” Art Fry, the retired inventor of Post-It notes, said that his idea would never have emerged under the new approach. “Which doesn’t mean that efficiency systems have no place. Loose goals and dream sessions might help artists. But they will harm the coherence of an army.”

Love your artists and soldiers equally

Bahcall writes “Artists tend to favor artists; soldiers tend to favor soldiers. Teams and companies need both to survive and thrive. Both need to feel equally valued and appreciated.”

“Maintaining balance so that neither phase overwhelms the other requires something that sounds soft and fuzzy but is very real and often overlooked. Artists working on loonshots and soldiers working on franchises have to feel equally loved.

“After creating what eventually became Bell Labs, Vail wrote, “No division, department, branch or group can be either ignored or favored at the expense of the others without unbalancing the whole.” The trap for most groups, however, is that soldiers naturally favor soldiers and artists naturally favor artists. “Equal-opportunity respect is a rare and valuable skill. Vannevar Bush, though a veteran academic at the start of the war, genuinely respected the military. “I have enjoyed associating with military men more than with any other group, scientists, businessmen, professors,” he wrote, years later. The deference with which Bush treated officers helped him understand, and ultimately influence, the military far more than the many scientists and engineers who had tried, and failed, before him.”

Manage the transfer, not the technology

Bahcall writes “Bush, though a brilliant inventor and engineer, pointedly stayed out of the details of any one loonshot. “I made no technical contribution whatsoever to the war effort,” he wrote. “Not a single technical idea of mine ever amounted to shucks. At times I have been called an “atomic scientist.” It would be fully as accurate to call me a child psychologist.”

“Vail similarly stayed out of the details of the technical program. Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises - between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.

“When the balance broke down, they intervened. In the chain of creating a breakthrough, the transfer between the two sides is the weakest link. Scientists may pay little attention to soldiers or marketers. Soldiers and suits may dismiss the babble of nerds. Bush and Vail zeroed in on that link. A radar detection device buried in a building full of physicists would sink no U-boats. A tiny switch made from semi-conductors buried in Bell Labs would remain a curiosity rather than grow into the transistor, the invention of the century.

“A flawed transfer from inventors to the field is not the only danger. Transfer in the other direction is equally important. No product works perfectly the first time. If feedback from the field is ignored by inventors, initial enthusiasm can rapidly fade, and a promising program will be dropped. Early aircraft radar, for example, was practically useless: pilots ignored it. Bush made sure the pilots went back to the scientists and explained why they weren’t using it. The reason had nothing to do with the technology: pilots in the heat of battle didn’t have time to fiddle with the complicated switches on the early radar boxes. The user interface was lousy. Scientists quickly created a custom display technology - the sweeping line and moving dots now called a PPI display. Pilots started using radar.”

Management spans

A management span refers to how many people report to a manager in a company. Bahcall writes “Wider management spans (15 or more direct reports per manager) encourage looser controls, greater independence, and more trial-and-error experiments. Which also leads to more failed experiments. Narrower spans (five or fewer per manager) allow tighter controls, more redundancy checks, and precise metrics. Which leads to fewer failures. There’s no right answer averaged across a company. When we assemble planes we want tight controls and narrow spans. When we invent futuristic technologies for those planes, we want more experiments and wider spans.”

“…A wide management span helps nurture loonshots: it encourages constructive feedback from peers. At Xerox PARC, for example, the entire computer research lab, between 40 to 50 people, reported directly to Bob Taylor. The structure, one engineer said, “provided a continuous form of peer review. Projects which were exciting and challenging obtained more than financial or administrative support; they received help and participation from other [lab] researchers. As a result, quality work flourished, less interesting work tended to wither.” More layers “would have promoted organizational distractions, tempting researchers to worry more about tiles and status than problem solving.”

“Taylor and Bill Coughran [who led computer research at Bell Labs] understood about engineers what Catmull understood about film directors: creative talent responds best to feedback from other creative talent. Peers, rather than authority. Catmull designed a system for a group of peer film directors to regularly coalesce around a project and give its director advice - honest feedback from colleagues rather than marching orders from marketers or producers. Creatives are suspicious of those outside their faith. It’s similar in drug discovery: biologists and chemists respond best to criticism from their own kind, much less well to suggestions from MBAs.”

Bahcall has a thought experiment: “Let’s say you work an eight-hour day, from 9 to 5, and it’s 4pm. You need to decide if you will spend the final hour of the day on (a) work that might increase the value of your projects (polishing up the client presentation; researching coffee machine designs) or (b) networking and promoting yourself within the company (currying favor with your boss, your boss’s boss, or other influential managers).” Bahcall hypothesizes that if there is a narrow management span, then there is lots of opportunity for promotion to new titles, so the “return on politics”, as he calls is, is high: if you invest in politics, there is a higher chance that you will get promoted. If there is a wide management span, then very few people are getting promoted, so the return on politics is lower.

Project-Skill Fit

Bahcall defines a notion called “project-skill” fit. This means how closely the project you are working on matches your skillset. Bahcall’s theory is that if there is high project-skill fit, then good things will follow. He writes “Invest in the people and processes that will scan for a mismatch between employees’ skills and their assigned projects, and will help managers adjust roles or employees transfer between groups. The goal is to have employees stretched neither too much nor too little by their roles.

Soft Equity

Bahcall writes “When we think of equity stakes, we usually think of stock options or bonuses or something similar that ties employees financially to the success of their project. Those are tangible forms of equity. Recognition from peers is a form of intangible or soft equity. It can’t be measured through stock price or cash flows. But it can be just as strong a motivator, or even stronger, as both a carrot and a stick.

“”A soldier,” Napoleon said, “will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” In the case of mid-level corporate soldiers given visibility and autonomy, the colored ribbon is recognition from respected peers. Imagine a computer graphics pioneer called to the podium at a graphics conference, presented a trophy, basking in the admiration of his colleagues.”

Middle Management

Bahcall has some interesting observations that it is middle management of a company where evaluation of success or failure of a project is the hardest. Bahcall writes “We saw how DARPA uses soft equity: nonfinancial stakes in project success, like peer recognition. Most large or midsized companies not only rarely tap into the power of soft equity but they do a bad job of using ordinary (hard) equity: stock options or bonuses. Large companies, for example, often use a steep equity grant curve; they award large stock options or cash bonuses at the highest levels (as much as 100 percent of base salary), and tiny amounts at junior and mid-levels (below 10 percent). That creates exactly the wrong incentive for the most vulnerable part of the organization - the dangerous middle.

“At the lower levels of an organization, where one person oversees one product or service without depending on many others, evaluations are not too difficult. The coffee machine came out great or it didn’t. The gaming app attracted users or it didn’t. Clients loved the presentation or they hated it.

“At the most senior levels of an organization, the CEO and board can keep an eye on internal battles, and they can intervene directly, as needed, to separate personal agendas from collective interests. A CEO and board span the entire organization and have the least to gain from turf wars.

“It’s the dangerous middle between these two levels that carries the greatest risk in the battle between politics and loonshots. Evaluations are more complex than at the lowest levels: there’s not just one coffee machine, but many products or services that may depend on dozens of external and internal factors, only some of which are under a manager’s control. And those same managers are far from the watchful eyes of a CEO of board, so the small fires of political agendas quietly smolder with no one to extinguish them. A wants B’s budget; B wants C out of the way; D wants A’s headcount; and so on. Steep equity grant curves - big bonuses at the highest levels, tine ones at the lowest levels - just raise the stakes of those battles. The big bonuses are just one or two steps up the ladder for middle managers like A, B, C and D - so close they can taste them. The steep curve creates a middle-manager version of Survivor: a giant jackpot for those who succeed in crushing their colleagues and staying alive.

“…Shifting rewards more toward projects and less toward promotion is difficult. It demands a lot from managers. Writing a bonus check to everyone in a group for 10 percent of their base salary on a good year and nothing on a bad year is easy. A system with larger stakes and greater variability - one person earns 60% for their triumphant coffee machine, another earns zero for a flop - is much harder. Easily measured, easily understood goals need to be carefully designed and agreed upon. Performance needs to be assessed fairly to avoid violent end-of-year arguments. Difficult messages need to be delivered with actionable suggestions, so an employee sees a clear path to greater rewards in the future.” Bahcall’s suggestion is that companies hire a Chief Incentives Officer. He writes “Imagine appointing a chief incentives officer, well trained in the subtleties of aligning value, who is solely focused on achieving a state-of-the-art incentive system. How much might politics decrease and creativity improve if rewards for teams and individuals were closely and skillfully matched to genuine measures of achievement?

“… A good incentives officer can also save money. He or she can identify wasteful bonuses and tap into the power of nonfinancial rewards: peer recognition, reduced commute times, choice of assignments, freedom to work on a passion project, and so on. Which is another reason to think of the position as strategic: A chief revenue officer (head of sales) seeks the highest sales for a given sales budget. A good incentives officer will also seek the maximum return from a limited resource: the most motivated teams for a given compensation budget.”

Loonshots is a fantastic book. Bahcall is a wonderful explainer of scientific phenomena. He couches things in terms you can understand. My 6 year old twin boys were able to understand and be amused by Bahcall's stories of radar, of polarizers, and of how statins were discovered. Bahcall also has some interesting reflections about cultural forces and practices in innovative organizations.

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