In this case, perhaps it's also that there's a current sad news item about the loss of a tourist submersible around the wreck of the Titanic ( https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-65967464 ) though honestly I have not been paying this story much attention.
In short, I had a dream last night. It was one of those tossing, fragmented dreams, all mixed up imagery and a sense of "working on" something. It seemed to be about submersibles.
As sometimes happens for me, some fragments of spoken words also came through this dream. First it seemed to be the name "Alan". Later, as I surfaced closer to wakefulness, the word turned into "Alvin", which I understood as the famous submersible Alvin DSV-2, commissioned in 1964 and which remains in use today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSV_Alvin
The Alvin is definitely close to Townsend Brown's old stomping ground, the Navy and hints of secret underwater spy missions. But what caught my attention on reading the Wikipedia page is this:
Did I know this? Wikipedia doesn't know much about this man:Named to honor the prime mover and creative inspiration for the vehicle, Allyn Vine,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allyn_Vine
The January 8, 1994 New York Times has more info in Vine's obituary:Allyn C. Vine (1914–1994) was a physicist and oceanographer who was a leader in developing crewed submersible vessels to explore the deep sea.[1]
Projects
* Major contributor to redesigning the bathythermograph during World War II. His version could be used on submarines to detect the ocean thermocline.[2]
* Inspiration for DSV Alvin
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/08/obit ... ibles.html
The US Navy is a large place so there is probably no direct link between Allyn Collins Vine and Thomas Townsend Brown. (There could be - he would have been only nine years younger than Townsend - but I have no data to indicate that they ever met.) That's why I'm filing this as "Voices from the Rabbit Hole" because that's literally what it is. A spoken word in a dream that led me to the biography of another remarkable man about which little seems to be spoken in public. And who probably deserves to be known more widely.Allyn C. Vine, an oceanographer who was a leader in developing manned submersible vessels to explore the deep sea, died on Tuesday at his home in Woods Hole, Mass. He was 79.
The cause was heart failure, said Shelley Lauzon, a spokeswoman at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Mr. Vine was a physicist, physical oceanographer and senior scientist at the institution for nearly 40 years, until his retirement in 1979. Contributed to War Effort
Because of Mr. Vine's tenacity in pursuing the construction of submersibles, the first American manned research submersible for deep diving was named Alvin, a contraction of his name. When the vessel was christened in June 1964, Mr. Vine was unable to be present because he was three miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean aboard the French submersible Archimede.
His interests extended far beyond submersibles, to deep-sea geology and the way sound travels through water. He was noted for producing new techniques and unusual oceanographic equipment.
During World War II, he made a major contribution to the Navy's submarine forces by redesigning the bathythermograph, an instrument that continuously measures water temperature at various depths from ships and submarines. He made a version that could be used on submarines to find a layer of temperature change in the ocean called a thermocline. This layer deflected sound waves and could be used by submarines to hide from enemy sonars.
In 1972, the Navy said Mr. Vine's contributions had resulted in "the savings of untold numbers of lives and millions of dollars in ships and equipment."
Mr. Vine came away from the war with the idea that submarines were ideal for oceanographic research. When the idea of building a small submersible vessel for oceanographic research was raised in the 1950's, it met with little enthusiasm from researchers. But Mr. Vine persevered with a small group of scientists, and Alvin was built for the Navy.
Since its completion in 1964, the 22-foot-long submarine has achieved a number of triumphs. In 1966, it recovered a hydrogen bomb that had fallen to the floor of the Mediterranean after a B-52 bomber and a tanker plane collided over Spain. In 1977, scientists aboard Alvin found strange life forms thriving in water heated by hot springs off the coast of Ecuador. In 1986, an expedition reached the wreckage of the ocean liner Titanic.
Allyn Collins Vine was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on June 1, 1914. As an adolescent, he raided the local telephone company's junkpiles for gear to build contraptions.
He earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Hiram College, a small liberal arts college in Hiram, Ohio, and a master's degree at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where his adviser was Dr. W. Maurice Ewing, one of the founders of modern oceanography.
Dr. Ewing took Mr. Vine to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution for cruises aboard the Atlantis, the institution's first oceangoing research vessel, during summers in the late 1930's. Mr. Vine joined the oceanographic institution in 1940.
After the war, he retained close ties to the Navy. In 1946, he helped make wave measurements at the atomic bomb test site at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. From 1947 to 1950, he worked on alternate weeks at the Sonar Division of the Navy Bureau of Ships, mainly on long-range sound transmission and efforts to improve oceanographic equipment.
He was the author or co-author of 30 scientific publications and 10 technical reports and held 6 patents on oceanographic devices. He received a number of awards, including the Blakely Smith Medal for outstanding accomplishments in ocean engineering from the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers.
In addition to his wife, Adelaide, whom he married in 1940, he is survived by two sons, Norman, of Woods Hole, and David, of Chattanooga, Tenn.; a daughter, Vivian Dreisbach of Woods Hole; two brothers, Everett, of Garrettsville, Ohio, and Victor, of Sequin, Tex., and two grandchildren.
Regards, Nate