| Oceanography > Issues > Archive > Volume 16 > Issue 3 |
2003, Oceanography 16(3):15–19, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.25
Scripps Before World War II: The Men, the Science,
and the Instruments
Author | First Paragraphs | Full Article | Citation
Author
Deborah Day | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, California, USA
First Paragraphs
A century ago, University of California zoologist William E. Ritter dreamed of establishing a marine station on the West Coast of the United States. Beginning in 1892, he and a few of his graduate students pitched a tent each summer at a different town along the Pacific coast and studied marine specimens. In 1903, he was in San Diego and met the Scripps family, who would fund his dream laboratory. Ritter, E. W. Scripps, and Ellen Browning Scripps wrote the bylaws of the newly established Marine Biological Association of San Diego on September 26, 1903. The marine station in San Diego, they wrote, was to conduct, "a biological and hydrographic survey of the waters of the Pacific Ocean adjacent to the coast of Southern California; to build and maintain a public aquarium and museum."
Historians of science have long discussed this wording to determine Ritter's intention. Was the San Diego station to be just another summer shore station for biologists or was it really a proto-oceanographic institution?
These historians have generally studied Ritter's lectures and publications to answer this question. But a study of the instruments acquired by scientists at Scripps before 1940 may offer better evidence of their scientific intentions. Oceanography has been called an instrument-driven science. Instruments have defined ocean science as a discipline and have influenced the way Scripps Institution was organized. That was true in 1903 and it is true today.
Full Article
Citation
Day, D. 2003. Scripps before World War II: The men, the science, and the instruments. Oceanography 16(3):15–19, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.25.