At a Manhattan dinner last week Professor Maurice Ewing, director of Columbia University’s Lament Geological Observatory, received the first $25,000 Vetle-sen Prize-for high achievement in the earth sciences (geology, seismology, oceanography, etc). From Columbia’s onetime president, Dwight Eisenhower, came a message of congratulation; from assembled speakers came paeans of praise. But as the tributes converged on his rumpled head, Maurice Ewing, 53, most likely was thinking about a ridge in the floor of the Pacific which, according to one of his theories, should have a crack running along its peak.
Oceanographer Ewing, called “Doc” by admirers and “The Dragon” by some others, was born in Lockney, Texas of a farm family. He put himself through Houston’s Rice Institute, taught physics at Lehigh University. In 1934 he got a summer job tossing hunks of blasting gelatin from a whaleboat off the East Coast so that the recorded shock waves could be used to study the sediments on the bottom. Ever since, the ocean’s bottom has been Maurice Swing’s oyster. But unlike most oceanographers, he is no sentimental sea dog. He dislikes the ocean itself; its water gets in his way. The best thing it does, he thinks, is to carry his instruments to interesting places.
The Payoff. Shifting his summers to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Ewing conducted gravity studies from the submarine Barracuda, designed and built a much-improved camera to picture the ocean bottom. Impressed by the distance that explosion waves travel through sea water, he tried to sell the Navy on using them for communication. But not until seven years later, in 1944, did his system get a trial. Then he proved that waves from a 4-lb. depth charge exploded 4,000 ft. below the ocean’s surface can be heard 1,200 miles away. This communication method is now called SOFAR (sound fixing and ranging), and it can carry a signal across an ocean.
SOFAR put Ewing in the oceanographic big time. He soon moved to Columbia to set up new courses in geophysics. In 1948 the widow of New York Financier Thomas W. Lament left to Columbia her magnificent Hudson River estate. Ewing and his staff moved in. What particularly took Ewing’s eye was a spacious underground root cellar (30 ft. by 5° ft) cut in solid bedrock. During the Depression, according to the local story, the Lamonts had stocked it with food to carry them through an expected revolution. Ewing found it an ideal hideaway for his sensitive seismographs.
Lamont Observatory is officially a part of Columbia University, but actually it is a Ewing principality. Building Lamont up, Ewing prowled about the country, visiting universities and delivering talks that convinced bright young scientists that geophysics at Lamont would be far more interesting than in their own laboratories. To Lamont they flocked, as though following the Pied Piper. When they got to Lamont, they often found no money for their programs. Often, Lament’s oceanographic ship, the elderly schooner Vema., sailed without enough money to carry her past her first port of call. As Vema headed into the Gulf Stream, Ewing’s land-based aides would telephone frantically around the U.S. in search of money to buy fuel and stores at Cape Town or Montevideo.
Doc Ewing eventually developed a remarkable ability to scrounge large amounts of money from Government agencies, private foundations, oil companies, etc. Lamont began to prosper, and its prosperity paid off in scientific achievement. Lamont seismologists have developed a new branch of their science: study of the earth’s long surface waves. Out of the work done by Lamont oceanographers in Vema came new theories about the formation of oceans’ flat plains, the ridges that cross ocean bottoms and the river-like furrows that score their slopes.
The Spur. So absorbed in his work that he often walks through a roomful of friends without seeing any of them, Doc Ewing drives his subordinates mercilessly. When excited about a project (and he nearly always is), he often skips meals and baths, gets as unkempt as a hillbilly. Some colleagues accuse him of claiming too much credit and publishing half-baked theories. But despite his oddities, Ewing has led Lamont to eminence. It has current grants totaling more than $2,500,000. It has a staff of 200. Every building is jammed with apparatus and elbow-to-elbow workers. Through this high-science jungle charges Doc Ewing, looking over shoulders, growling, criticizing—and providing a spur for an important segment of U.S. science.
-Endowed by a foundation established by Norwegian-American Shipping Magnate Georg Unger Vetlesen, who died in 1955-