U-boat Predators in the Great War: "A Problem of Physics, Pure and Simple"

Abstract

That a solution to U-boat predation during World War I (WWI), also known as The Great War (1914–1918), was “a problem of physics, pure and simple” occurred in a conversation between British Nobel Laureate Sir Ernest Rutherford and American physicist Robert Millikan. Millikan then added: “It was not even a problem of engineering, although every physical problem, in general, sooner or later becomes one for the engineer” (Yerkes, 1920, p. 39). Technologies of the industrial revolution found new applications, many of which were about to converge on the battlefields of Europe. Scientists placed their discoveries into the hands of engineers, who then put their inventions into the hands of the military. The president of Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio), Charles Thwing (1920, p. 115), was unequivocal: “The two new chief forms of attack, the submarine and the airplane, had their origins in the science of physics.”