Word: columbus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...words of Columbus Iselin: "The cold war and the scientific effort run parallel much of the time. They're both geared toward our learning more. Each has a different motivation. One is survival, and the other is curiosity...
Curiosity & Avocation. The man who best exemplifies the growth of U.S. oceanography into a major science is Columbus O'Donnell Iselin II himself. Since the prewar days when he solved the Navy's temperature problems off Guantanamo, he has been longtime director of Woods Hole, seen its fulltime staff grow from a prewar 24 to the present 300, its fleet from one ship to five, is now its senior oceanographer...
Born in 1904 to a New York socialite family of Swiss origin, Columbus came to his specialty by a combination of inheritance and intellectual curiosity. The family vocation was banking, but its avocation was sailing. His great-uncle, C. Oliver Iselin, was four times a defender of the America's Cup. ("He could afford it -he married two rich women," says Columbus.) His father, Lewis Iselin, sailed less gaudily but no less enthusiastically, racing Star boats on Long Island Sound...
...family's summer home in New Rochelle, N.Y., Columbus learned from the family carpenter how to use tools, built his first boat (called the Sponge, because it leaked) at the age of eleven. When he was in prep school he was spending school vacations sailing in waters as dangerous as the Bay of Fundy...
...concentrated at first on mathematics because he thought it had something to do with the banking business. But the sea was in his blood, and in his junior year he discovered Professor Henry Bigelow, who was then officially a zoologist but whose real interest was oceanography. Columbus gave up all thought of banking. He ordered the schooner Chance built in Nova Scotia, on graduation set off in her for the icy coast of Labrador with a crew of college students on his first oceanographic trip. The student-scientists fraternized with Eskimos, exploded firecrackers in one another's beds...