The Origins of NOAA’s National Ocean Service

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HOST: This is the NOAA Ocean Podcast. I’m your host, Allison Burrell. At the turn of
the 19th century, a small scientific agency was established with one mission, to chart our new
nation’s coasts and coastal waters so the many ships that traversed the Atlantic and Caribbean could
arrive safely. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, two influential figures in U.S. history, knew
the importance of maritime industry and scientific endeavor and spearheaded the nautical
chart-making mission, which would grow over the years into NOAA’s National Ocean Service. We are
joined in the studio by the historical curator at the NOAA Heritage Office, Mark Weber. With his
knowledge, he will lead us through the ambitious origins of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. Now,
let’s dive in…

I’d like to welcome Mark Weber, the curator of the NOAA Heritage Program. Thank you so much for
joining us at the NOAA Ocean Podcast.

Mark Weber: Thrilled to be here, Allison. Thanks for having me.

HOST: So the NOAA Ocean Podcast is all about the National Ocean Service. But
concerning the origin of the National Ocean Service, it wasn’t always called that. If we go back to
the early 19th century, what was it called? How did it start?

Mark Weber: Yeah, that’s a great question. And the agency starts out in 1807 under
the administration of Thomas Jefferson, and it was called the Coast Survey. It’s had a number of
different names over the years. 1836: it gets “U.S.” added to it, a little bit of that stamp of the
federal government, and is known as the U.S. Coast Survey. And it operates under that name until
1878, when it’s changed to become the Coast and Geodetic Survey. And that agency becomes part of
NOAA when NOAA was created in 1970. So a little bit of a timeline there, but it’s important, I
think, to realize that the creation of the Coast Survey, 1807, that’s pretty early in the annals of
our country, right? We’re three decades out from the revolution, less than two decades out from the
establishment of our Constitution, the third presidential administration. Why did they do this? Why
did they create the nation’s first physical science agency? The reason was commerce. If you think
about that, in that era, taxes came from goods that were brought into the country. And you want to
encourage trade. We want to have the natural products of our country that are desperately wanted
overseas. We want to make those available, and we want the manufactured goods that are coming from
Europe, the Caribbean, other places to come to our country. But to do this, you need safe ports. You
need navigation that will be affordable. So insurance companies have to feel good that if their
ships come into our ports, they’re not going to crash. So there’s a scientific enterprise that needs
to be created to create this data, and it leads to things like charts and maps and lighthouses that
engender that commerce. So that’s perhaps why the agency ends up under the Treasury Department when
it’s first created. Yeah, that’s the strange beginnings, I guess, of the National Ocean Service.

HOST: I’m curious, in the beginning with Coast Survey, what are some examples of the
work that they did? Like you were saying, the maps and the charting. These are groups of people
going out and doing work.

Mark Weber: That’s right. So the first superintendent of the Coast Survey was a
Swiss émigre named Ferdinand Hassler. And Hassler had studied law but then decided science was his
passion. So he studied math. He had done a survey of one of the Cantons in Switzerland and had great
experience. But he decided that he wanted to emigrate to the United States, and he felt that he had
real skills to contribute to the development of the nation. And he was suggested to Thomas
Jefferson. Jefferson, like many of the founding fathers, had a real scientific bent and saw a
talented, experienced person who he could trust to establish this agency. He saw that in Hassler and
appointed him.

HOST: So Thomas Jefferson was president at the time the Office of Coast Survey was
pulled together?

Mark Weber: So, yeah, exactly. In 1807, Jefferson signed the legislation that
created the Coast Survey, which leads to today’s NOAA. So that’s a proud, long history. And it’s one
that has had many twists and turns as we, in the NOAA Heritage Program, kind of look at our family
tree, if you will, of the agency. There’s a lot of different things woven in there over the years,
different agencies and missions that come together in the modern NOAA.

HOST: So what about the National Geodetic Survey? What are some of the early
activities that went on with NGS?

Mark Weber: You know, initially the work was focused, as the name would imply, on
the coast of the United States, making sure that we had good charts of our harbors and waterways and
that, you know, tied into that safe navigation that I was discussing earlier. As the nation grows
and expands beyond the original 13 colonies, we’ve got a lot of inland territory and we realize that
we need to have a better understanding of that. What did we just buy from the French with the
Louisiana Purchase? What does that look like? So you have the exploration expeditions that Jefferson
is famous for authorizing, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and there were a number of others that
went out into these wilderness areas to see what was there. What did we just buy? That leads to,
well, we need maps of these things. We need to understand that. And that was not really coastal
work. That becomes the geodesy, as it’s called. The geodetic nature of the agency is given by
mission in the 1870s. And then by 1878, the name of the agency is changed from the U.S. Coast Survey
to the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey to recognize that important mission area. And this is really
amazing work when you think about it.

HOST: What was the first charting project that Hassler, as the first superintendent
of Coast Survey, worked on?

Mark Weber: Hassler, the first work he did was all around New York Harbor. If you
look at, you know, we know Manhattan’s an island, right? We have that vision in our minds as
Americans. But what else is around it? You know, Long Island, Staten Island, Fire Island, all of
these places, they were raw, untrammeled wilderness at that point. So Hassler needed a group of
really stout men to lug all of this scientific equipment out onto a beach. And he’s in a carriage
that he had specially designed to carry the scientific equipment around in and then uses his office
out there in the field. And some of his notes are preserved. Here’s this guy in the middle of the
wilderness doing calculus. I mean, you know, super complicated mathematical work, right? And I’m
sure his laborers were just standing around completely mystified as to what he was about. But his
plan was to use triangulation. So you as succinctly and as accurately as possible identify one
point, mark that, and then you work out from there. Once you’ve got those three locations known,
that triangle, you can make all the triangles that come out of that to help to do this survey work.
So, you know, it’s pretty amazing when you think about that. You know, a long career in history and
one of the things I’ve always loved are these kind of aerial views that artists would do of a town
or something. Like, well, how did they do this before they had a balloon or an airplane? You know,
how did they imagine what that looked like from above? So there’s that same kind of thing here, you
know, science meeting imagination. And you’re taking these complex things of a coastline and turning
that into a chart.

HOST: And not just coastlines, but elevations.

Mark Weber: Exactly right. So, yeah, it’s, you know, when you’re coming in, in a
ship, you know, there’s obviously a lot of things under the water that could cause you grief. So you
need to know the depth. You need to know the obstructions. And so if you look at these charts, there
are so many little pieces of data represented on them, and these bodies of water, there’ll be
numbers everywhere. And that’s the depth. So people had to go out in a boat and drop a lead line to
the bottom and record how deep that was. They had to know exactly where they were in this grid that
was going to create the chart. So you had that depth charted in exactly the right place. And, yeah,
so it’s pretty amazing work that they were doing. And as I reflect on what NOAA and its ancestors
have done, I think of it as exacting science in unforgiving environments. The sea is an unforgiving
environment. You can be the best mariner, have the greatest ship, but the sea can still take you
down. You know, these are environments that are not going to give you a second chance if you do the
wrong thing.

HOST: So we talked about Thomas Jefferson. He’s a notable historical figure. And we
talked about, like you said, the first superintendent for Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler. Are there any
other notable historical figures associated with the National Ocean Service?

Mark Weber: Yeah, there certainly are. And, you know, when I think about the agency
and how it comes to be, I go back to Benjamin Franklin, who’s a scientific genius. He was the most
famous American until George Washington. He was famous for science. He was a great party guest, fun
person to be around, you know, a raconteur, all of those things that I think, you know, if you got
to meet a historical character, he’s high on my list. But he was so curious about the world, you
know, a real Renaissance man, to use that kind of term. He would look at things in a different way
and want to understand them. But it wasn’t just for arcane satisfaction or a scientific paper to be
presented. It was, for him, practical. He wanted to understand why things worked the way they did
and solve them. But he also had a real amazing ethos of these discoveries belonging to the public.
He invented the lightning rod, something that saved countless millions of dollars in property and
human lives. He didn’t monetize that. People thought, well, he should copyright this. He could sell
them. No, he put it out there for the benefit of mankind. And I think that ethos is so much a part
of the people who had this experiment in democracy that leads to the creation of the United States.
So it’s not surprising to me that ultimately they create a science agency to help improve and
protect the country.

HOST: Was it the first science agency?

Mark Weber: It is, yeah. It’s the first physical science agency of the United States
government.
But, to think, talk a little bit more about Franklin, he was not just about electricity. He was also
very interested in the maritime environment as well. So if you think about how long it took to take
a voyage in a ship in those days, he had ample opportunity to see what was going on and to
understand. He was the postmaster in the colonial period, and he wanted to understand, well, why
does it take a ship so much longer to go from this point to that point? That led him to naming what
we now call the Gulf Stream and to understanding how that worked, those ocean currents. So he’s very
important in oceanography as well as the electricity that he’s perhaps more famously known for.

HOST: Wow, because he was a diplomat over in France, so he took many transatlantic
voyages.

Mark Weber: Yes, many ocean voyages. Yes, exactly, which could take, you know, a
couple of months, right? So, and you were very much at the mercy of the wind, the waves, the
weather, all of that. But, you know, so I think that ethos of Franklin to do this work for the
public good really infuses what becomes NOAA, that this is for the public. It’s exacting science, as
I said. And his family obviously carried this ethos, so much so that three of his great-grandsons
served in the agency in the early years, two of them as naval officers that commanded survey ships
under the arrangement that the government had at that time. And both of them lost their lives in
maritime incidents. So there was a real high cost to this service.

HOST: Were their last names Franklin as well?

Mark Weber: Their name was Bache. Yes, Franklin had a daughter, and the Bache
family, very involved in early American politics, the revolution, and so forth. But Alexander Dallas
Bache becomes the second superintendent of the Coast Survey after Hassler.

HOST: And Alexander Dallas Bache is Ben Franklin’s Great-grandson.

Mark Weber: So Hassler really kind of lays the foundation. He says, here’s what
we’re going to do. We’re going to do this science. We’re going to do it without any charlatanism.
We’re going to hire people who are experts, who know their science. This is not a place for
political appointees, which was very much the standard in the early part of the country. You know,
we didn’t have a civil service, and jobs could be seen as patronage to be given out by somebody who
had maybe just won an election. And that could lead to people getting a job they weren’t necessarily
qualified for. But, you know, Hassler really stuck to his guns on that and made sure that the people
who were doing this work for the agency were doing it with the highest scientific accuracy and
integrity. Bache as superintendent really builds an agency that can handle this work and become an
important part of the growing country. And he had gone to West Point and studied engineering there.
So he also understood the military value of this work and was able for the agency to provide great
support during the Civil War. And he was a trusted member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. And the
Survey personnel would be embedded with the staff of the admirals and generals of the Union forces.
They were out there under fire, being shot at, at risk of being captured, and performing really
important service that led to the Union victory in the Civil War.

But I think one of the other things that Bache and his contemporaries were so great with was that
they helped to create a broader scientific infrastructure in the country. They weren’t saying, hey,
this is the sole purview of the government. We’re here. We’re going to run this whole thing. No,
they knew that this needed to be a much more broader project that the country would be involved in.
So Lieutenant George Mifflin-Bache had joined the Survey before his brother became the
superintendent. He was a Navy officer. And in that era, that was a great labor pool for the Survey.
We had the scientists, but we needed to get them places. So the Coast Survey would buy a ship or
often get them from the Treasury Department partner, the Revenue Cutter Service, which becomes the
Coast Guard. So we’d have a ship, but who’s going to command it? Who’s got the maritime knowledge to
sail this? And where do we get the sailors to do it? So they were generally seconded from the Navy
to the service. And in 1846, the ship, the Washington Coast Survey Brig, is exploring off the coast,
looking into things like the Gulf Stream when they get caught in a hurricane. A terrible, terrible
storm. Their masts snap off.

HOST: These are tall ships.

Mark Weber: Yeah, a brig is a two-masted sailing ship, square rig ship, and it’s not
a particularly big ship. So they’re really at the mercy of this storm. So Bache knows as the masts
snap off, now those are hanging over the side and threatening to pull the whole ship down. So he and
10 of his men go out with axes and knives, and they’ve got to cut all this heavy rigging away before
it pulls the whole ship down. And they saved the ship, but Bache and 10 men are washed overboard and
never seen again. So to think about, you know, leading this agency of the Coast Survey, but knowing
that your own brother had paid this ultimate price, they were really early American martyrs to
science. The Treasury Department gave the crew a medal, and the medal says on it: “For gallantry and
humanity.” But the ship amazingly survived, limps back into port, and lives to sail on for another 20
years. The ship itself is involved in the discovery of the slave ship Amistad. It is captured by the
Confederates at the beginning of the Civil War and is taken into their service. We kind of lose the
thread on what happens to it after 1861. But as a maritime specialist, these stories are so
interesting to me, and I really love the opportunity to dig into them. And, you know, you would
never think that this is going to be all connected to what seems like the simple act of making a
navigational chart.

HOST: So it’s interesting, all of these superintendents of the original Coast
Survey, and this went on for almost 200 years. Are there any other significant milestones within
that 200 and some years?

Mark Weber: Yeah, they, you know, I think as technology marches along with the
development of the country, the expansion westward, we acquire in the Mexican War, we acquire
California, the Pacific Coast, now as part of something we need to understand. So, again, small
ships being sent out to California.

HOST: What year was this?

Mark Weber: So, this was in the 1840s, the starts, you know, and then pretty quickly
you have the California gold rush. So, there’s, oh, my gosh, we’ve got to get out there. We’ve got
to understand this. We’ve got to be able to exploit this. We’ve got to be able to understand where
the best place is to put a port. How do we develop someplace like San Francisco and understand the
complicated waterways around there?

HOST: Does this expand the Coast Survey?

Mark Weber: It certainly does, yes. So, you know, as where I think initially, maybe
they thought, oh, how long will it take? We’re going to take a couple decades. We’re going to make
some maps. We’re going to chart the coast. Over and done. But that doesn’t allow for the dynamic
changing nature of the Earth, right? A storm can quickly change the landscape, the waterscape, the
seascape, those sorts of things, and you need to chart over again. Then you add new territories,
right? So, the Louisiana Purchase, Texas, and then, but the Pacific Coast.
So, to get ships out there, they have to go around South America. There’s no Panama Canal. There’s
no easy way. And you look at some of these small ships and a pretty small crew. It’s a very
audacious thing to do that, to go around the Horn. And one of the ships did not make it. This was,
in fact, the Thomas Jefferson. And it wrecks off of Patagonia. And the captain tries to
save as much material from the ship as he can, but they have to be transported back on a merchant
ship and come back saying, well, we lost the ship.

But San Francisco is really one of the first big West Coast operations. And the man who was put in
charge of this Pacific, this West Coast work for the Survey was George Davidson. He’s a legendary
surveyor. And, you know, really think about the disconnected nature. How long would it take you to
get orders and instructions from Washington? So you had to have the right person for this job
willing to kind of operate on their own, know what their orders were, know what the right thing to
do was. But, you know, you couldn’t be expecting a lot of handholding from Washington to carry that
mission out.

But that’s nothing compared to the work that comes when we buy this crazy thing, Seward’s Folly,
Alaska. If you look at Alaska, the huge long chain of the Aleutians arcing out into the Pacific, the
coast, the inlets, the just wild, rugged nature of Alaska. It’s still a huge area for us to work in
today.

HOST: So when did that start?

Mark Weber: So that’s, that’s again in that post-Civil War era. So, you know, a
generation after, let’s say, California, Oregon, huge, huge territory that requires survey work. And
that coincides with one of those leaps in technology, aviation. So the early 20th century, they
start to take a camera up there. So pretty quickly after the First World War, we start to work with
partners in the Army and the Navy and these very early rickety aircraft and to try to put a giant
camera in there and pilot a very straight line. So you have exacting photographs that can be used
for survey work. And the Coast Survey does an amazing job with it. They really invent the way to do
this. And during the Great Depression, an officer in the Survey, Captain Redding, creates a
nine-lens camera. It was the only one like it in the world. It cost a million and a half dollars
during the Depression. And it was just a valuable piece of equipment. And they quickly sent it to
Alaska. And it was being used during the Second World War, flying in a Coast Guard aircraft. We
didn’t have any of our own aircraft at that time. And it crashes at Mount Moffat, Alaska. And a
number of the crew were lost in that accident, including two of our first aviators in the Coast and
Geodetic Survey. And the camera itself, though, was in pieces. But they went out and they picked
those pieces up. And they spent two years putting it back together and finally get it reassembled at
the end of World War II and put it into service again and use it into the 1960s.

HOST: That’s a fascinating story.

Mark Weber: It is, I hope to see this camera. It’s actually in the collection of the
Smithsonian. They do have one of our later cameras on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the
National Air and Space Museum, their annex that’s out at Dulles Airport outside of Washington. We
recently participated in an event there as the NOAA Heritage Team, and we were able to stand by that
camera and tell people how it worked and show them these photos that were used for charting and
mapping. And it was great to see it inspire young kids today looking at this.

HOST: So what you’re telling me is that after Seward’s Folly and we acquired the
Alaska Territory, that we really didn’t map the coast until the early 20th century?

Mark Weber: Well, they started working on it, yes. But it’s just, again, it’s a
huge, huge enterprise. Again, Alaska is a big area of operation for our survey work. You know, of
course, there’s needs going on around the rest of the country for the Survey to do as well. But
yeah, that was one of the huge mission areas. And if you were with the Coast and Geodetic Survey, in
the early 20th century, you knew you were going to spend some time in Alaska. And again, it took a
long time. It’s remote. And you can only do it during the summer months, short though they may be.
And it was very dangerous. You know, we talked earlier about, like, dropping a lead line down to
know the depth in a place. But that can be really hard. What if there is a seamount? And if you
think about these, they’re sort of like a stalagmite that you might see in a cave, right, this kind
of tall, narrow pinnacle of rock coming up from the bottom. You could completely miss that, doing
survey work. But if your ship was unlucky enough to pass over it and the water between your keel and
this seamount was not great enough, it could punch a hole in you and send you right to the bottom.
And there’s an amazing example of this happens in 1914 to a revenue cutter called the
Tahoma
operating in Alaska. The revenue cutter service the next year in 1915 becomes the Coast Guard. The
name people are familiar with that agency, but less so with the names they used before that. It’s
the beginning of the First World War. The United States is still a neutral power. So a lot of ships
heard this message that the Tahoma had their hull breached and they were sinking and
they’re in such
a remote area. Some ships hear this message and they think, well, this could potentially be a ruse
of war. Maybe the Germans are up to something. And if we respond to this, we’re going to get sunk.
But Captain James Miller of the survey ship Patterson was like, nope, we’re going to go get
these
guys. Easier said than done. He didn’t have enough coal to reach where they were at. So he had to
steam in through a huge storm to the port, load as much coal as he could on the ship. In fact, they
loaded more coal than they could have safely kept. It was dangerously piled on the deck, affecting
their stability. But they did it anyway, and they are able to rescue these Coast Guardsmen and bring
them back to safety. So, you know, that’s just an example, though, of that dangerous environment in
Alaska.

HOST: And the camaraderie between all of the officers.

Mark Weber: Right. And the devotion to duty that these
scientists and sailors had to have to execute these missions in these unforgiving places. So, you
know, as the United States moves on through the Spanish-American War, we acquire overseas
territories, including the Philippines. So that becomes the next big area of operations. More than a
thousand islands. Complex environment. Far, far flung. So, again, the survey has to go and begin to
do detailed charting and survey work there. The difference there is that the United States knew from
the onset that the Philippines were on a path towards independence, commonwealth status, that led
the survey to send American officers and scientists, but to train Philippine nationals as the crew
of their ships. And the cadets who would learn this survey technology and then be able to do that
for the Republic of the Philippines once they got their independence.

HOST: What a great example of diplomacy.

Mark Weber: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, again, the young officers knew you were
going to be going to the Philippines. So this was a little bit of a dicey proposition in the early
1900s. There were some groups in the Philippines that were not too happy to have this work there.
Moro tribesmen were known to attack these survey parties, so they would have to have armed guards
along with them. But the real dangers came from an unforgiving rainforest environment, people
falling off of a cliff and dying. Or, you know, you figure you’re surveying at sea, but to know
these points, you have to erect a tower on the shore. So they’re cutting down logs, creating a
tower, doing things like that. All ample opportunities to just have an accident, but also to come in
contact? with poisonous snakes. There’s a famous story of one of our officers being attacked by a
saltwater crocodile while they’re in a shallow water doing some survey work. He survived that, but
I’m sure he requested a transfer to New Jersey as soon as it was possible.

HOST: This sounds like Jumanji.

Mark Weber: Yeah, it really does. It really does.

HOST: And so then is it after the Philippines that Hawaii comes into the picture?

Mark Weber: So Hawaii comes in around the same time. A lot of the survey work in
Hawaii was conducted by the Navy. But certainly the Coast and Geodetic Survey did much work there.
That was a regular station. In fact, many of the ships that worked in Alaska got to go to Hawaiian
waters during the winter. So they probably very much appreciated a little bit of tropical work after
the, you know, I’m sure it was cold and stormy and unforgiving in Alaska even during the so-called
summer months.

HOST: But also traversing the Pacific Ocean must have been punishing.

Mark Weber: Yeah, exactly, exactly, and, you know, making soundings and other
observations all along that vast ocean is just, you know, what a daunting task. And I think one that
really, you know, makes you seem small and insignificant against the size of these mighty oceans of
our planet.

HOST: Well, in addition to the ocean and the coast, the United States also has the
Great Lakes.

Mark Weber: Yes, in 1841, the government said, we need charts and maps of the Great
Lakes. These are, again, super highways into the interior of the United States. You come in the St.
Lawrence, the Hudson, all these waterways, you’re feeding into the Great Lakes. And canals like the
Welland Canal open up. You can now have a way to sail around Niagara Falls and get to the upper
lakes. There are so many shipwrecks in the central basin of Lake Erie. So it shows how needed the
charts were, how bad the weather could be, how unexpectedly it could change.

HOST: Right, and the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries is another Program Office
within the National Ocean Service.

Mark Weber: Exactly, right. And these sanctuaries on the Great Lakes are really
opening people’s eyes to the time capsules that exist beneath the sea. It’s just astounding. But now
you realize how imperiled they were and how much they’ve improved due to the actions of conservation
groups and government agencies and so forth.

HOST: Well, and we know them as the Great Lakes, but they, in practice, act more
like inland oceans of fresh water.

Mark Weber: Exactly. Right, right. And when you’re, you know, you’re trying to
traverse untrammeled wilderness, there’s no roads or anything to speak of. And going on those
waterways was much quicker. That was the way to do it, to send cargo and people. And, you know,
there’s huge resources of fish. So that became a great way to feed the country. But starting in the
1840s, they do this survey and charting work on the Great Lakes. They did feel like they were done
with the mission by 1888, and Congress said, okay, you’re done. You’ve got everything mapped and
charted, and it didn’t take long. By 1901, they said, you know, enough has changed, we need to start
this all over again. But that mission continued with the Army until the creation of NOAA. And in
October of 1970, those ships and offices and personnel were one day working for the Army Corps of
Engineers, and the next day they were working for this new group called NOAA. So that’s how NOAA
comes to the Great Lakes.

HOST: Oh, that’s so interesting. So it was the same mission, but one office was with
the Army, and the other one was part of the Coast Survey and Geodetic Survey. So NOAA acquired all
of these Coast Survey offices that were in the Great Lakes, and so it becomes all one: The ocean,
the coast, and the Great Lakes.

Mark Weber: Exactly, yeah. And I think that’s part of the, you know, the
inspirational understanding that leads to the creation of NOAA, right? That these academic
disciplines of atmosphere or weather and oceans and oceanography and so forth, we understand the
Earth more as a system where these things all relate. You know, there’s not a hard border between
them that what happens in the water affects the atmosphere and the reverse. So an organization like
NOAA that brings all of this observation together is a revolutionary idea, but it’s completely the
one that makes sense.

HOST: So when NOAA was brought together and created in 1970, is that when the
National Ocean Service became the National Ocean Service?

Mark Weber: Well, sort of. It had the same initials, but it was initially the
National Ocean Survey. And then in 1983, it changes from survey to service, so it becomes the
National Ocean Service in 1983.

HOST: Are all of the core missions from the early Coast Survey still a part of the
Ocean Service?

Mark Weber:The Survey created the term aeronautical chart and pioneered that work.
But as aviation becomes a bigger enterprise, more important to the commerce and culture of the
country, we have different groups, government agencies that are created to handle that. So
eventually that mission is spun off to the FAA. You know, so there are other examples of that. But I
think most of those core missions of the early Coast Survey still live within the National Ocean
Service.

HOST: The National Marine Sanctuaries, which I know, I think, around 1972
is when Congress enacted the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, which led to the first National Marine
Sanctuary, which is the USS Monitor.

Mark Weber: Exactly. Yeah. You know, humankind hasn’t really had a good look under
the waves for very long. You know, man’s exploration of the sea was pretty fraught. And, you know,
you think about a deep sea diver down there on the end of a line and not even understanding how long
they could withstand those pressures and what returning to the surface would do to their body. But a
coral reef or a shipwreck, those were nothing to be preserved. They were obstructions, you know. If
they were in the way of your getting into your harbor or that shipwreck was interfering and possibly
causing another shipwreck, those were things that came to the notice of the agency. They were marked
on a chart. Sometimes they were destroyed, you know. But so, yeah, it’s a very different
understanding as we start to get that glimpse with scuba and technologies that allow more and more
humans to see beneath the sea.

HOST: Yeah, like the autonomous underwater vehicles that were imaging the
Monitor.

Mark Weber: Right. You know, the genius of the staff working for the agency, the
personnel, the scientists, and their inventiveness is really brought home by some of the artifacts
that we at NOAA Heritage manage. In our campus here in Silver Spring, we have a facility called the
Science Center. And one of the pieces that’s in there is a tide-predicting computer that was first
envisioned in the 1890s, and when the people behind this idea first talked to their bosses, their
bosses said, well, that might be interesting. You can work on that in your spare time. You don’t
have anything else going on. But they took that as a yes, and they took what the British had
developed and improved on it. Because as they looked at these rugged environs of Alaska and some of
the other parts of the United States coastline, the system that the British used wasn’t really up to
what we needed in terms of its capabilities. So they, two gentlemen, Fisher and Harris, worked on
this, one a scientific genius and the other an instrument-making genius, and ultimately created what
became known as Tide Prediction Machine No. 2. Not a really catchy name. And people love a catchy
name, right? So the early news stories, you look at National Geographic and Scientific American,
when this machine in the 1910s was really getting known.
They would call it the machine that prophecies. And pretty quickly, the staff started calling it Old
Brass Brains, and that’s the name we lovingly refer to this machine with today.

HOST: Old Brass Brains.

Mark Weber: Old Brass Brains, it’s about the size of a minivan. It is a steampunk
contraption of gears and wires, and, you know, it’s just astounding. This is something that, you
know, involves celestial mechanics, the moon, and the orbit of the Earth, and theoretical
mathematics. It could predict the tides at a given location for 100 years, given basic inputs of
observations conducted by the Survey with a tide staff and tide gauge and things like that in a
location. And this material is amazingly important, right? So we talk about the charts, but as we
mentioned earlier, you know, you come in at the wrong time, the tide is low. There’s all kinds of
things under there that could cause you and your ship grief. So knowing the tides was very
important. So these were published in tide tables that that ship captain could have as well to help
them know about their safe navigation. This machine was used up until 1960. It was located in the
basement of the main Commerce building downtown. And during the Second World War, it was so
important to national security that it was kept under armed guard. It was running about 24 hours a
day.

HOST: Oh, my goodness.

Mark Weber: As, you know, as we know, with huge amounts of the American male
populace at war, there were real opportunities there for bright women to finally show what they
could do. And they made a real contribution to the development of science and to the nation’s war
effort during the Second World War.

HOST: When did women first work at the early Ocean Service?

Mark Weber: The first we know of is in the 1840s is a woman named Mariah Mitchell.
And she lived in Nantucket, was part of a Quaker family, and, uh, her father and mother were
interested in libraries and science. And so she knew how to operate a sextant and a telescope. And
she discovers a comet. It’s given international acclaim and awards for Miss Mitchell’s Comet. She
comes to the attention of Bache, the superintendent, and she’s hired to do astronomical calculations
for the agency.

HOST: Was Coast Survey the first government agency to employ a woman in a scientific
role?

Mark Weber: Definitely. Definitely.

HOST: Wow.

Mark Weber: That was her. She goes on to become a famous professor of astronomy at
Vassar. And her telescope is in the collection of the Smithsonian. So, a really, legendary
character. And one we hope to learn more about her, her contributions to the agency.

HOST: Well, it’s interesting, you know, a lot of firsts for the Coast Survey, first
scientific
agency, and now employing the first woman in a scientific role in the United States. That’s
significant.

Mark Weber: Yeah, exactly. It sure is.

HOST: In the 20th century, after the World Wars, the organization or the agency was
still called the Coast Survey and Geodetic Survey?

Mark Weber: Yeah, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey exists under that name from
1878 until 1970, when NOAA is created. It becomes, then, the National Ocean Service.

HOST: Do you know what the driving force was to bring all these agencies together
into one NOAA and, you know, combine them into the National Ocean Service as well?

Mark Weber: I think in the post-World War II era, as there’s so much new science
there’s a lot of scientific and technological advancement—and people start to realize that the ocean
and the atmosphere, these are interconnected systems, right? It’s one planet that we live on, that
these are not—well, they may be studied as distinct scientific disciplines. In reality, we’re all in
this big terrarium together, right? And these systems affect one another. So that kind of
revolutionary understanding, coupled with the burgeoning ecology movement, you know, the books like
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, as we were talking about earlier, those first glimpses
underneath the sea, you know, scuba gear, Jacques Cousteau, that really opens up to man how much we
don’t know about this interconnected system that we have. So I think it’s a pretty audacious idea to
create a whole new agency to put these like-minded physical science agencies together. And, you
know, that’s part of the real genius of NOAA and how it continues to grow and evolve and serve the
American public.

HOST: Well, and it’s interesting that, you know, we’re talking about the origins of
the National Ocean Service, early 19th century, working with mapping ports and charts and charting
the coasts, and that all of this is still being used today.

Mark Weber: That’s right.

HOST: And still being done and revised and new technologies are coming out of it,
that these programs within the National Ocean Service are still as important to the country as they
were when they started.

Mark Weber: I agree. Yes, certainly. And, you know, the technology, sonar, aircraft,
there’s a lot of other tools that we bring to bear. But those are still getting us to the same kind
of data, the same charts and maps and ways to understand our world.

HOST: Oh, it’s fascinating hearing about all the history—all the history that’s come
before to create what is now the National Ocean Service.

Mark Weber: Yeah, it’s a proud legacy. And I’m so thrilled to spend a little bit of
time with you today to talk about these kind of unsung people and all that they’ve done for the
country.

HOST: How important is history?

Mark Weber: Oh, well, you’re asking the guy who’s going to say it’s the most
important thing. But, yeah, it’s how we get to where we’re at today. And, you know, I’m passionate
about sharing that with people, and particularly in museums, you know, taking objects that tell us
something about the past and looking at those and using them to help us understand where we’ve come
from and what the people who came before us contributed.

HOST: This has been Allison Burrell with the NOAA Ocean Podcast. Thanks to our
guest, Mark Weber, for this ocean history lesson, as the National Ocean Service steps into the
future. The National Ocean Service continues to make history with our many programs that cover
ocean- and coastal-related topics, from tides and currents to marine debris. For more details about
the history of NOAA’s beginnings, click on the NOAA Heritage link on our website. Be sure to check
out all our podcast episodes through the National Ocean Service website or wherever you get your
podcasts. Thanks for listening. Let’s keep making waves.