Sound transmission in sea water: a preliminary report

Abstract

During the last 20 years or more commercial and naval ships have made increasing use of a variety of instruments in which the transmission of sound in sea water plays an important part. Throughout this development the engineers and physicists have devoted most of their attention to the instruments, both sending and receiving units, for from the beginning it seemed likely that through improvements in design and construction very great gains would result in the usefulness of such equipment. This has proved to be the case, and the instruments have now reached a high state of technical perfection, yet from the standpoint of naval tactics the great fluctuations in the effective range of some types of underwater sound equipment has been disappointing.