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88 Years Young

January 6, 2018

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was founded on this date in 1930, following the recommendations of a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Oceanography. The chairman of the committee, Frank R. Lillie of the Marine Biological Laboratory and the University of Chicago, was named the Institution’s chairman of the board, and the committee secretary, Henry Bigelow, became its director. The following year, WHOI’s first laboratory building (background)—later named for Bigelow—opened its doors, and Atlantis, the Institution’s first oceanographic research vessel and the nation’s first purpose-built research vessel, arrived in Woods Hole. (Photo courtesy of WHOI Archives)