Image

Precision Work

August 30, 2015

In this 1946 photograph, five men work in the WHOI machine shop that was then located on the ground floor of the Bigelow Laboratory. Ralph Bodman is behind the machine at left, and Tex Hoadley and Fred Gaskell are third and fourth from left, the other two men are unindentified. Precision instruments and tools produced in the shop helped support more than 40 wartime projects, ranging from studies of the first antifouling paints to underwater sounds to early predictions of currents, drift, waves, swell, and smoke screens.(Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Archives)